There's nothing 'safe' about legal highs

THE Masterton and Carterton District councils have issued their shared policy to restrict the sale of legal highs in their respective districts.

Hang on, I thought we had got rid of this accursed stuff?

Frankly, I've never forgotten the time I picked up a hitchhiker between Featherston and Masterton and he wanted me to stop at the dairies so he could buy some legal highs. He was on his way to his Winz appointment in Masterton and no doubt wanted to make an impression.

It turns out legal highs are banned at the moment, thanks to efforts by Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne, but it is expected the Government will begin issuing licences again this year. Councils, as much as I suspect they'd like to see them gone, can't legitimately stop it from happening. They are not in the business of preventing a law-abiding operation from entering the market. But, in their role in determining land use in their districts, they can at least reasonably restrict their locations.

That will mean, should I pick up another twitchy, unemployed, in-need-of-his-fix hitchhiker (which I won't be), he's not likely to find what he needs from the outlying dairies. In fact, since the zones are restrictive, we're not likely to see a dairy selling them at all.

I believe the material is an abomination because we have seen, over and over again, people being addicted in some weird ways to these chemicals, and doing pretty loopy things.

Time and again, the Government has battled over the reasonable expectation of a retailer to engage in commerce over a "safe" consumer item, against public and police exasperation over the crimes committed, which legal highs have contributed to.

The Government lost patience with them in 2014, taking them all off the shelves until they could be proven safe. Now, they're coming back.

I am confident that "safe" doesn't mean safe at all. What a collection of supposedly benign chemicals will do on paper, and in a laboratory, or even with animals, doesn't mean a jot when introduced to an angry human being with a complex agenda and culture. I suspect we'll see these stores back, legal high-related crime will go up, and this stuff will be shelved, once and for all.