Legal highs must be stopped!

89.5% of readers on Stuff.co.nz think that legal highs must become illegal and they are right.

A 19 year old girl from Blenheim called Anesha Stratton must wake up three times a night to smoke synthetic cannabis because the so called “Legal High” is so addictive. Anesha Stratton smoked legal highs for less than a year before the habit got out of control in September while she was living in Nelson. She said that she would wake up in the night with hot or cold sweats and she would have to have another smoke so she would stop feeling sick.

Or this 17 year old man named Jesse Murray. Every morning he wakes up on his cardboard mattress and walks the streets going to the nearest legal highs shop and he would spend $25 to $80 a day that he begged for just to buy legal highs. Even though it is illegal for him to purchase it he still gets it's and sometimes the shop employe would give it to him for free out of sympathy. Jesse has been smoking synthetic cannabis for three years. He started because he thought it was "cool". But, by the time he realised how it badly it was affecting him, it was too late. He left his home in Auckland and moved to Christchurch to study pluming but was kicked out because of his habit. "It is killing me," he says. "I don't want to live like this."

So they must be extremely bad if that is coming from the people who take it. But why are they still legal and in shop windows? It is because they can and the makers of these terribly bad substances don’t see that it is bad for you. They also have to test that is safe before it can go on the shelves, so it is not just be the companys that make it but the testers who say it is ok to sell when it is not. Our teenagers are being affected by these people because they can become very violent and also you can lose brain cells, you may have no personality and it will seem like you have no soul.

But there are some places that are cracking down on “Legal Highs” like Hamilton. The Hamilton City Council has been doing a great job of getting rid of these terrible substances. So all of New Zealand must ban legal highs before any more people become addicted like Aneshe Stratton.