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LEGAL high kills two teens,” cried the Daily Express. “Legal drug teen ripped his scrotum off,” roared The Sun. A steady stream of stories in the UK media about a little-known “legal high”, variously called mephedrone, plant food, miaow-miaow or m-cat, reached fever pitch last month. Newspapers, teachers and parents demanded an immediate ban. Les Iversen, the UK government’s chief drugs adviser, recommended that the drug be put in the same class as amphetamines, making possession punishable by five years in prison. The government rushed through an emergency ban on mephedrone and related compounds that became law last week.

This knee-jerk response may not be surprising, but what is far from clear is whether criminalisation is the right thing to do to reduce drug harm. While mephedrone has been loudly implicated in at least 27 deaths in the UK and Guernsey, its presence has been confirmed in just 11 of these cases and found by coroners to be a contributing factor in just two, according to a report produced by John Corkery of the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths, based in St George’s, University of London.

There is virtually no published research on how the substance affects the human body. Iversen himself recently admitted that “there is no data on toxicity that I could find”. Intrigued at the rush to action despite the lack of hard evidence, I decided to try to sort the facts from the frenzied speculation (see “Miaow-miaow myths”).

Mephedrone is a synthetic analogue of the herbal amphetamine cathinone, found naturally in the leaves of the khat plant, . Chewing khat leaves is a popular practice in some east African communities. Mephedrone, or 4-methylmethcathinone, is part of a family of synthetic cathinones created to mimic khat’s stimulant properties.

Its precise origins are unclear, though early reports suggest it was being supplied by an Israeli legal-high seller called Neorganics as far back as 2007. Fearing it would affect army conscripts, the Israeli government banned mephedrone later that year.

Rapid growth

Around that time, mephedrone began appearing on internet chat forums, and the drug seems to have spread rapidly since: significant use is now reported in Sweden, Finland, the UK, Ireland and Australia. The vast majority of mephedrone is produced in China and sold to dealers for between £2500 and £4000 per kilogram. No one knows how much is being exported globally.

What is clear is that a lot of people are using it. An , published in January suggested that mephedrone had become the fourth most popular drug among the readers of the website, after cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine. “We’ve never had a drug become so popular so quickly, about which we know so little,” says , a criminologist at Lancaster University, UK, and member of the UK government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). The emergence of legal highs like mephedrone, however, should come as no surprise. “When restrictions are placed on the supply of drugs and demand remains high, you get substance displacement,” says Danny Kushlick of , a UK think tank opposed to drug prohibition.

Key factors in mephedrone’s extraordinary rise in Europe have been the success of crackdowns on ecstasy and cocaine supply, and a fall in quality of these drugs. The purity of cocaine seized by the police in England and Wales dropped from over 60 per cent in 1999 to 22 per cent in 2009, and about half of ecstasy pills seized last year contained no MDMA, ecstasy’s active ingredient.

I decided to see for myself how easy it would be to get hold of mephedrone. A quick online search for “mephedrone” revealed hundreds of websites. Moments later I was on the phone ordering a special delivery of 5 grams of “plant food” for £60, plus £25 for courier delivery. Two hours later a courier called from outside my house. He insisted I sign a disclaimer saying I knew mephedrone was not for human consumption, then handed over a brown, padded envelope.

I sent a sample to Mark Parkin at the at King’s College London. Parkin compared a detailed chemical analysis of the compounds present with a reference sample. He found the two were “95 to 98 per cent identical”. The remainder was likely to be unreacted precursor chemicals, Parkin says. My sample was about as pure as they come.

I began to entertain the idea of trying the drug, to find out for myself about its effects and to enable me to gain a more informed perspective. I had concerns about the effects on my health: I had been warned that large doses could probably kill those at particular risk by inducing a heart attack. Nevertheless, I reasoned, we all take risks. I go rock-climbing and snowboarding, not to mention crossing the roads of London. But I resolved that before trying it I would find out as much as I could about its effects.

The basic problem with any discussion of mephedrone is the lack of reliable data on its effects, toxicity and prevalence of use. While the effects of some substances that have become popular as recreational drugs in recent years, such as ketamine and GHB, have previously been studied, there are practically no published studies on mephedrone – just user surveys and anecdotal accounts. Users describe the drug’s effects as similar to those of ecstasy or amphetamine.

