New drugs craze and a deadly game of roulette
THE terrifying lottery facing thrillseeking teenagers who buy the prescription drug Xanax online is today exposed by the Daily Express.
Our investigation highlights the potentially deadly risk youngsters face when trying to obtain the highly addictive anti-anxiety medication for recreational use.
One site offering Xanax for sale in fact supplied us with Tramadol, an equally controversial opiate painkiller linked to hundreds of deaths.
MP Bambos Charalambous said: “These young people don’t know what they are putting into their bodies. They have no control at all.”
Rick Bradley, of the anti-abuse charity Addaction, said: “Purchases are either on the clean [legitimate] or the dark web or on the street.
“The clean web is safer because it will be dispensed with information which might enable the user to take the drug more safely.”
Mr Bradley, who also sits on a new substances watchdog for Public Health England, added: “But that doesn’t make it safe at all.”
The Daily Express set out to RAVEN Hunt’s family demanded a criminal investigation after she hanged herself while suffering from Xanax withdrawal.
Mother Emmy Hunt, 42, believes her daughter was supplied with the anti-anxiety pills by a member of her student circle in Bristol.
“We know the withdrawal of Xanax can lead to suicidal thoughts,” she said. “This dealer gives Xanax to the girls to get them on it and then gets them to pay for it after.
“We feel he needs to answer for the role we believe he has played in Raven’s death.”
Miss Hunt, 21, had taken the pills for six weeks to help battle anxiety ahead of her final exams at the University of the West of England. After she came off the drug she struggled with depression and was found dead two weeks later in a wooded nature reserve in Bristol.
Miss Hunt, who had wanted to be a social worker, was found to have traces of Xanax in her blood after the tragedy in April last year.
Her mother, who lives in Southampton, added: “I will never get over it or accept it. She meant the world to me. As a family, we will only be able to really come to terms with what has happened if the suppliers of Xanax are stopped.”