Mephadrone - When will the craze stop?

Whilst tidying the flat on Friday for our flat inspection this coming weekend, I came across a poster our halls’ staff had put under everyone’s door. Like most flyers shoved under our doors, it got ignored for a while until one of our cleaner flatmates decided to pick them all up only for us to, at some point, drop them on the floor again.

This one was different though. It wasn’t advertising the next best wannabe rap/grime superstar to hit Orange Rooms, neither was it advertising cheap snakebites or the like at Walkabout, or cliché fancy dress nights out in Lava. This one, personally written by our halls’ staff (the guys in charge basically), informed us all of the dangers of mephadrone...seemingly because we weren’t aware enough already, thanks to the mass media.

Interestingly, it listed the many positive effects of taking the horse tranquiliser, including giddiness and an immediate sense of happiness for the user. To be honest, whilst reading it, I questioned what the hell the people at my halls were thinking – so far, this advert had only got me interested in taking the stuff, and I’m guessing that, as an authoritive body, this isn’t exactly what they were aiming for.

Underneath this jumble of words lay the gold-dust they were trying to shove down our throats. The list of side-effects to mephadrone was longer than my parent’s shopping list, with nausea, constant dizziness and headaches only being three of the mildest. I’ve heard stories of people whose feet have actually turned purple, with veins in their body prominently throbbing blue – not exactly healthy by any means – yet for some reason these extreme cases were withheld, for now.

If authoritive bodies such as our halls’ staff, club reps, hell even national newspaper editors desperately trying to prove that mephadrone can be directly linked with death, actually want students to stop taking the drug, then don’t sugar coat it. If you want something done, you do it the easy way. Shove your message forcefully down every student’s alcohol-induced throat until it gets through, because right now all the messages we’re hearing of the drug only raises the appeal of the powder to us naive lot.

After listing all these side-effects to the drug, the letter then had the liberty to say how a student could get away with possessing the stuff. The preferred reading of the letter probably would have been along the lines of ‘this drug is illegal, and if the police find that you’re possessing the stuff, you will live to regret it’. But instead, I read ‘if I tell the police it’s for my horse, and not for human consumption, then I can legally carry it. Go me’.

There needs to be a serious crackdown on the use and possession of mephadrone quickly, else the craze is only going to increase even more. Sure, a few people have died from over-dosing severely on the drug (by this, meaning constant consumption over more than 12 hour periods in which time two to three grams of the white stuff has been snorted), but with three out of the thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of students taking the stuff dead from taking the drug, many students will happily take such a risk.