legal highs have been available to buy for many years and up until around 2 years ago they were relatively unknown and harmless. Certainly the use of them in the homeless community was more or less none existant. Today in 2015 they are rife. Many homeless people have taken to using these drugs on a daily basis and the problems they are causing is, in some cases horrific.

Legal highs are fast becoming the drug of choice for many people, and why would they not be? They are readily available, cheap, very potent and you can pick them up in shops or online. A legal man made synthetic version of every known drug is available now in a shop near you.

Over the last 12 months I’ve witnessed first hand numerous people having seizures, episodes of extreme paranoia, bizarre delusional behaviour, dozens of hospital admissions and physical injuries due to people collapsing while overdosing on these legal drugs. That’s the key point and a difficult message to get out as people are just not familiar with using such strong drugs. It’s simply far to easy to overdose on these drugs, for a few diferant reasons. Each bag or batch varies in strength, this has always been the case with every drug especially street drugs. However this is enhanced with legal highs due to the way the chemicals are sprayed on to a smoking medium or a chemical powder that is 100% pure. Street drugs have been cut, watered down so to speak but not with legal highs. These synthetic drugs are on average 20 times stronger so like for like you need to use x20 less for the same effect. This is mainly where people are going wrong, massively overdosing is very easy as people are simply not used to taking drugs in such small amounts. The saying less is more is not commonly used amongst people looking to get high.

As these drugs come in colourful snap bags the synthetic chemicals in them tend to sink to the bottom of the bag, so the top of the bag could contain hardly any chemical but the bottom of the bag may contain the majority.

The government plans to ban these substances very soon and in an ideal world that would be a good thing. However they have been banned in other European countries for a few years, in these countries the useage of them has increased.

As long as these drugs are cheap and readily available they will continue to reap havoc amongst some of the most vulnerable in our society.

In the last week in Stockport a young man died in hospital, ultimately his use of legal highs massively contributed to his death. RIP RK.