U.K. Bill Banning Psychoactive Drugs Could Stifle Scientific Research
A U.K. bill announced this week in the 2015 Queen’s Speech aims to curb the manufacturing of “legal highs” sold both in head shops and on the streets with a blanket ban on any and all new psychoactive drugs.
The far-reaching proposal is intended to “ban the new generation of psychoactive drugs” – commonly called “legal highs” or “synthetics” due to their mimicking of banned substances – by pre-emptively criminalizing the manufacturing and sale, but not possession of, new mind-altering substances.
“The landmark psychoactive substances bill will fundamentally change the way we tackle new psychoactive substances – and put an end to the game of cat and mouse in which new drugs appear on the market more quickly than government can identify and ban them,” Mike Penning, minister of state at the Home Office, said in a statement.
The new legislation would result in a seven-year jail sentence for anyone found guilty of manufacturing or distributing “any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect.”
But critics say the bill is too broad to be enforceable, let alone effective, and may stifle research that employs new psychoactive substances.
“The definition of what’s considered psychoactive is so broad as to be unworkable,” Stefanie Jones, Nightlife Community Engagement Manager at the Drug Policy Alliance, tells Rolling Stone. “It demonstrates a complete disregard for the question of whether or not any new psychoactive substances actually carry risks.”
The bill follows the U.K. government’s difficulty enforcing existing bans on new psychoactive drugs like synthetic cathinones (“bath salts,” such as mephedrone) and synthetic marijuana (“Spice”), which are already illegal under the Misuse of Drugs Act. When it comes to the emergence of new psychoactive substances that are not already explicitly banned, the U.K. government has the power to temporarily ban the manufacture and sale of psychoactive substances not covered in the Misuse of Drugs Act.
The blanket-ban proposal comes despite a poor track record when it comes to banning new psychoactive drugs in the U.K.
Studies on the effect of the mephedrone ban, for example, have found that club goers continue to use the drug unabated.
“Since we carried out our first study [in 2010] the purity of mephedrone has fallen, the price has risen, yet the results of our second study showed both use and popularity had increased in the year since the ban,” Dr. Fiona Measham, senior lecturer in criminology at Lancaster University, told The Guardian in 2012.
“The results of our two studies showed that not only were club-goers undeterred by the change in law, but the drug had in fact increased in popularity among our sample.”
The ban will also have a chilling effect on research in the U.K., according to Professor David Nutt, who was chairman to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs until he was fired for comments about the harmlessness of ecstasy. A neuropsychopharmacologist studying how drugs affect the brain, Nutt has served as an advisor to multiple U.K. government offices, and was head of the Psychopharmacology Unit at the University of Bristol before becoming the Edmond J. Safra chair in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, London.
Speaking with The Guardian, Nutt called the blanket ban “disastrous,” and said, “It’s going to end brain research in this country.”
“[T]he only drug for Parkinson’s is a cathinone [a class of drugs, including mephedrone, which was banned in 2010],” Nutt said, “We’ve already seen massive impediment to research of interesting compounds by current law.”