A heartbroken sibling has taken to Facebook to share the devastating story of how she has lost two brothers to legal highs.
Melanie Downie from Kilnirnie, in the UK, explains in the post that two of her brothers were afflicted with an addiction to legal highs. Her brother died within three years of each other.
Melanie explains that the drugs are marketed as legal safe highs but they can be deadly when abused.
“Easily available on the internet and delivered straight to your door or from dozens of shops on any main street, marketed as safe and fun, cheap and completely legal, ” she writes.
“With fancy names such as Cherry Bomb, Pandora’s Bo, and China White, don’t they seem so safe, so fun, so attractive?
“These manufacturers should be prosecuted. The websites hosting these pages should be held accountable. Kids and young people up and down the country are dying from drugs you can buy online. How many more families have to go through this?”
According to The Daily Record, recorded deaths from legal highs have more than tripled in the last two years.
Continuing her post, Melanie urges people not to judge addicts but to instead recognise addiction as a disease.
“Please don’t look down on anyone and think, oh there’s another ‘Junkie’ the next time you see someone struggling with addiction. It’s been a long, long time since drugs was a class thing. You’ve no idea what life has thrown at any person with addiction, no one is born an addict. No one chooses to be one.
“Addiction chose Simon and William. It chewed them up and spat them out.”
The heartbroken sister further states that pathology tests cannot recognize the drugs in post-mortem tests.
“Pathology can’t pick up the many, forever changing compounds of the drugs, they’re new to their systems and the final results come out negative to drug use. We know that William was using NRG3 in the hours before his death, there’s video evidence of him walking ‘highly inebriated’ yet NOTHING at all showed in his pathology report. Long-term psychotic episodes and delusional thoughts are one of the many side effects and something that William and Simon suffered greatly with. It’s debilitating for families to watch” she says.
Melanie concludes by urging officials to crack down on legal highs.
Read the post in full below.
