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The deaths of two teenagers in March 2010 were linked to the ‘legal high’ drug mephedrone, prompting the government to ban the drug. However toxicology tests published today show that they did not have traces of the drug in their system.
Prof Colin Blakemore, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said:
“This shocking news should be a salutary lesson to the tabloid journalists and prejudiced politicians who held a gun to the heads of the ACMD and demanded that this drug should be banned, before a single autopsy had been completed. The only good that might emerge from this fiasco is a long-overdue review of drug control policy.
“The politicians talk about using drug classification as a way of sending “messages” to young people. I fear that the only message that will be sent by the hasty decision on mephedrone is that the present drug laws deserve no respect.
“The UK Drug Policy Commission recommended that new street drugs causing concern could be put in a pending category – Category X – with some controls, short of illegality, while proper evidence is collected. If that had been done for mephedrone, this embarrassment would have been avoided.”
Prof Les King, member of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, said:
“It was indeed these two deaths that led to the biggest media frenzy about drugs that I can recall. And it was these two deaths that put pressure on the Home Secretary for mephedrone to be controlled. I presume that BBC Panorama will now go ahead with their enquiry. As David Nutt said in his Hardtalk interview the other day the evidence base for the fatal toxicity of mephedrone is weak. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00sl6h9/HARDtalk_Professor_David_Nutt/. I also remember doing an interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 a few days after those death and cautioning against a too-rapid conclusion that mephedrone was involved.
“I think the role of Humberside Police at the time needs to be investigated. I wonder if all those scare stories in the press will be retracted – some hope. It seems to me that the scientific community now needs to carry out its own enquiry. It was just this problem that I and others tried to solve by suggesting that we should have some sort of temporary/emergency legislation on so-called ‘legal highs’ – an idea that is now Government policy.
“The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) is carrying out a risk-assessment on mephedrone on 15 July. This has been long-planned. I think that meeting will be most interested in this story. As far as I know there are still very few cases where mephedrone has been the direct cause of any death in the UK.”
Dr John Marsden, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London and member of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, said:
“It always looked as if the most likely cause of death would be CNS depressant induced respiratory depression inducing hypoxia in this sad case. I can’t see how mephedrone would directly kill a healthy users if they didn’t have a heart attack.
“We have interviewed 100 mephedrone users and (with John Ramsay ) we have some urine samples screened for 40 or so compounds. Our study data is feeding into the EMCDDA risk assessment shortly.”
Prof David Nutt, Chair in Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial Collage London, said:
“If these reports are true, the previous government’s rush to ban mephedrone never had any serious scientific credibility – it looks much more like a decision based on a short term electoral calculation. This news demonstrates why it’s so important to base drug classification on the evidence, not fear and why the police, media and politicians, should only make public pronouncements once the facts are clear.”