New Psychoactive Substances
sylweddau-seicoweithredol-newyddNew Psychoactive Substances (also called NPS, or ‘Legal Highs’) was a name given to a huge range of different types of drugs that were not covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act. These were often ‘New’ in that they were drugs that were deliberately produced with slight chemical variations to the range of traditional illegal drugs as a way of getting around the law. The government spent the best part of a decade bringing hundreds of these drugs into the Misuse of Drugs Act, but every time they did this a new variant would appear that was often more potent and more dangerous. In 2016 the Government introduced the Psychoactive Substances Act, that effectively closed all the shops and UK based websites selling these drugs. While the use of some of these substances disappeared, some like synthetic cannabinoids (‘Spice’) continued to be sold in prisons and among street populations. And for other drugs covered by the Act such as Nitrous Oxide, there was very little difference in the number of people who used them.
