My Lords, Amendment 56NA and the proposed new clause seek to stop the high street trade in what are known as legal highs. Head shops are retailers that have traditionally sold material and devices relating to the cannabis culture. In the past five years, these outlets have mostly diversified their range of products to include legal highs, which are psychoactive substances that have not been assessed for their harms by the relevant authorities and mimic the effects of illegal drugs such as cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy.
It is estimated that there are around 260 of these head shops, located in major cities and some of the more affluent suburbs. A further report has indicated that legal highs are also on sale in such diverse places as shoe repair shops, petrol stations and takeaway restaurants. Since 2009, the volume of trade and number of outlets in the United Kingdom selling new psychoactive substances has risen considerably. There has yet to be any significant legal challenge to their questionable operations, but the current law does not really provide for this eventuality. Local authorities that have attempted to prosecute sellers under consumer protection legislation have failed. To evade prosecution through the Medicines Act 1968, the legal highs are invariably labelled “research chemicals” which are “not for human consumption”.
The Office for National Statistics has estimated that the number of deaths from new psychoactive substances has risen from 29 in 2011 to 52 in 2012. The Scottish Government’s drug-related death statistics estimate 47 legal high deaths in Scotland in 2012. The reported effects vary depending on drug type, but include symptoms such as anxiety, paranoia, delusions, psychotic episodes, irregular heartbeat, chest pains, hyperthermia and seizures. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated the number of young people aged between 15 and 24 in the United Kingdom who have taken a legal high at 670,000 or 8.2%. That figure is the highest in Europe. It is estimated that the number of websites selling new psychoactive substances in Europe rose from 170 in 2010 to 690 in 2012. About half of these are based in the United Kingdom.
Both ACPO and Police Scotland have expressed support for introducing some enforcement measures against head shops. Legal highs often have an inconsistent set of ingredients; there is no regulation on how they are produced and the substances have, in effect, no status. The manufacturers, often in China or India, are always a step ahead of the law and when any temporary ban is signed, new untested drugs with similar properties come on the market within days. However, the reality is that only three substances have been subject to temporary banning orders in the past two years. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction identified 76 new substances in 2012 and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report for 2013 recognised that more legal drugs are available for purchase than are listed in the UN conventions on drugs.
Amendment 56NA is based on the existing Intoxicating Substances (Supply) Act 1985, which prevents the sale of glues and butane to minors. That law has been successful over some years in reducing the number of deaths from volatile substances. Under the provisions in the amendment, a court would issue a civil order against a particular shop, listing the products identified by trading standards officers which appeared to be psychoactive, synthetic and intoxicating, and prohibiting their supply. The amendment specifically excludes medicines, alcohol and tobacco. Any breach of the synthetic psychoactive product order issued to a supplier or retailer would be a criminal offence.
There is a need to act. The sale of dangerous substances in an everyday retail environment has the effect of normalising their use. It encourages experimentation among minors and exposes more vulnerable people to powerful psychoactive substances. The problem with legal highs is that people wrongly believe that, because they are legal, they must be safe, and having the substances so openly available only reinforces that impression. The reality is that the number of head shops is growing inexorably and nothing appears to be currently in place to prevent that continuing —hence the proposed new clause that we are now debating, which will help to check the substantial increase in the number of shops selling these substances and help to cease the trade in untested psychoactive substances in existing outlets.
The second amendment in the group aims to probe the Government about the comparative lack of data on the impact of legal highs. The Government need to do more work to assess and understand the impact of legal highs on the resources of the police, the NHS and other agencies and the link to anti-social behaviour, criminality and drug abuse. The proposed new clause in Amendment 56NB addresses this point by requiring the Secretary of State to carry out a review within 12 months of the Bill passing.
I hope that the Minister, in responding, will recognise that this problem is getting worse. It has not stabilised: it is getting worse and doing so fairly quickly. Although the Minister may well tell us everything that the Government have done—I am sure the Government have been seeking to do things to address the problem—the reality is that whatever the Minister will tell us has been done has not had the impact desired. The problem is growing and we need action now. This amendment
constitutes that action and stands a chance of being an effective way of addressing an increasingly serious problem.
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