The 'legal highs' that leave users feeling low

By Zhang Yi (China Daily) Updated: 2016-04-19 07:38

Police officers destroy more than 100 kilograms of confiscated heroin, morphine and other illegal drugs on June 3 in Fuyang, Anhui province. Wang Biao / For China Daily

China's teenagers face a growing threat from a new class of drugs called New Pyschoactive Substances that are easy to manufacture and obtain. Zhang Yi reports.

Zhang Ling (not his real name) will never forget the evening he walked into a club and consumed what he thought was a regular soft drink.

Eight years later, he is still suffering the consequences of the instant euphoria brought on by the 50 yuan ($7.70) drink, which contained a powerful "legal high". He now lives in a voluntary drug rehabilitation center in Beijing, attempting to overcome an addiction triggered by the bottle of "Cough Syrup", a preparation that contained large amounts of codeine.

"I never thought it would be so easy to get addicted to codeine, which was classified as a Category II psychotropic substance under China's medical regulations on May 1 last year. Now, it's impossible to get cough medicine containing codeine without a doctor's prescription, but a few years ago, cough syrups were freely available at most convenience stores," he said.

"I was 14 when I drank that first bottle of 'Cough Syrup' at the club, and I quickly began to feel the need to feel euphoric again. A couple days later, I found the drink in an adult store near my home. It was sold at 17 yuan a bottle, and, once hooked, I couldn't give it up."

Zhang's case is not an isolated one. Many teenagers have inadvertently found themselves caught up in new types of illicit drugs, which are usually synthesized in illegal laboratories.

About 80 percent of the 531,000 new drug users registered in China last year were addicted to synthetic drugs and other preparations, including a class of drugs known as New Psychoactive Substances, or NPS, according to the China National Narcotics Control Commission.

Social drugs

Unlike traditional illegal drugs, such as heroin and marijuana, NPS drugs use substances from a range of legal chemicals, medicinal materials and even plant extracts. Marketed as "legal highs" and intended for social use, they can be bought at entertainment venues or via online trading channels.

One typical example is 25i-NBOMe - N-bomb or 251 to use its street names. Last year, the drug, believed to be a synthetic form of LSD, was brought to the public's attention by an Australian father who travelled to China to uncover the companies that exported the raw materials to Australia, leading directly to the death of his 16-year-old son.

Preston Bridge died after jumping off a second-floor balcony at a hotel in 2013. His father, Rod, believes the teenager was hallucinating after taking 25i-NBOMe and thought he could fly.

Rod Bridge claims that he approached two chemicals suppliers in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province. Bridge said he posed as a drugs boss and managed to record interviews with company representatives. He was accompanied by a crew from the Australian TV station Channel Nine who used a hidden camera to record the exchanges.

A video clip, which went viral online, showed how easy it was to obtain the raw materials for the drug, which was not registered as a Category II psychotropic substance at the time, meaning that it was not illegal to sell the chemicals for non-trade purposes.

According to Bridge, he was offered five different chemicals and was assured that they could be delivered to him in Australia. One deal involved more than 200 kg of raw materials, and Bridge was told that around 100 kg of the drugs were shipped into Australia every month.

Bridge said that he decided to travel to China because the Australian police failed to act on information he had given them about the Sino-Australian drugs trade.