Credit: The Daily Record
Former legal high Ethylphenidate, which was subjected to a banning order in the UK in April 2015, is being shipped into Scotland in inkjet cartridges.
Gangs in China are supplying illegal psychoactive substances to the Scottish black market, an investigation by the BBC found, The Daily Record reported. Undercover journalists from BBC Scotland contacted a Chinese chemical company and asked to buy Ethylphenidate, and were then put in touch with the company’s Scottish business partner, who said the chemical can be purchased in $15,000 (€13,300) batches.
A package was sent to the team labelled as a “printing ink filler”, which a drug testing company later verified were the legal high. The BBC broadcast a programme about the supply entitled BBC Scotland Investigated: The Deadly World Of Legal Highs.
Scottish ambulance crews deal with six call-outs every day because of legal highs, with 2,229 incidents involving new psychoactive substances (NPS) reported last year. The number of deaths where NPS had been taken rose from just four in 2009 to 114 in 2014.
Many legal highs can still be purchased in high street stores, but a blanket ban is to be introduced to outlaw the production, sale and supply of NPS from next year.
Detective Inspector Michael Miller, Police Scotland’s National Drug Co-ordinator, said there were once separate gangs who dealt with heroin, cocaine and ecstasy on the hand, while others dealt solely in NPS, but now they are converging.
He commented: “It’s attractive to organised criminal gangs, there’s more money to be made, they perceive less risk, so criminal networks will get involved in this.”