![]() ![]() ![]() But if you want to come off it there’s no detox programme.” He has the face of someone who looks both older and younger than his 37 years.Ī former heroin addict, he pays £25 for a 7g bag of spice – also known as mamba – which will last him a day. “I’m not saying I was an angel before, you know, but it helps,” Roberts said. He started using spice after the cot death of his five-week-old daughter Eva-Rose two years ago. Luke Roberts has been at the camp for a couple of weeks. Spice was sold legally in ‘headshops’ but has now been banned. Then, three weeks ago, amid the furore, one was forced to temporarily close its doors, leaving the users with nowhere to go. Everyone was getting off and on the buses and seeing it.”Īs Wrexham’s problems attracted national attention, complaints were made about the number of spice users congregating outside the town’s drop-in centres. All towns have a spice problem, but in the smaller towns it tends to be concentrated in one area – in this case around the bus station. “We’ve been dealing with spice for two years, but it’s only in the last six months that it’s become a real problem,”says Rowena Gregor, a case manager with the Wrexham branch of Arch, an organisation that helps rehabilitate drug addicts. “Zombie hunting” became a Facebook pastime. A few months ago, pictures of spice users slumped unconscious in the town’s bus station went viral on social media. The latest statistics confirmed last week that deaths from synthetic drugs, of which spice is the most notorious, are on the rise.Īnd Wrexham has found itself at the sharp end of this trend. Ministers and harm-reduction experts clash over what could, or should, be done as the crisis shows no signs of abating. In every town centre, spice users can be found begging for the small amount of loose change they need to buy their next fix. A synthetic substance that emerged only three years ago has already wreaked chaos within the prison service and placed huge pressures on the emergency services. Few drugs have achieved such notoriety in so little time. ![]()
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