High Time We Stopped

MKET, the infinitely annoying street name ‘ROFLCOPTR’ or, for the chemists, methoxetamine, is the new legal high making waves around York. For me though, not the most experimental soul, the idea of a horse tranquillizer swirling around my blood stream has never appealed.

Yet I like to consider myself fairly liberal on drug matters. I’m not adverse to measures promoting cannabis for medical use and with MKET, so I approached the issue with my usual naivety – if it’s legal, why is abusing it any worse than the standard York student’s downing of cheap Willow Sambuca shots, or an office worker’s eight daily cups of coffee?

However, this is exactly the view the distributors of such drugs hope to foster – an ignorant, glamourised perception of what is an exceptionally dangerous and addictive drug. MKET is a few chemical compounds away from MKAT, or mephedrone, a past ‘legal high’ that after a brief craze was banned across the EU at the end of 2010. They both can cause pretty serious hallucinogenic effects for the price of a bottle of vodka. Almost exclusively available online, MKET web distributors have tripled in the last six months.

My basic understanding of human biology tells me snorting or swallowing a chemical labelled “not fit for human consumption”, does not sound like it’s going to produce the best effects, despite the quick high. The experience of students interviewed in York has almost been exclusively negative, and some of worst side effects include horrific teeth grinding, nausea, heart palpitations and, yes, even a risk of death. One or more of these side effects have been felt by over half those who take legal highs according to a UK Addiction survey.

Whilst I haven’t tried MKET, I don’t intend to, I recognise all of us will probably know someone who has or will. Rather slyly, its creator “M.” professed in an interview with hipster site Vice.com that it was an anti-depressant for those with mental or physical scars abandoned by the medical system, an expected lack of moral compass from an underground drug chemist. It is this marketing that worries me most. Often portrayed as a “friendlier” form of ecstasy, or even as a painkiller, such an attribution could not be further from the point.

MKET distributors aim at party-goers and conversely those seeking strong pain relief. Both are guided to purchase with little information about what’s entering their system. A quick Google search yields little but information on how to purchase MKET. Dosage requirements and health warnings are near impossible to find, a particularly worrying absence considering MKET’s inherent potency and heightened risk of overdose.

When something is classified as ‘legal’ it leads to various connotations; safe, principled, protective. None of these phrases can be associated with MKET. Naivety will not suffice, and distributors will keep glamorising this drug until we step up. Whilst we wait with baited breath for reports of the first attributed deaths, I fear the government and those in the know are claiming ignorance of MKET’s obvious human misuses, and not fulfilling their duty of informing people of its inherent dangers and stopping distribution of these ‘legal’ highs once and for all.