Life

The legal high naphyrone should be made illegal in the UK, the government's leading advisor on drugs said yesterday. He also recommended that the government introduce US-style legislation under which new compounds would be banned automatically if they are similar to existing illegal drugs.

Les Iversen, chairman of the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), said a new legal framework was needed because when novel drugs are made illegal, underground chemists and dealers simply replace them with new legal highs.

His call came as the ACMD recommended that naphyrone, a legal high that internet dealers have been selling in recent months, be controlled as a "class B" substance – meaning that possession and dealing would be punishable by up to five years and 14 years in prison respectively.

Little is known about the prevalence of naphyrone or its effects on the body. It has a close chemical resemblance to cathinones such as mephedrone and pyrovalerone – a drug developed in the 1960s to treat fatigue but largely abandoned due to the risk of abuse and addiction.

Labels changed

Some websites sell naphyrone under the name NRG-1. But when researchers from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, bought 17 products advertised as legal highs from 12 UK-based websites, only one of 10 products sold as NRG-1 contained naphyrone, with the rest made up mainly of mephedrone and other banned cathinones.

Most internet retailers stopped selling mephedrone, also known as plant food or miaow miaow, when it was banned in April – but many began offering other legal highs in its place.

Iversen said that no sooner had the ban been introduced than naphyrone was being advertised as "the legal alternative to mephedrone" and "a research chemical 10 times more potent than cocaine".

Analogue gambit

In the US, the Federal Analog Act automatically bans compounds that are chemically similar or have similar effects to substances that are already banned for human consumption.

"Some of us on the ACMD think that this is a very attractive long-term approach to the problem that we ban one substance and another one will crop up the following week," said Iversen.

An ACMD working group will discuss this approach today with US Drug Enforcement Administration officials. The UK government is also looking at introducing laws like those in New Zealand that allow ministers to introduce a temporary ban on a substance while an investigation is carried out.

Iversen acknowledged that an analogue substances law might catch certain prescription medicines unless it was carefully framed or exceptions were included. For example, phenethylamines, the large chemical family into which cathinones and naphyrone fall, also include various medicinal treatments, including a weight-loss drug and a drug which is used against Parkinson's disease, depression and senile dementia.

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