“There are practically no published studies on mephedrone, just user surveys and anecdotes”

“Any psychoactive substance carries with it a set of risks,” says Adam Winstock, from the National Addiction Centre at King’s College London, who carried out the Mixmag survey. Winstock adds that from the little known about the substance’s toxicology, groups he would advise to steer clear of mephedrone include those aged 21 or under, anyone with mental health problems, those with neurological, cardiac or blood-pressure conditions and anyone with a history of alcohol or drug problems. I fall into none of these categories.

I decided to take a small quantity of mephedrone and measure some of my vital signs throughout the experience (see “My mephedrone moments”). As you will by now have surmised, I survived.

That’s not so surprising. In 2001 , now at Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK, illustrated how the public’s perception of drug risks is distorted by selective reporting. He published a 10-year review of drug deaths in Scotland which showed that the chance of newspapers reporting a death from an overdose of paracetamol (acetaminophen) was 1 in 250, whereas a death from amphetamine had a 1 in 3 chance of being reported, and deaths from ecstasy were always reported.

David Nutt, who set up the UK’s new (ISCD) after being sacked by the government from his position as chairman of the ACMD, published a paper last year stating that there was a serious adverse outcome when horse-riding in about 1 in 350 events, compared with about 1 in 10,000 for those taking ecstasy.

That’s not to say that taking mephedrone is without risk. I experienced a significant increase in heart rate from 80 beats per minute to a peak of 110 after snorting the drug. A sustained increased heart rate of over 100 beats could be dangerous, says Ann Robinson, a London-based general-practice doctor. “In susceptible individuals, this could trigger a heart attack or even sudden death.” I also took a smaller dose compared with what other users report taking. The dangers of larger or more frequent doses are unknown.

Criminal offence

The UK’s ban on mephedrone will add it to a growing number of nations prohibiting the substance. In the US, mephedrone’s chemical similarity to MDMA means it is banned under the Controlled Substances Act. Mephedrone possession is a criminal offence in at least 13 other countries.

Some think a ban would do more harm than good. “We know what happens when you make demand-led drugs illegal,” says Kushlick. “All you do is push the price up and hand the trade to organised criminals. You make it dirty and dangerous, and you force people into crime to support an expensive habit.”

And even if the UK ban on mephedrone works, it won’t be long before an alternative comes along. “We’ve seen designer drugs appearing over many years but the rate at which they are appearing is speeding up,” says Les King, a former member of the ACMD and now a member of Nutt’s ISCD. Indeed, in the last five years, piperazine derivatives such as BZP and CPP, synthetic cannabinoids including “spice” and now synthetic cathinones including mephedrone have come along in quick succession. The , a pan-European effort to track trends in legal highs, has built up a database of more than 400 novel substances by monitoring some 200 internet forums over the last two years.

Last year the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction that the legal highs market was constantly one step ahead of the authorities. It called for improved monitoring of emerging trends and quicker, more flexible approaches to controlling substances.

In an attempt to avoid having to deliberate on each individual compound as it appears, the new law controls not just mephedrone but a whole group of synthetic cathinones, including those such as methylone and butylone, which are already emerging as recreational drugs, and others not yet in widespread use. But even that won’t stall things for long. Police in Europe and the US have already seized drugs from a completely new family of compounds now being sold as legal highs.

Another option is the so-called “Class D” approach. BZP was widely used in New Zealand during the first few years of the new millennium. In 2005 the nation’s parliament introduced controls that fell short of a ban, but made it illegal to sell the drug to anyone under 18, to give it away or advertise it. The aim was to introduce controls while gathering evidence on harms. Two years later the government’s advisory committee reported there was moderate risk of harm . This “holding position” option was rejected by the UK government last year. Nutt says this is the reason for the rise in popularity of mephedrone.

Meanwhile, the inaccuracies and sensationalism of the mainstream media in its approach to reporting on drugs can only hasten its already diminishing relevance to the generation that is more likely to trust what it reads on Twitter and Facebook. “What we are seeing with mephedrone is an example of the coming-of-age of the internet in terms of disseminating awareness about a drug and as a method of supply and distribution,” says Martin Barnes, chief executive of UK drugs charity Drugscope and a member of the ACMD.

While demand for thrills from drugs, legal or otherwise, remains undiminished, those making money by supplying this demand will find a way to continue doing so. Until humans no longer seek to alter their state of mind through intoxication, the cat-and-mouse game over miaow-miaow and its successors will continue.