Number of drugs discovered in Scotland quadruples

THE number of drugs discovered by authorities has quadrupled, Scotland’s drug enforcement agency said today.

They included the likes of as “legal ket” (methoxetamine) and “mad cat” (mephedrone and phenazepam which is close to the tranquilliser diazepam).

Such substances are now being discovered at the rate of one a week across Europe.

The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) said 48 new, unlicensed drugs were “discovered” last year, up from just 10 five years ago.

The findings were announced by the SCDEA as it published its annual report.

The effects of the substances on people are unknown because they have not been officially tested.

The SCDEA says the drugs are being marketed and trafficked through the internet.

One of the new drugs, known as Benzo Fury, was reportedly taken by a teenager who died at the RockNess music festival earlier this year, although the results of his toxicology report are not yet known.

SCDEA’s Andrew Cunningham said: “It is difficult to keep up with. Methoxetamine, for example, is so close to ketamine in structure but it avoids the law: it has the same effects and the same harms. It is a small proportion of what is out there in Scotland but it is growing all the time.

“The big issue is that they are untested and people don’t know what the effect is. It is causing concern for us because of the dangers. People think they are legal, they think they are safe. But they aren’t”.

According to the agency’s Kenny Simpson: “There is often no information about the dose. People are taking them in far greater amounts than they should be. You can buy them on the internet and have them delivered to your door. There is no good news around this.”

Meanwhile, the SCDEA said it is using new tactics to disturb the activities of organised criminals. It said it disrupted such groups on 109 occasions in 2011-2012: twice as many as in the previous year.

Forty-two of the interventions were classed as high-level, meaning they had a significant impact on serious criminal activity, the agency says.

The report says 194 people were arrested, 75 of them being the “most harmful and dangerous criminals”.

The SCDEA says it seized 782kg of illicit drugs, said to have a street value of around £18.5 million, over the year period. That included 40kg of cocaine and 100kg of ecstasy.

Deputy Chief Constable Gordon Meldrum, SCDEA director general, said: “We want to ensure that our disruptive activity makes life as difficult as possible for the serious organised crime groups we target. The more we continue to disrupt serious organised crime in this way, the safer 5.2 million people and our economy are from harm.”