It takes a lot to shock Julie Boyle.

The 46-year-old youth support worker has been helping Manchester’s troubled teenagers and young 20-somethings for six years. What she can’t tell you about the city’s streets isn’t worth knowing.

But the latest drugs epidemic sweeping through them is like nothing she’s ever seen before.

“We’ve had people gang raped, we have had people put on the game, we have had people trafficked because of it,” she says.

“We’ve had people who have ended up on the sex offenders’ register. I’ve had people wake up in an MRI scanner who didn’t know how they’d got there. I’ve had a lad recently been sectioned.

“There’s been a couple of cases where people have had to be brought back to life, who we’ve called an ambulance for when they’ve actually died on the street.

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“I’ve had a young lad who we’ve just found out has contracted HIV as a direct result of it. I’ve had a 22-year-old walk in the office, walk round the corner and have a heart attack.”

And what’s causing all this mayhem and tragedy? Spice, the highly potent drug that until its ban last April accounted for virtually all the legal highs being sold in the city’s headshops.

Julie knows of at least four deaths linked to Spice, either because their hearts have stopped or it has made them suicidal.

But ten months after the ban and it’s just as available in Manchester, according to homeless people, charities and academics, as it was before. It’s just that now, it’s even stronger.

The group of drugs classed as ‘synthetic cannabinoids’ - loosely referred to as Spice by those who use them and deal with their consequences - first surfaced as a problem two or three years ago.

Made up of a range of amphetamines and other laboratory-created chemicals that vary wildly from batch to batch, pre-ban it was being sold either over the counter or online under a variety of brand names that made no bones about their purpose: Annihilation, GoCaine.

Quickly these cheap fixes gripped the city’s vulnerable kids, often teenage runaways or kids not long out of care and already at risk from exploitation.

Julie believes around 95pc of the young homeless people she sees - roughly 100 at any given time - are now taking Spice, in spite of the ban.

It is now simply being sold on the streets alongside other illegal drugs.

Young people spoken to by the M.E.N. universally describe its effects as terrifying.

“I got taken into hospital for 13 hours. It’s that addictive and that horrible,” says Daniel, a lad in his early 20s who regularly visits Julie’s drop-in at the youth charity Lifeshare, in the Northern Quarter.

Watch: Spice explained...

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Kelly, 18, who became a regular rough sleeper after running away from care, says she too has been taken to hospital several times while on Spice. But the ‘rattle’ - withdrawal symptoms - would catch up.

Everyone says the rattle is worse than any other drug they have tried.

Craig, an ex-prisoner in his mid-20s who has since kicked the drug, ended up using Spice for a year after going into a headshop to buy a weed grinder.

“I used to shake. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep without it.”

“Some guy told me it was legal weed. You can’t tell a pothead it’s legal weed - obviously he’s going to smoke it. I had a spliff and it took me out, it knocked me clean out. For about a week later I carried on smoking weed but it weren’t touching me. I started rattling.”

That then gave him pains in his stomach, made him shake and throw up. Others have described becoming suicidal.

Not long afterwards someone at a night shelter offered him some more and that was that. He cannot remember anything about what happened when he was on it.

Like Julie and Craig, 17-year-old Liam has also seen someone die while on Spice.

“I’d just be sat there on my own, just slumped, unable to do anything.

“My mate died in a car park. The stuff you get in the bags is dead strong and he just snorted it. It must have killed him.”

“It was absolutely horrible. I’ve seen a man die off it.”

A few weeks after that interview the M.E.N. meets Liam again by chance, but this time he is on Spice. He can’t speak properly, his face is red, he’s staggering about.

Charity workers are just trying to keep him calm while the drug wears off. There’s nothing else they can do.

Julie says she first heard ‘whispers’ about Spice around three years ago, ‘but then it just exploded’.

(Image: GMP)

She says kids end up in the most dangerous situations imaginable either while on the drug or thanks to their desperation for it. One girl has been ‘passed around the homeless community for sexual favours in return for Spice’, while the 25-year-old who contracted HIV was sexually assaulted while on it.

Others simply have no recollection of what’s happened but wake up in hospital later.

In June 2015, following rising reports from homeless charities, the M.E.N. found through the Freedom of Information Act that police call-outs to incidents involving Spice or similar drugs had rocketed 13-fold in two years. A third involved children and many featured frightening levels of violence or threats of suicide.

