High alert for synthetic drugs

THEY'RE cheap, they're widely available and some are even legal. Why police, politicians, parents and medicos fear the scourge of synthetic drugs.

Henry Kwan Funeral

STEPHEN Kwan greets me at the door of his immaculate apartment overlooking the manicured spreads of Killara, on Sydney's north shore. I remove my shoes and he ushers me into a large, open living space where a priest is sitting at the dining table with a folder of forms.

"Should we use his Chinese name, Yi-Heng, for the service, rather than Henry?" the priest asks. "That's what you christened him - much more personal, don't you think?" "Yes, yes, that would be very nice," replies Stephen. "Thank you," he bows. The priest leaves and the businessman and I settle down on the couch to talk about how, a week earlier, his 17-year-old son had dived head-first to his death from the third-floor balcony just behind us.

On that awful day, June 5, Stephen was in Taiwan - he works for a company that supplies waste-water treatments to mines. That afternoon his wife, Vanessa, collected Henry and his little sister Michelle, 14, from Killara High School. His mum and sister were going shopping and Henry asked if they could pick him up some sushi for dinner. When they left he was sitting calmly at his desk, studying. Henry was in his final year and apart from being popular, he was one of the school's brightest students, a likely dux who spoke six languages fluently. He was born in Taiwan but, having lived in Singapore prior to the family moving to Australia four years ago, he had no trouble with English - in fact, English was his best subject and he talked of becoming a lawyer, or possibly a doctor.

Henry knew he had to work hard to get the marks for university and for a few days he'd been feeling ill and was worried he might be falling behind in his studies for the HSC in October. He didn't like to take medication and preferred natural herbal remedies, his dad says. Nevertheless, a mate at school allegedly sold him a drug another kid had bought over the internet. There was some talk around the schoolyard that this could help with study and his parents believe this is why he took the substance. He may well have been experimenting, as teenagers do, seeking some relief from the demands of study and teenage life. It seems an odd place and time - at home, alone - to knowingly take a hallucinogen. But even the smartest 17-year-olds can make dumb decisions.

The horror began when his mother and sister returned an hour or so later. Henry rushed to greet them at the door, talking at a million miles an hour. He had no appetite for sushi and went back into his room and closed the door. Sometime later they heard loud noises coming from the room and rushed in to find Henry smashing bottles on the floor. His distressed mother ordered him to stop. He got up, walked around and vomited outside his room, and Vanessa angrily asked him: "Why didn't you vomit in the toilet? Clean it up." He sloshed about on the tiles with a cloth, incapable of the task. His mother put him in the shower and Henry said, "Mum, I am so sorry, I have taken something." She had no idea what this meant. "Please call father in Taiwan so I can apologise for what I have done," he pleaded. Even in his psychotic state, he was ashamed.

Henry got out, dried himself, put on his clothes and then took them off again. He sat watching TV on the floor, rocking back and forth in the foetal position. Suddenly he got up and exclaimed, "I want to fly. I want to fly." He ran out to the balcony with his mother and sister in pursuit. There was a tense stand-off, and a struggle, which brought neighbours to their windows. "My wife tried to grab him by the foot and my daughter grabbed him by the arm," Stephen tells me, glancing in distress at the balcony. "He bit his sister - he didn't even recognise her. And then he just ... he landed on his head."

Police say Henry had taken 25I-NBOMe, known as an N-Bomb, a hallucinogen 25 times more potent than LSD and something that his parents - and most of Australia - had never heard of. It is among a slew of new drugs that have found their way into Australia over the past three years, sold legally via the internet or over the counter. It has prompted emergency doctors to report an alarming increase in patients who've taken the substances presenting with extreme paranoia and organ failure. "Oh, for the good old days of heroin and cocaine," one told me. "At least then we knew what we were dealing with and how to treat it."

The Queensland Coroner recently alerted health authorities to a link between synthetic cannabis and four deaths, including two teenage fatalities in the past month. In NSW, synthetic drugs have been associated with at least three deaths and another has been reported in South Australia. Federal politicians have been hastily playing catch-up with a new interim ban on the sale of 19 drugs through sex shops and tobacconists. In NSW, Fair Trading officers identified 1044 stores thought to be selling "legal highs".

But new synthetic drugs are coming on to the market at an unprecedented rate - the UN identified 33 new substances in Australia in the first half of last year. It issued a special warning about the rapid spread of synthetic drugs, noting that new formulations are outpacing international controls. "The international drug control system is floundering for the first time under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon."

