Nine people have died this month from taking some sort of synthetic cannabis. It seems hardly possible that whatever it is being sold cheaply on the streets is still finding takers after so many deaths in quick succession. Has word not got around, or are these people's lives so miserable, so devoid of any hope of higher possibilities, that they would buy a cheap chemical high knowing it is deadly?
A drug counsellor described the effects of synthetic cannabis to the Herald this week as worse than meth. "It tends to keep them awake for days," he said. "It drives people psychotic, or at least in that direction, more quickly than methamphetamine. It's a lot more addictive than the plant cannabis. It has no business being called cannabis."
Evidently it is made by spraying a chemical mixture into finely chopped plant material which enables it to be smoked. The chemicals are so new their medical effects are unknown, except anecdotal - and that evidence is awful. No sane person following the news of late would touch the stuff.
Anecdotal evidence suggests it is also being contaminated. Police say sellers have admitted to lacing it with kitchen spray cleaner, rat poison and horse tranquiliser. It is staggering that anybody would do such a thing and sell it to somebody hopelessly addicted. Criminal charges surely cannot be far away.
Not everybody believes criminal charges are the answer. The NZ Drug Foundation argues these deaths might not have happened if the Government had kept its nerve on decriminalisation of chemical highs in 2013. Many will remember that Parliament had passed a law regulating new pyschoactive substances such as the party drugs that had arrived on the market more than 10 years before.
