Spice Still ruining lives
16 months after we called for action, a new super-strong form of the drug has the city centre in its grip...
IN Piccadilly a homeless man wanders in the heatwave, wrapped in a sleeping bag.
Like many others on Manchester’s streets, he believes there is a bad - possibly even deadly - batch of Spice going round.
“People are fitting out, having Mamba attacks,” he says. “That’s what it used to be called, isn’t it? Mamba. People who normally would have some and it doesn’t touch the sides, they’re getting laid out for five hours.”
He’s not wrong. During rushhour, the scenes last week are hauntingly familiar. Between the food market entrance to the Arndale and the corner of Market Street - a distance of a couple of hundred feet - three different people slump, very clearly out of it on Spice. Outside Halifax in Piccadilly, a woman leans forward, glazed. And again in Piccadilly Gardens. And again on Mosley Street.
The following day there are more. Rows of men sitting on benches in different states of consciousness.
Rough sleepers tell us of men leaving prison recently with ‘fresh heads’ - having got used to milder strains of Spice - before hitting the batch currently circulating on the streets and collapsing.
By the end of the week, public agencies confirm what the city’s homeless population were already saying: that a new strain of Spice is going round, up to four times stronger than the weaker batches previously circulating.
Yet while it has suddenly thrust itself into the limelight again, Spice never actually went away in Manchester.
It may not have been sprawled out in the middle of Market Street until this last couple of weeks, but it just became part of the furniture instead - lurking in the doorways, shelters, hostels, canal basins and coroner’s reports.
The drug has only become a bigger and grimmer fact of life for rough sleepers, homelessness workers, the police and charities over the last 18 months, even if much of that has played out behind closed doors.
At the end of last year, in a notorious Ardwick bed and breakfast called Val’s - previously covered by the M.E.N.’s investigation into slum homeless accommodation, but which eventually burned down last month - three people died after taking the same batch of Spice. Charities believe many other deaths can be linked in some way to the drug, even if it isn’t being recorded as the primary cause.
Its effects can be truly horrific, as any frontline homeless worker will testify. And that’s not just the case
in the city centre. Jonathan Billings, chief executive of Stockport’s Wellspring homeless charity, says people regularly travel the eight miles into Piccadilly to buy Spice for £5 a gram, before going back again to sell it for £15.
On Friday, he had to help a man who was fitting on it so hard he had managed to wrap himself around a parking meter, squeezing into the six inch gap between the meter and the wall.
“It’s not got any better,” says Jonathan, who has been speaking to the M.E.N. about Spice for three years, gradually watching it take over the streets.
“It’s just got worse and worse as time’s gone on. It’s just horrible - it absolutely destroys people. Spice is the worst drug I’ve ever come across.
“And it is particularly very strong at the moment. We’re seeing people taking half the amount they used to take and then massively overdosing.”
In May, he saw a new pattern: a user go through a bizarre series of fits, calmness and then coming round again - before suddenly flipping out again.
“He sat at a table, chatted and appeared 100 per cent fine again, like we’ve seen lots of times before,” he says of one man.
“However, after 15 minutes he then had what we can only describe as a psychotic episode - trashing tables, thrashing around, smashing a fire door, throwing cups, with very strange body language.
“We had never seen behaviour like that before.”
One city centre charity worker, who asks not to be named, agrees the strains change all the time, causing different effects.
“A few weeks ago we started to see people we thought were coping well collapsing, people you didn’t expect,” they reflect.
“But before that we thought everything had calmed down a bit.
“We saw the aggressive phase early this year, then it sort of went back to the zombie apocalypse and then started to calm right down. You could have a conversation with people who were smoking it at that point. But recently we’ve seen people collapsing again.”
Alongside charities and council workers, it is the police who face the frontline of much of this chaos.
Freedom Of Information figures obtained by the M.E.N. show callouts that mention the drug more than doubled year-on-year in the last six months of 2017 - and there’s no sign of that abating.
At the forefront of the response has been Northern Quarter constable Andy Costello, who has followed the drug’s rise closely.
Working with researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), he has become an expert on the new substance - so much so that he now has his own testing lab in the town hall, one of only two in the entire country.
Seeing a police officer sitting at a table with pipettes, funnels and chemical receptacles is an eyeopener. But it has become the logical solution.
“Spice is the third street drug,” he says. “Before, it used to be crack and
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It’s just horrible - it absolutely destroys people. Spice is the worst drug I’ve ever come across Jonathan Billings