Here, senior police say they are operating in a legal minefield. "When we get to court it's a case of chemists at 10 paces," one said of the battle to determine if a substance is illegal. "We can't legally seize a drug unless we have a reasonable suspicion it is an illegal substance and that is almost impossible to know. We are not even lawfully entitled to ask them to volunteer it so we can test it."

Underlying all this is a seismic shift in the way drugs are distributed in this country. Traditional illicit drugs like heroin and cocaine pass through a long distribution chain - from grower or manufacturer to exporter to importer to distributor to upper-level dealer to street dealer and finally consumer. The drugs are smuggled in relatively large quantities and there's an identifiable criminal enterprise for police to focus on. This has made those drugs expensive.

With synthetic drugs, that model is obsolete and cost is no longer a barrier. When 21-year-old Taylor, a science and biotechnology student from Brisbane, wants drugs to enhance his dancing at a music festival, he doesn't hassle his dealer; he sits at his computer and emails a chemical company in China. A gram of the drug, which is not illegal in China and may or may not be legal here, arrives in the post a week later and costs him $30, which is more than enough for a night of partying for Taylor and four or five mates. There's not a middle man in sight.

Just as call centres and accounts departments have moved offshore for the cost savings, so has the sale and distribution of these new drugs. The N-Bomb that led Henry Kwan to believe he could fly arrived in an envelope from China for less than the cost of a stubby of VB, about $1.50. The school kid who imported it sold it to one of Henry's classmates for $5; the classmate allegedly sold it to Henry for $10. The boy who sold the tab to Henry, allegedly marketing it as LSD, an illegal substance, has been charged with supplying a prohibited drug. The schoolboy who ordered it over the internet has not been charged with any offence because he on-sold the drug as an N-Bomb, which is not in itself an illegal substance - although it will soon to be added to the list. "We could have busted someone with 100kg of the stuff and there's not a thing we could have done about it," Superintendent Rob Critchlow, the police commander for Sydney's North Shore, tells me. Welcome to the brave new drug world.

One of Australia's most senior drug detectives, the NSW Drug Squad chief Detective Superintendent Nick Bingham, says this new offshore distribution model, run over the internet, is virtually impossible to police. "We don't actively target users," he says. "We might go to music festivals and find users, but our priority is to target the suppliers." The problem is that the supplier is most likely an industrial chemist in a factory in China who, under Chinese law, has committed no offence. In Henry Kwan's case, police believe the supply chain involved an industrial chemist, the postal service and two school kids.

Synthetic drugs began appearing in about 2010 with the arrival of synthetic cannabinoids, which mimic the effects of cannabis. Bingham says the compounds had been discovered 40 or 50 years ago and "someone thought they'd have a crack" at distributing them as legal highs to circumvent drug laws around the world. Synthetic drugs mimicking the effects of cocaine, ecstasy and LSD followed soon after - all of it, at first, legal as the law played catch-up. Sex shops, desperate for a new business model due to the loss of pornography sales to the internet, became one of the main over-the-counter suppliers, along with tobacconists and even service stations. Within three years, the sale of synthetic drugs over the counter had gone from zero to an industry estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Parallel to this has been the slow and steady growth of the internet trade, direct from the producer to consumer. The drugs, particularly the cannabinoids, have proven popular with workers in industries such as mining, as they rarely show up in workplace drug tests.

Bingham says police have no real handle on the size of the synthetic market - up until this point it's been largely legal and has not been assigned resources - but he estimates it is still only a fraction of the traditional illicit market, where marijuana is the number one drug, followed by speed and ice, ecstasy, heroin and the abuse of prescription medications.

The effect of these old drugs on humans is well known, but scientists know little about what synthetic drugs do to the human body and brain. Iain McGregor, professor of psychopharmacology at the University of Sydney, has been watching the arrival of these new drugs with interest and alarm. "I remember when some of these things were developed 20 years ago. Occasionally we'd think, 'My God, I wonder what this would do to a human, because look what it does to rats'." The new drugs are often much more potent than the drugs they are supposed to mimic; some synthetic cannabinoids are 100 times more powerful than marijuana. "Natural cannabis tends to tickle the receptors," McGregor says, "whereas the synthetic cannabinoids tend to bash them." It's the difference between drinking a schooner of beer or a schooner of straight vodka.

Last year, authorities in Europe identified 73 new synthetic drugs appearing on the market. This year there will probably be around 120 and next year possibly 200. All of these drugs will be available in Australia, via the internet, and most will slip past any laws: as one substance is banned, a new, altered version quickly takes its place. "What really concerns me is how long before something really, really nasty comes along," the professor says. Already they've noticed that some of the cannabinoids have had their structures altered through the addition of fluorine, which has been linked to severe kidney damage and even birth defects. "So what if there is one like thalidomide - how long will it take us to realise that?"

