Are `Legal Highs` Legal Anymore?

If you have been keeping in touch with the news over the last few months you will have noticed a great many news items involving legal highs, both the use of them and the selling of them. The other day, for the first time in the UK, two men pleaded guilty to selling dangerous substances, namely the legal high Novel Psychoactive Substances. This is very much not before time and there certainly needs to be a tightening up of the regulations with regard to this and many of the other substances.

One of the problems I feel is in the use of the term `Legal High`. This gives the impression to many of our naive youngsters (and not so young but foolish members of our society) that as these highs are legal they must be fine to take. This cannot be further from the truth in many cases and if they cared to read the small print on some of these products they would see that on some of them it says `not to be ingested` or `not to be taken by mouth`, even though all the traders who sell these products know that that is exactly what people intend to do when they purchase these substances. The fact is calling some product a legal high both puts people off guard and they risk taking substances that could in fact cause them great harm, and also it gives retailers a term to hide behind if they are confronted by anyone, they can shrug their shoulders and say it is perfectly legal for me to sell this product.

Legal highs have led to a number of people throughout the UK being taken to hospital and there have been a number of deaths that have been connected with them too. And many of them can be just as addictive as some illegal drugs and they are leading to all sorts of anti-social problems within our communities here in the UK.

What we need to be doing, besides banning many of them and making it an offence to take these legal highs in public, is to be giving a new name to them so people are more wary of getting involved with them in the first place. Why can`t we put a label on these products in large print saying `Potentially Harmful Substances` and start to call them this instead of legal highs? This may make many members of the public think twice before trying them out in the future.