How the drug war creates more drugs

By Patrick Gallahue, Global Drug Policy Program, Open Society Foundations

There has been an explosion of so-called ‘legal highs’ in recent years and their production shows no signs of abating. As legislative responses— that often consisting of new laws banning these substances— have started, the report Towards a Safer Drug Policy: Challenges and Opportunities arising from ‘legal highs’, made by a group of lawmakers, reveals that this proscriptive impulse may be driving the creation of even more synthetic drugs.

Manufacturers of these drugs (the majority of which are marijuana substitutes) produce them to bypass existing proscriptive drug laws. But once the new substance is banned, chemists get to work to produce newer, possibly even more dangerous drugs, according to a new report by the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform.

The group of lawmakers suggests that the UK government study alternative policies.

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