McGregor's department is setting up an early warning system, testing the new drugs' toxicology and publishing the results on the internet. It also hopes to conduct a study where users bring in their synthetic drugs to be analysed; the user's urine would be tested to see how the drug is broken down. One of the problems with the prohibition approach, McGregor says, is that the number of new compounds "is infinite - it's Hydra-like, you chop off one head and up pop another two". When substances such as marijuana or ecstasy are banned, often a more potent and dangerous substance takes its place.

McGregor refers to a New Zealand trial where the onus will be on retailers to prove the synthetic drugs they are selling are non-toxic. He believes it is better to have some sort of regulated market than a free-for-all over the internet. "Otherwise, who takes the blame for that poor kid who jumped off the balcony after taking a synthetic hallucinogen?" The New Zealand approach has been rejected by state and federal governments, which have opted for a hardline prohibitionist approach. In Queensland, legislation has been passed to "make the possession, sale or trafficking of any substance with an intended similar effect to a dangerous drug a criminal offence" - a broad definition that the state's law society says presents a legal ambiguity.

One of the men leading the charge in this fresh battle in the war against drugs is a young, enthusiastic NSW Liberal MP, Dominic Perrottet. He headed a recent NSW inquiry into synthetic drugs that led to a consumer ban on certain over-the-counter synthetic drugs in NSW and prompted the federal government to follow suit. "The problem with these drugs being available over the counter and legal is that it implies that they are safe," Perrottet tells me. "So you are getting school kids thinking it is OK to take these drugs. There will always be drugs in society but we, as law-makers, need to ensure that as many people as possible don't go down that path."

Perrottet is certain the tragic death of Henry Kwan will deter many young people from taking synthetic drugs. Prohibition, he insists, is working and a tough, zero-tolerance message, backed by proper rehabilitation programs, is needed to send "a serious message, particularly to young people, they shouldn't go near this stuff".

But will young people listen? In 1995, a pretty, 15-year-old girl called Anna Wood, who lived not far from Henry Kwan on Sydney's North Shore, died after taking ecstasy with friends - she overheated and drank too much water. It was a death that received blanket media coverage for weeks and led to tough talk by politicians and a raft of new laws to stamp out the scourge of ecstasy. Police hastily formed task forces to target dealers and users and officers with sniffer dogs began conducting regular raids on dance parties and clubs.

But to what end? In 1995, the year Wood died, 2 per cent of Australians had tried the drug, according to the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. In just three years, by 1998, that figure had more than doubled to 4.8 per cent, and by 2010 it had more than doubled again to 10.2 per cent. Under the government's tough stance ecstasy use increased by 500 per cent, a vast criminal enterprise grew fat on the profits and 2.2 million Australians failed to heed to warnings.

Last year, the man former prime minister John Howard entrusted to lead his Tough on Drugs policy, former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer, conceded prohibition had been an abject failure and that new approaches were needed. A liberalisation of drug policy in places such as Switzerland and Portugal had achieved many benefits with no serious adverse effects, he said. "In Australia the police are better resourced than ever, better trained than ever, more effective than ever and yet their impact on the drug trade, on any objective measurement, has been minimal," the veteran policeman said. "It's time the community and its leaders had the courage to look at this issue with fresh eyes."

Maybe the old rheumy-eyed approach will work this time and banning over-the-counter sales will send a message to the public, to our children, that these drugs are dangerous and the synthetic drug fad will fade largely into oblivion. Or maybe the trade will migrate even further to the internet, making it "virtually impossible to police".

Taylor, the 21-year-old student from Brisbane - one of a number of regular synthetic drug users I spoke to for this article - says the death of Henry Kwan and the banning of over-the-counter drug sales will have no effect on him. He and his mates will continue to consume synthetic drugs. "It was really unfortunate, horrible, what happened to him - but he didn't know what he was doing," he says. "You always need people around you that can help you out."

Taylor and his friends are "part of a boutique market for informed users" known as psychonauts, who order specific drugs for a specific effect for a particular event, be it a music festival or a round of wacky golf. He says he has tried at least 15 different types of synthetic drugs, has yet to suffer any adverse effects and has mostly had an "amazing time". The cost is negligible, even for a student - less than $10 per person when a one-gram bag is split between friends. Taylor researches the effects of the drugs through internet forums, avoiding those that have been given bad ratings by other users. He insists on receiving a chemical analysis of the drug before purchase. He says he buys his drugs from the same reputable companies that supply universities with chemicals and compounds for scientific research. "They are not contaminated, like if you bought it off the street."

