Just as it's not advisable to purchase your prescription medications online, it's probably not a good idea to find your drug highs there either. Published in the journal Drug Testing and Analysis, Dr. Mark Baron from the School of Natural and Applied Sciences at the University of Lincoln, U.K., conducted a study in which he purchased seven products over the Internet in order to determine whether the ingredients claimed to be in the products were actually present. Although the products were supposed to be “legal highs,” six out of the seven tablets did not contain the advertised active ingredient, while some even contained controlled substances, which are illegal to sell anywhere.
“These findings show that the legal high market is providing a route to supply banned substances,” says Dr. Baron. “It is clear that consumers are buying products that they think contain specific substances, but that in reality the labels are unreliable indicators of the actual contents.”
Indeed, ACSH's Dr. Josh Bloom thinks this practice is no different from buying street drugs, in that the consumer has no idea what they’re getting. “The latest designer drugs are sometimes new chemical substances that are perfectly legal. This becomes a losing game of catch-up since, by the time one new substance is banned, chemists can easily manufacture a different (and previously unknown) drug that is not yet illegal. Worse still, the newer drugs seem to be significantly more dangerous than their predecessors.”
