Explore teen substance use trends over time, by grade and substance with an interactive chart featuring Monitoring the Future data from to present. If a friend is using drugs, you might have to step away from the friendship for a while. It is important to protect your own mental health and not put yourself in situations where drugs are being used. This lesson, provides scientific information about teen brain development and the effect of drugs and alcohol use on the brain.
These community activities are designed to help students in grades 6 through 12 learn about the effects of drug use Content on this site is available for your use and may be reproduced in its entirety without permission from NIDA. Department of Health and Human Services. National Institutes of Health. What is Spice? Expand All What happens to your brain when you use Spice? What happens to your body when you use Spice? Can you overdose or die if you use Spice?
Is Spice addictive? Withdrawal symptoms can include: headaches anxiety depression irritability. How many teens use Spice? The combination is then dried, packaged and sold as either incense or smoking mixtures. JWH is now a controlled substance in many countries under narcotics legislation.
But the prevalence of next-generation synthetic cannabinoids — now known colloquially as Spice or Mamba — continue to be the largest group of new psychoactive substances NPS in common usage. As of December , 14 different sub-families of cannabinoid agonists have been identified — indicating that there are potentially hundreds of these types of substances circulating via the internet and often across international borders.
Different brands of smoking mixtures can have very different effects, but the strength of a specific brand appears to owe more to the ratio of cannabinoids to chemically inactive plant material in the mixture, rather than the variation in the chemical structure of compounds themselves. In other words, the specific type of chemical in the mixture is less important than how much chemical there is compared to what has been put in to provide bulk. Some people experience difficulty breathing, rapid heart rate, and shakes and sweats, all of which can lead to a severe panic attacks.
At higher doses, balance and coordination can be severely affected. Users can experience a loss of feeling and numbness in their limbs, nausea, collapse and unconsciousness. Spice is made in China and imported to the UK by criminal gangs, who dissolve the powder in acetone and spray it on to herbal matter such as damiana. The volatile solvent evaporates, leaving the plant matter infused and ready to smoke. The chaos seen in city centres in recent years, with smokers sprawled out on benches or paralysed on pavements, was caused because batches of the drug vary wildly in strength and content: one might contain a mix, while another could be as high as — meaning a single draw on a joint might incapacitate users instantly.
Solutions to the spice phenomenon exist, but they require dedication, money, and innovative thinking. The only innovation in recent years was a suggestion by police and the Home Office to reclassify spice from class C to class A, thereby further criminalising an already marginalised and vulnerable group: fining and jailing spice-drunk beggars, like a Hogarth print for the 21st century. An essential first step to addressing the problem would be extensive investment in supported housing, and the reinstatement of cancelled drug treatment services.
While heroin and benzodiazepenes, also often taken by street homeless users, have a formalised detox pathway, spice and other drug users should be offered residential rehab, with counselling and support to help them understand and break their cycles of use.
The use of spice is not due to some some individualised moral failing on the part of the users. If it were, its use would be seen at every stratum of society.
It is, rather, a natural and inevitable — indeed rational — response to a systemic failure in social care and drugs laws, with poverty at the ultimate root. Spice is the attempted solution to a problem most of us will never consider: how can I get through yet another day with nothing to do and no hope of change? Mike Power is a freelance journalist specialising in drugs, science and technology and the author of Drugs 2. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, catch up on our best stories or sign up for our weekly newsletter.
This article is more than 2 years old. Mike Power.
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