Hansard

This has been a really constructive debate that many members have added to through their expertise and learning. I hope that the minister has found it helpful, especially as she is looking at solutions to the problem and working with the UK Government on it.

It is difficult speak about the debate without mentioning, as many members have, the 47 deaths that have been caused by these new drugs. We extend our sympathies to the families of those who have died and hope that we can do something about the situation before many more die. We also need to pay tribute to the organisations that are doing good work out there. I started taking notes of all the organisations that people mentioned, but it would take up most of my time if I went through them all. Suffice to say that we all appreciate their work, which we hope will inform the debate and how we deal with the situation.

Graeme Pearson pointed out what is behind this: profit and greed, with no regard whatever for the impact on the individuals and their families who suffer as a result.

There was a lot of discussion about the terminology. Do we use the term “legal highs”, the phrase “new drugs” or the unpronounceable “new psychoactive substances”? The latter does not really roll off the tongue and I do not see it getting an awful lot of traction.

Kezia Dugdale suggested—John Finnie emphasised the point—that we use the term “legal highs” because that is what is understood out there. I often wonder whether that term is promoted by those who sell these substances or by the media because it sounds jinglistic. Would the term “new drugs” begin to grow legs and run if we had some help from our friends in the media? Would it become a more descriptive definition?

Graeme Dey, I think, referred to a survey carried out in Arbroath, which found that 44 per cent of those questioned thought that these substances were safer because of the word “legal”, which suggested that they had been legalised, when in fact it is just that they have not been illegalised. We need to give that more thought. The stakeholders and the groups working with the people affected are using the term “new drugs”, so perhaps we should consider that.

A lot of members talked about the dangers of new drugs. It is clear that nobody knows what the side effects are—not the users and not the agencies that try to support users or deal with the consequences. Therefore, it is very difficult for people to pull together a response. Sometimes, such substances are more dangerous than substances that are illegal.

It was interesting to listen to Elaine Murray and Nigel Don discuss chemistry. I have to say that chemistry was not my forte. I do not think that I even got my O grade, far less my higher, in chemistry—it was way over my head. I always thought that a drug was a drug and that people could tell what it was. However, sometimes it is not so clear. If the substance cannot be boiled down—for want of a better phrase—to a chemical compound, it becomes more difficult to assess the side effects. As Alison McInnes said, it is about how the substances interact with other substances—new drugs, alcohol or other drugs.

Sandra White said that the new drugs could pose a greater threat to health because they are so accessible. There is so little information about them out there.

Claire Baker mentioned the Crew 2000 briefing, which said that people are really unsure about what dosage to take. Some new drugs take time to be effective. Someone might try a little, decide that it is not working and then take a bit more and a bit more over a long period, by which time they have overdosed and the drugs are having pretty fearsome impacts on their health. We need to consider that.

Some have said that the drugs are not always dangerous and they do not always have an ill effect. I do not think that we can gauge their long-term effects, such as the impact on mental health, which they interfere with to cause a reaction that is not natural. We do not even know the impact that some legal drugs have on mental health, and exactly the same applies to these new drugs.

A lot of people talked about how we can legislate to make these new drugs illegal. It was quite clear that if we do that, we will just be chasing, because the moment we make one compound illegal, it will be tweaked slightly and will come back as something else. That could have a worse effect, because we would not know the impact of the new combination.

Willie Coffey said that perhaps we should look at the issue the other way round and should sell only drugs that are named and controlled and which people understand. That might be a way of dealing with all this.

A number of speakers, such as Elaine Murray and Dennis Robertson, talked about the decrease in illegal drug taking and the increase in the taking of new drugs, and the question was asked whether the increase in the taking of new drugs was down to people’s fear of getting a criminal record. I think that it was Kezia Dugdale who said that that was not the case, and that the increase might be down to cost. The cost of illegal drugs is much higher. New psychoactive substances are much more accessible—they are available on the internet with buy-one-get-one-free offers or quantity discounts.

A lot of tools have been talked about—I notice that I am running out of time to discuss them. Members discussed the use of social media and the internet. Another issue is the use of licensing, although I wonder whether licensing might give the impression that new psychoactive substances are legal. Perhaps we need to enable councils and the like to ban not only certain payday loan establishments but head shops from the high street.

Graeme Pearson made what was perhaps one of the more useful suggestions, which was about using HM Revenue and Customs. HMRC normally gets whoever it is looking for, so it might be worth exploring that avenue.

We need to consider who uses new psychoactive substances, because it is the same things—poverty, low self-esteem and the like—that cause people to turn to substances that make them feel better.