Deadly drugs on the market stall in Shropshire
It's mid afternoon in a busy market, and folk are milling around looking for bargains. There is a bit of a queue at the cake stall, and children's toys are being sold a few feet away.
"All right mate, got any Mamba?" our reporter asks the man behind the counter of a tobacco stall.
"Black Mamba? Yeah, £10 a gram," he replies, as he delves into a box at the back of the stall. A small green sachet is passed over the rack of clay pipes, and our man heads off for a coffee sponge cake.
Black Mamba is a brand of synthetic cannabis, which the Government banned in 2012 – only for the suppliers to get round the law by varying the recipe slightly.
A blanket ban on all so-called "legal highs" was announced in the Queen's Speech, and in future, anybody caught supplying it is likely to face up to seven years in prison. But at the moment, these substances are freely available – perfectly legally.
"They don't know what they are selling," says Charlotte Delo, of Hadley, Telford, whose brother Jamie Penn died last year after taking the then-legal stimulant 4,4-DMAR, which he bought from a woman in Shrewsbury.
"If they looked into it a bit more, they wouldn't sell it. They wouldn't want their son or daughter taking it," she adds.
4,4-DMAR was outlawed in March this year, the month after an inquest heard how Mr Penn suffered a horrific death, shaking and foaming at the mouth, after the drug reacted with ecstasy he had taken earlier on.
But in the same way as the makers of Black Mamba got round the law by making small changes to the recipe, there are plenty of businesses offering to supply new forms of drugs which promise a similar experience.
The internet is awash with companies offering all manner of tablets, powders and smoking products, claiming to offer similar effects to controlled substances.
Mrs Delo, who now tours schools giving talks to teenagers about the dangers of legal highs, believes the synthetic drugs are actually more dangerous than the illegal substances they seek to emulate.
"They are only legal because they keep getting round the laws," she says. "I have got a friend who works in a prison, and they are going around there," she says.
"They say it is three times stronger than normal cannabis, they have got more drugs in them, and they are more dangerous because they are so easy to get hold of."
This belief is backed up by the recent annual Global Drug Survey, which surveys thousands of drug users on their experiences. It reported that users of synthetic cannabis were seven times more likely to need hospital treatment than users of the natural forms of the drug.
Certainly, Black Mamba, which is usually smoked with tobacco in a hand-rolled cigarette, has been the scourge of the prison service in recent months.
A report earlier this year revealed that paramedics were regularly being called out to jails to take inmates to hospital, leading to the coining of the term "Mambalance".
Prisoners can pass the drug off as rolled tobacco and it cannot be picked up in routine drug tests.
One prisoner, on remand at HMP Forest Bank near Manchester, said some of the users were "going down like flies".
"Guys are taking it and having psychotic episodes all over the place," he said. "Ambulances are coming in and out of the place more frequently than the escort vans."
According to the packet, Black Mamba is made up of two drugs, STS-135 and N(adamantan-1-yl)-1-(5-fluoropentyl)-1h-indole-3-carboxamide, with marshmallow and "a blend of natural and synthetic extracts and fragrances".
And by labelling the drugs as "unsuitable for human consumption", Mrs Delo says many of the suppliers are able to get away with adding all sorts of substances.
"They have been known to include drain cleaner, rat poison, carp pellets, plant foods, all sorts of poisonous stuff," she says.
Many of the suppliers get round the law by actually labelling their products as plant food or incense products.
According to the label of the Black Mamba packet we bought on the market stall, the product is distributed by a London-based company called Gloryal Ltd. A man who answered the telephone number on the packet declined to answer any questions over the telephone, but said he would respond to an email. No response has yet been received.
Gloryal says its products are sold for research purposes only. According to records at Companies House, Gloryal was formed in March last year, and has yet to file any accounts.
Mrs Delo, who will be a guest speaker at a drugs conference in Oakengates in September, says education will play an important role in preventing the dangers. Perhaps surprisingly, she says that when she visits schools the teenagers are very receptive to the message.
By Mark Andrews
