Drugs are everywhere. Constantly changing and evolving, it’s growing increasingly difficult to distinguish between the harm caused by legal and illegal substances. In the UK, our appetite for legal highs surpasses that of any other country in Europe, but with this habit comes consequence, and alarmingly, deaths by legal drugs have risen by 700% in the past three years.
Tonight on BBC3, Brianna Price, aka the very excellent DJ B.Traits, is taking a look at the effects legal highs and mainstream drugs are having across the UK in her documentary How Safe Are My Drugs? Bri admits to experimenting in the past, but has been drug-free for years. She openly talks of an ex-boyfriend who suffered an adverse reaction to cocaine in Ibiza, which nearly destroyed his liver and left his immune system dangerously weak. ‘It was very stressful and very scary,’ she told us when we spoke to her about it. ‘The cocaine he took was cut with another drug and it destroyed his white blood cell count for seven to ten days. In that amount of time he took a whole bunch of flights, and he was still partying in Ibiza. He came down with this weird flu and seven days passed and I was like, “You’re still not getting any better your eyes are so yellow.” The doctor was like, “Your liver is basically failing, we need to put you on antibiotics now.” I’ve never had anything like that happen to me or anyone close to me.’
The people in Bri’s documentary are united in their love of legal and illegal highs and free outdoor raves. We hear about 15-year-old Martha through her mother Anne-Marie, who tells us that her daughter died after swallowing half a gram of MDMA, at 91% purity. We meet student Britney and her friend Solomon (aged just 16) eager to lose themselves in the next field or warehouse all-nighter they end up at. ‘When you go free-partying, I won’t bullshit there are a lot of drugs. I went to loads last year, I had a great summer,’ Britney says. ‘It’s a thrill,’ Solomon explains. ‘I’m not able to get into clubs yet, and if you were to take substances in a club there’s a high risk factor of getting caught.’ As we track their night, however, things take a turn for the worst as Britney ‘freaks out’ when taking legal hallucinogen AMT. ‘She kept dabbling with it as if it were powder like MDMA or cocaine – it was way too much,’ Bri tells us afterwards. ‘She took as much as five people would take. If more information was available it may not have happened.’
Because, as Bri discovered, shops selling legal highs provide little-to-no warning to those who purchase them. ‘They are sold as “research chemicals” and if anyone suggests they will be taking them, we can no longer sell them’ one shop owner explained in the documentary,’ she says. A couple also invite the cameras back to theirs while they ingest legal weed. ‘It was insane to watch,’ Bri recalls. ‘One second she was completely coherent, then she was gone and couldn’t even string a sentence together. For “legal” marijuana it was terrifying.’
Information and knowledge are key to preventing deaths from legal and illegal highs. ‘If they’re going to take [drugs] they need to know how to take them,’ says Anne-Marie in the film. Bri’s documentary hopes to open up a dialogue on the benefits of harm reduction measures which reduces risk by accepting that people will take drugs and acting to protect them when they do. Bri even travels to Amsterdam to try a ‘safe’ drug created by the famous Dr Z, the man behind mephadrone. Back in the UK, after a tragic death last year, we meet criminologist Fiona Measham who now works closely with world famous venue The Warehouse Project to educate clubbers on their drugs.
‘It’s incredible what they’re doing in Manchester,’ Bri tells us. ‘When I was there, they were finding cocaine and MDMA and ketamine that was all extremely pure, and two or three years ago the substances weren’t like that. If anything dodgy is found on the night, warning messages go out straight away on these big LED screens out front in the queue area saying, “If you think you’ve taken anything like this, come to the medical area on the side of the club,” and they actually give you information and help.’ So does she think more harm reduction measures should be implemented in clubs around the globe? ‘People will always do drugs,’ Bri says. ‘People are always going to be curious and want to experience a heightened sense of reality. The environment that they are taking it in just needs to be much safer.’
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.