Legal highs have been around for a good few years, but it's only now that they've become truly popular in youth culture. You may be worried that your children can walk down the high street, into a store and purchase 'legal' uppers, downers and hallucinogens and take them without any worry that we could be arrested. But are our worried unfounded, or should we be concerned about the health implications that some of these substances can have?

One of the better known legal highs is Salvia Divinorum; a hallucinogenic herb indigenous to Mexico, but also grown in other countries for sale. It can be obtained in various strengths (5x, 10x, 20x etc.) and is smoked through a bong for a direct hit, rather than through a cigarette which often doesn't work. Salvia is said to be generally safe in terms of what it contains; it's a natural plant and therefore the only danger is to mental health after exposure to the hallucinogenic properties.

However, there are plenty of other legal highs that contain substances we know nothing about. All a legal high manufacturer needs to do is take the chemical composition for a known and illegal class A drug and change one part of its structure. This process makes it legal because it isn't that exact structure any more, yet it can often have exactly the same effects. How long the drug stays legal for varies, but at the moment we are seeing them staying on the legal market for a matter of months. There are legal substitutes for cocaine, speed, ecstasy and MDMA and all manner of other amphetamines and narcotics. This is perhaps not the most worrying thing, however.

Drugs experts have expressed that it may be safer for people to take the known illegal drug than a legal high. The reason? Legal highs often contain the 'new' compounds that have been altered so that they can become legal. This means they are not only foreign to the body, but also to health care professionals. If someone takes legal MDMA and then collapses, the medical team won't know how to react. For instance, using a certain type of drip that would normally be used for an MDMA overdose might cause unpredicted complications with the legal high. With known illegal drugs there are set procedures because the effects on the body are well research and documented.

What these drug experts are saying is not 'go and take illegal drugs', but instead that legal highs need to be investigated much further and in much more detail. We wouldn't take 'substitute' medication that doctors know nothing about simply because it's cheaper, so why take drugs that doctors know nothing about simply because it's legal? There are ways for teenagers and young adults to experiment with substances and still be relatively safe, yet many legal high manufacturers are pushing these boundaries to the limits. In an ideal world nobody would take drugs, but we will never stop our young generations from trying them. Instead, we can encourage them to recognize when something is unknown and untrustworthy.

Stan Tian

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