The psychonauts follow a strict code where they ingest a small amount of the drug at first to gauge any adverse effects, and then slowly build up to taking more - and they have an absolute no-injection policy. Whether or not this will protect Taylor against "a really nasty one" is unknowable. And he has no fear whatsoever of getting caught. "Basically, the machine they use at Customs only has a small database of compounds it can test - so obviously that limits its capabilities," he says. Besides, most of the stuff he is taking is so new it is not illegal. "I've never ever heard of anyone being busted or prosecuted, to be honest," he says. "I mean, I don't see why we should either - it is the job of police to deal with problems in society and I can't see how we are causing any." Drugs are something he does once a month for fun. "I've got plenty of other things to do in my life - I never let it affect anything else I want to do."

This is the dilemma that policymakers have always faced - the vast majority of people who take drugs are not addicts and are otherwise law-abiding citizens. For these users, the testimony of their friends and their own experiences have proved a more powerful message than "just say no to drugs". They view the horror stories, such as the deaths of Henry Kwan and Anna Wood, as terrible events - but it doesn't equate to their own experiences.

Of course, things can and do go wrong, as Dr Kate Sellors, a doctor who specialises in toxicology at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital, knows only too well. Sellors started seeing patients suffering the effects of synthetic drugs about 18 months ago and in the past year has seen about one a month - small numbers compared to prescription and illicit drug abuse and alcohol. Still, she is very concerned with the emergence of these new drugs. "It is very difficult for us because it is an unknown quantity," she says. "Someone might come in with a packet of something they have smoked or ingested and we have absolutely no idea what it is. We are unable to detect it in our routine drug scanning, which is why users like them because they will not be detected through workplace drug tests."

The symptoms, particularly for those who have taken synthetic stimulants, include profound agitation, super-human violence, organ failure and extremely high temperatures. In one case, the patient died. That man was Glenn Punch, a 44-year-old truck driver from the NSW Central Coast. In October last year he and his girlfriend, Rachael Hickel, 42, purchased synthetic LSD from a sex shop. It was marketed as a bath salt called "Smokin Slurrie". "I thought because it was herbal it was safe," Hickel says.

Punch, an interstate truck driver, planned to spend the weekend partying on the drug with his girlfriend before driving to Adelaide with a load of steel on the Monday. He knew the drug would not show up if his urine were ever tested. Punch was not a novice drug user and had injected amphetamines in the past, according to Hickel, "but not on a regular basis". On the Sunday morning, he parked the truck outside a metal works at Tomago, near Newcastle, where he was to pick up his load the following day. He and Hickel used the drug over the previous two days and each time the amounts had increased. Hickel tells me that while Punch had injected the drug, she had only snorted it, but on the Sunday morning she decided she too would inject. "It was all done under the name of fun and it was for 10 minutes, and then it turned into a horror movie," she says.

Soon after being injected she became boiling hot and took her shirt off, opened the door of the truck and lit a smoke. Then she fell out and smashed her face on the ground. Her boyfriend tried to help her, picking her up and running in circles saying, "Baby, baby I love you." He then ran off in one direction, naked, and she in another. She ran madly through a caravan park in her bra, bashing on doors, and out onto the highway, where ambulance officers eventually tackled her and restrained her. "I thought they were kidnapping me," she says.

Meanwhile, her boyfriend had jumped a fence and attacked a security guard, who had come to investigate the commotion. In his mania he had a cardiac arrest. Passers-by administered CPR until the arrival of the ambulance. They managed to get his heart started and he was later flown to Sydney. Doctors tried desperately to save his life but his temperature soared and his kidneys and liver failed. His brain swelled and when it had nowhere left to expand it squeezed down into his neck and cut off its blood supply.

Sellors was on duty the day they brought Punch into the emergency ward. She expects to see more like him and says recent moves by governments to clamp down on the sale of synthetic drugs will have little effect. "My general take on the whole thing is that people are pretty innovative when they want to get their hands on drugs. Perhaps educating the public that they are not herbs and they are not safe may help."

Stephen Kwan said something similar as he led me to the door, away from the balcony where his son jumped to his death. "My family didn't have any experience of this. Maybe the death of my son can help others. Education is very, very important," says Stephen, who is already speaking at community drug forums to other parents. "We need to let young people know these drugs are very dangerous. We also need to educate the family; if their children take these drugs call an ambulance. Lock away knives. Get help. Don't leave it until it's too late." He shakes my hand, bows deeply and then closes the door to be alone with his shattered family.