OPINION
Grim repercussions Banning all new psychoactive drugs – so-called legal highs – will put users at greater risk and hamper brain research, warns David Nutt A BLANKET ban on legal highs is now on the cards in the UK. Cue cheers from campaigners who say that newly devised psychoactive substances can be lethal, and that the “head shops” selling them are reviled by communities in the way sex shops used to be. At the core of the campaign for a ban is the repeated claim that legal highs killed over 90 people in the UK in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. DrugScience, an independent committee I set up, showed this to be false, revealing many drugs involved in this claim were illegal. Campaigners are aware of this but continue to use the figure – which suggests this parody of the quote often attributed to Disraeli: “There are lies, damned lies and legal high statistics.” To base a new law on untruths is unpalatable at best and dishonest at worst. Moreover, an ill-considered law
could create greater harm to users and the scientific community. How might the proposed ban increase the dangers of legal highs? If head shops shut, people will turn to street dealers and the internet. Neither has the same relationship with customers as shopkeepers, so vital education and guidance on harm reduction will diminish. A blanket ban on new psychoactive substances could also seriously hamper UK pharmaceutical research into brain disorder treatments. Such work is already shrinking, and another regulatory hurdle could run it into the sand: would new antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs be hit by the ban? Scientific societies must warn of unintended outcomes. In any event, bans don’t stop deaths. Illegal opioids such as heroin kill around 1200 people in
Light warfare Reagan dreamed big, but thankfully laser weapons are a smaller reality, says Jeff Hecht HAVE laser weapons finally arrived, three decades after US president Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” anti-missile dream? Sort of. You can watch a US navy laser blow up explosives on a boat and destroy a drone on YouTube. Yet the laser is still a prototype, not a field-hardened weapon. And it is a lot less potent than 24 | NewScientist | 13 June 2015
nuclear missile strike, tipping the cold war balance. Back then, the navy already had a ground-based laser called MIRACL that generated a 1-megawatt infrared beam for a few seconds by burning vast quantities of chemical fuel. The aim was to adapt it for space and put dozens of lasers in orbit. Each would generate a 5-megawatt beam to destroy a missile up to a few thousand kilometres away. Such weapons would have been 50 times more powerful than
Reagan believed possible. The new weapons can destroy rockets, mortar rounds, small boats and drones a few kilometres away. The Pentagon imagines using them against weapons “The logistics of putting launched by insurgents, and massive lasers and to defend cities and ships. chemical fuel tanks in It’s a far cry from Reagan’s goal in 1983: to thwart an all-out Soviet space were ignored”
those shown on YouTube, and their targets were a thousand times more distant. The logistics of putting massive lasers and chemical fuel tanks in space were ignored. Other options, such as nuclear bomb-driven X-ray lasers, were considered, but the end of the cold war in the early 1990s finally doomed Star Wars. At that time fears emerged that rogue states might be able to launch a nuclear missile. The US responded with Star Wars lite – the Airborne Laser programme, in which a megawatt-class laser was put in a jumbo jet. With fewer targets and better chemical lasers, it looked more plausible. But even