LEGAL HIGH’ FIRMS PLAN BAN DODGE
BRITISH web sellers peddling deadly “legal highs” are setting up abroad to sidestep a new ban.
From Thursday anyone found making or supplying psychoactive substances can be jailed for up to seven years.
These drugs are linked to 76 deaths in the past decade and the ban is a triumph for the Sunday People’s long-running No To Legal Highs campaign.
But evil pushers are already trying to dodge the ban by flogging the highs, such as synthetic cocaine and cannabis-style substances, via internet firms run from abroad and posting them to the users. A source said: “This makes a mockery of the ban. People can still get them if they wait a couple of days for delivery.”
The homepage of one top- selling British site for the drugs reads: “We are now closed. We will still be monitoring emails over the next week but no sales will be possible. We are in the process of selling our site to an established e.u. based vendor. E.U. customers may get an email from the new owners.”
And at least one firm on the continent advertised for orders from British customers, listing prices in pounds and letting buyers enter UK delivery addresses. But buyers had to pay by Amazon gift vouchers or bitcoin, electronic currency.
On Friday, the bosses of another site said it would send drugs to a UK address, in clear breach of the law. It’s reply to a reporter’s email said: “We are shipping to the UK on daily base. Feel free to place your order at our webshop anytime.”
The clampdown does not make possession of the substances illegal butpolice can seize and destroy them as well as searching people, premises and vehi- cles. Recovering user Luke Tucker, 26, has shared a harrowing picture of himself fighting for his life as a warning to others. The van driver, of Chiswick, West London, smoked up to 50 spliffs a day.
He said: “They shut down my body. Doctors said if my kidney was in any worse shape, I’d have died, which is absolutely terrifying.”
Before last week, legal highs could be on the web and in high street “head shops”. Individual drugs were banned on a case by case basis.
Our No To Legal Highs campaign has run for more than two years.
A Home Office spokesman said anyone found to have imported substances outlawed by last week’s bill into the UK would face up to seven years in prison.