Skip to main content

Drug users should be 'wary of legal highs'


00:02 AEST Tue Aug 28 2012 NINEMSN
Drug users are being urged to be wary of buying harmful "legal high" stimulants over the internet.

Mephedrone - a drug also known as "miaow miaow" and bath salts - is banned in most parts of Australia.
Kronic, a synthetic cannabis, is also illegal.

But other drugs, known as "legal highs", are still available through many of Australia's 100 internet retailers, the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) says.

NDARC director Professor Michael Farrell said users needed to beware of the substances they are buying online, which are often sold under various misleading names.

"They don't know what they're buying. What they think they're buying may be something different," he told AAP.

"Just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's not harmful."

Prof Farrell is among 22 experts who will address NDARC's annual drug symposium on Tuesday at the University of NSW.

The Sydney conference is discussing ways of keeping pace with the escalating availability of synthetic drugs on the internet and the challenges law makers face.

Dr Lucy Burns, NDARC's head of drug monitoring, said internet drug retailers often made slight changes to the properties of a banned substance to make it technically legal.

"Our laws have to keep trying to stay one step ahead," she said.

Dr Burns said the ingredients in many legal and illegal drugs were a mystery.
"There's no testing procedure," she said, adding many of these substances were known to trigger psychosis, depression, anxiety and cardiac problems.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Methamphetamine use and addiction in Australia

methamphetamine use and addiction in Australia By Nicole Lee Associate Professor at the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction at Flinders University More commonly known by the street names speed, ice or crystal meth, both amphetamine and methamphetamine belong to a group of stimulant drugs called amphetamines. Australia has one of the highest rates of illicit methamphetamine use in the world and the highest use among English-speaking countries. Around 2.5% of Australians over 14 years – around half a million people – have used methamphetamine in the last year. This rate is three- to five-times higher than the USA, Canada (0.5%) or the UK (1%). Illicit use The illegal manufacture of street amphetamines in Australia is almost exclusively methamphetamine. Illicit methamphetamine is manufactured in local “meth labs” and also imported from South-East Asia. The drug usually comes in powder or pills (speed) o...
Post a Comment
Read more

NSW Police overlooked scientific advice about hair sample

NSW Police overlooked scientific advice about hair sample and sacked drug-tested sergeant Eamonn Duff  March 12 2017  A single strand of hair that destroyed the life of a long-serving Sydney police officer has the potential to influence the future of not just the entire NSW Police Force but all workplaces across NSW. Sergeant George Zisopoulos insists he has been wrongly dismissed due to one of his hair follicles which returned a positive drug test reading. But while the state's top cop, Commissioner Andrew Scipione, has determined that, on the "balance of probabilities", the officer knowingly consumed drugs, scientific opinion suggests otherwise. Leading forensic experts have cast doubts over the decision to sack Sergeant Zisopoulos, concluding there is "no evidence" the substances found on his hair were ingested and that the minute readings may have been caused by "external contamination". ergeant Zisopoulos, who is the first NSW...
Post a Comment
Read more

GHB date rape drug is back and pill testing may not help, says ED doctor

GHB the Date Rape Drug Discovered by a Russian chemist in the nineteenth century, used as a general anaesthetic in 1970s Dunedin, picked up by Californian bodybuilders in the 1990s - the drug known as GHB has travelled a long road to its current resurgence in the Australian party scene. On the weekend in Melbourne, more than 20 people were hospitalised after reportedly overdosing at the Electric Parade festival. GHB was blamed - one of the biggest overdoses of the drug since 10 people collapsed outside at a Gold Coast nightclub in 1996. "It's back again," exclaimed Dr David Caldicott, a Canberra-based emergency department doctor who was in Adelaide when GHB hit in the '90s. "I thought we managed to explain to people it was a stupid drug to take. Around Australia there will be emergency doctors everywhere holding their heads in their hands going, 'Oh God!'. "A new generation has started learning the mistakes all over again." ...
Post a Comment
Read more