Herbal highs danger

Clubbers who turn to cocktails of ‘herbal highs' as a cheap and legal alternative to drugs could still be risking long-term neuropsychiatric damage, according to clinical scientists at St George's, University of London.

Dr Martin Schmidt, Specialist Registrar in Psychiatry, and Dr Ken Checinski, Senior Lecturer in Mental Health, issued the warning at 2007's Royal College of Psychiatrists annual meeting in Edinburgh after spotting a worrying increase in the availability online of herbal preparations containing psychoactive chemicals.

Their study of herbal highs available to buy on the internet revealed a hotchpotch of shamanic plants, synthetic stimulants and psychedelic cacti were being used to create pills offering legal highs with unknown side-effects.

Dr Schmidt said: “Until recently, legal highs consisted of single plant substances or simple preparations. But what worries me is the latest trend towards polysubstance products, which are being packaged and marketed to a young crowd, normally clubbers.

“One product we found, called Original Herbal Ecstasy, contained nutmeg, hallucinogenic mushrooms and a lot of stimulants. Yet there's no way of knowing how much nutmeg, for example, is in there.”

Nutmeg is hallucinogenic when taken in sufficient quantities. Half a dozen nuts, ground up and eaten or drunk in the form of a tea, can produce 24 hours of hallucinations and is known by users as a “nutmeg trip”. Reported side effects include anxiety, dizziness and an accelerated heartbeat.

But clubbers often don't bother to examine what their products contain. “I don't believe the average user even bothers to read the label,” said Dr Schmidt. “They see Original Herbal Ecstasy and take it without looking. They are taking several psychoactive chemicals and stimulants at the same time and we don't really know what harm these can cause.

He said there was a common belief that if a preparation was “natural” it was more likely to be safe, but said that could prove a dangerous assumption. He said: “Most packets contain no information about side-effects or the potential effect of mixing these substances with other things like alcohol or medications.

“They could cause a range of psychiatric disturbances ranging from anxiety and panic attacks to substance-induced psychosis. This would be particularly frightening if the person did not realise that they had taken a psychoactive substance.”

Other common “herbal high” ingredients include salvia, a Mexican herb, the leaves of which are smoked or taken as a tincture; Fly Agaric mushrooms, which produce euphoria and hallucinations but can be dangerous in overdose; baby woodrose and morning glory seeds, which bring on hallucinations lasting six to eight hours; the San Pedro cacti, which contains mescaline; Ma Huang, an ayurvedic preparation containing ephedrine; Kratom, used as an opiate substitute in Thailand; and stimulant BZP — now licensed as a medicine and harder to obtain.