Spice outbreaks of altered behaviour in Manchester and Wrexham have hit the headlines. Scare stories and images of so-called zombie–like behaviour (people being completely intoxicated and sometimes frozen in an unresponsive state), have become commonplace. Although these terms sound perjorative, this is not scaremongering – these behavioural changes show the profound impact that new powerful forms of synthetic cannabinoids can have on users. So what is spice, why do we have it, and what can we do to mitigate its possible harms?
Spice is a slang media term for a range of synthetic cannabinoids that have entered the market in recent years. Their use in the UK really started because the last Labour government decided to target cannabis users to gain the anti-drug vote, or at least to show it was “hard on drugs”. Successive Home secretaries from John Reid to Alan Johnson incentivised the police to catch cannabis users, and to urine-test prisoners for cannabis products. As the penalties for conviction were profound, many turned to legal alternatives, the most popular of which were the synthetic cannabinoids. These are man-made compounds that act at the same sites in the brain as cannabis but are often many times as powerful.
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