Legal High In The Sky With Diamonds

If you live in the UK you will be well aware of the recent controversy a legal high known as Mephedrone which has a rather bizarre street name of meow meow or M-Cat.  The reason it’s such a topical discussion is due to the untimely demise of 2 teenagers from Scunthorpe who had taken it.

The first I heard of the deaths was via a news broadcast on the radio on Tuesday evening but by Wednesday morning the media was in a frenzy on how this legal high was killing people, very much like they whipped up a storm when ecstasy first started doing the rounds.  One thing puzzled me and now slightly annoys me.  On Tuesday night the news reports I listened to all stated that the boys had taken mephedrone, gone out to a club and consumed copious quantities of alcohol and also take Methadone.

Now, you don’t need to be a genius to know that mixing any drug is never a good idea but those three? For crying out loud, methadone is a heroin substitute, hardly the sort of thing you would expect a couple of teenagers to want to take to finish off, quite literally, their Monday night rave?  However by Wednesday morning I found very little mention of the methadone use, just that the mephedrone was considered a contributing factor in their deaths and their parents are widely quoted as saying they only took the mephedrone because it was sold as a legal high… So why did these good boys take methadone, a controlled prescription drug?

Following the subject on the news I listened carefully to the words used by police relating to arrests made in connection with the deaths.  The suspects who had been arrested were arrested for supplying a controlled drug.  That’s not mephedrone which is widely available online (tho it is illegal to sell it for human consumption), methadone however IS a controlled drug.  Could it be that the methadone had more of an impact on the death of the boys?  If I were a betting man, which I am, I’d say it was more a contributing factor than the mephedrone.

As someone who has taken a variety of drugs, legal and otherwise I am still astounded by the great number of people, you and old, who happily take pills, powders and potions with no idea what they are actually taking.  Rule No. 1 in my book is Know what you are putting into your body.  With the advent of the internet this is not difficult. Rule No.2 is Be very, very wary of mixing drugs.  I can’t say don’t mix drugs because I have done so myself but I only did so after I had taken things often enough to now what they did to my body and had a good idea what the effect would be.

Of course with all the scare stories in the press right now you can bet your bottom dollar that sales of mephedrone are rocketing as people clamour to buy it before it is banned, which it will if the British Press has it’s way.  The ignorance of the facts and scaremongering by those who seek to blame anything rather than the cause will only widen the appeal, having the exact opposite effect than originally planned.

Remember ecstasy?  It’s all just a case of history repeating.

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