Watch: Shocking video shows prisoners high on Spice

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As those warnings grew louder - fuelled by rising use of the drug in prisons - the government brought in a ban last April.

However Manchester academic Robert Ralphs, who has been researching legal highs for several years, says little has changed since Spice was outlawed.

Prior to their ban last year, he found that between 90pc and 100pc of the legal highs being sold in the city’s head shops were Spice ‘or some other name for the same thing’.

Researchers suspected the new law would simply drive sales underground.

“Immediately after the ban, these predictions proved true with street sellers setting up close to previous shop outlets and around city centre areas such as Piccadilly Gardens, around Manchester Cathedral and Urbis,” says Ralphs, senior criminologist at Manchester Metropolitan University.

“The market has simply switched to the streets. It was already there anyway, since head shops are only open in the daytime. Now the crack and smack dealers are just dealing Spice as well as Class As round the clock.

“All that’s changed is that the price has gone up, the size of the deal has gone down and it’s become more potent.

“That’s not because the chemicals themselves are stronger but because manufacturers are mixing different strains together.”

Jonathan Billings, who runs the Wellspring homeless charity in Stockport, agrees the only difference made by the ban is rising prices. He has seen children as young as 12 come in while on the drug, with one man ‘barking on all fours’.

As the numbers of young rough sleepers continues to rise, so too does the number of Spice users.

“It’s just more expensive now,” he says. “It’s gone up from £5 a gram to £35 a gram.”

Some public services appear to have been slow to wake up to the Spice epidemic.

When the M.E.N. obtained those figures from police 18 months ago, they covered all incidents where the officer had mentioned the phrase ‘legal high’ on the call log.

But most health trusts asked for figures at the same time were unable to provide a response - because they don’t record incidents in that way.

Robert Ralphs believes authorities have been unable to get an accurate picture of the scale of the epidemic as a result.

“There is a national recording problem in the fact that GPs, A&E departments and police forces do not have codes to record its use,” he says.

“Therefore, the only thing we can say with any confidence is that official figures are an under-representation of the situation.”

In recognition of that fact Manchester council last year commissioned Ralphs to undertake research on the subject, which is now being reviewed by the city’s public health bosses in an attempt to tackle the problem.

Meanwhile Greater Manchester Police says Spice - and similar substances - is now a ‘big community safety issue in the centre of Manchester’.

“Since the New Psychoactive Substances Act came into effect last spring, we have seen the selling of ‘Spice’ displaced from specialist shops and other retailers to the streets,” says city centre inspector Phil Spurgeon.

“We know, from local research and our work with partners, that ‘Spice’ is having a big impact on some of our more vulnerable communities, including rough sleepers.

“We are taking positive action against those selling and supplying new psychoactive substances. Fourteen arrests have been made in the city centre, since the act came into effect, for supply and possession with intent to supply offences.

“We are also exploring the full range of tools and powers available to us to tackle this issue, including Criminal Behaviour Orders, which have been used to good effect under Operation Mandera in tackling cannabis supply in Piccadilly Gardens.”

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Julie Boyle, who sees the effects of Spice every day at Lifeshare, now testifies on behalf of victims whenever a Spice dealer is prosecuted.

Her statement is officially presented before courts as a demonstration of what the drug can do, warning them this is ‘a problem of epidemic proportions that has never been seen before’.

“The grip it’s got on the homeless population is far worse than any drug I’ve seen around… ever,” she says.

“It’s frustrating and it’s horrendous.”

Daniel, the former Spice user in his early 20s, is just as brutal.

“Every Spice-head knows they are dying off it,” he says.

“But they can’t help it. I know that feeling when you are addicted to it. It’s strong. You think it just makes your life a bit better, but it doesn’t, it’s killing you.

“It’s like black magic.”

Drug treatment services in Manchester

Manchester Integrated Drug and Alcohol Service (city centre) 43a Carnarvon Street. 0161 214 0770

Manchester Integrated Drug and Alcohol Service (Hulme) Zion Community Resource Centre, Stretford Road. 0161 226 5526

Salford Drug and Alcohol Service 6 Acton Square, The Crescent. 0161 745 7227

Achieve Salford Recovery Services The Orchard, Langley Road South, Salford, M6 6GU. 0161 358 153

Trafford Drugs Service 454 Chester Road, Old Trafford 0161 877 0491

THOMAS Project St Boniface Road, Lower Broughton 0161 792 5982

The NHS has a full list of projects that can help people with drug addictions in Greater Manchester. You can see it here...