BBC Panorama: The Battle Against Legal Highs
LETHAL HIGHS
BBC Panorama: The Battle Against Legal Highs can be viewed at the bottom of this page.
Panorama: Northumbria Police’s fight against legal highs to feature on BBC show
The programme, to be aired at 8.30pm on Monday, will follow officers as they take action against those responsible for dealing and using lethal highs
18:00, 23 JAN 2017
Legal highs task force meet at Newcastle City Centre Police Station, examples of confiscated legal highs
Northumbria Police’s battle against legal highs in Newcastle is set to feature on national TV on Monday night.
The Panorama programme, to be shown on BBC 1 at 8.30pm, will follow Insp Nicola Wearing, Sgt Andy Percival and PC Fran Joyce as they take action against those responsible for dealing and using lethal highs in the city.
Last year police formed a task force with partners, including the city council and the NHS, to get a grip on the problem following a spike in reports of crime, disorder and incidents linked to the substances.
Since last year there have been around 17 arrests made for offences connected to legal highs.
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More than £50,000 worth of legal highs have been seized by authorities and a lot of work has taken place with hundreds of known users across the city.
The police say this work has seen a decrease in incidents reported to all emergency services, however efforts remain ongoing to tackle the problem in the city centre.
In May last year, the Psychoactive Substances Act came into force banning the production and supply of legal highs designed for human consumption.
And in October, a Newcastle man became one of the first people in the UK to be prosecuted under the new legislation.
Jack Lockhart
Jack Lockhart, 23, of Bentinck Terrace in the West End, was handed a 12-week community order at Newcastle Magistrates’ Court after pleading guilty to five counts of supplying a psychoactive substance.
He was spotted on CCTV selling the so-called legal high Spice to people at the Old Eldon Square on June 17 – just three weeks after the new law was introduced.
His solicitor said Lockhart simply did not know the law had changed when he was caught and that he was part of a social group of legal high users and he would share or sell to friends if he was in a position to do so.
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However the chairman of the bench said “ignorance of the law is not an excuse” and Lockhart was ordered to carry out 40 hours of unpaid work and undertake 10 days of rehabilitation as part of a 12-week community order.
After the case, Chief Insp Dave Pickett said:
“We take the selling and distributing of lethal highs extremely seriously here in Newcastle and are doing all we can with our partners to get them off our streets and out of our communities.
“We will continue to target people like Jack Lockhart and anyone else responsible for peddling these illegal drugs on Tyneside.”
The new Act does not affect possession of the substances, it only applies to production and supply.
The Battle Against Legal Highs
The drugs that were known as legal highs have become a global phenomenon. They have exploded in popularity in the UK, and deaths from these chemical compounds, designed to mimic illegal drugs like cocaine and cannabis, have tripled here in recent years. In May 2016, the government acted by banning these drugs with the introduction of the Psychoactive Substances Act. The north east of England is one of the worst-hit areas for drug addiction. Panorama spent six months in Newcastle to see how the city is tackling the problem and asks whether the new law is working.
Watch the documentary aired here:
999 What’s Your Emergency – Series 3 Episode 2
This episode follows police and paramedics dealing with the effects of legal highs, from a regular user coughing up blood in a bus stop to a grandad who’s reacted badly to legal highs he bought online
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/999-whats-your-emergency/on-demand/59274-002
