A poster on Head Shop drugs by Pierce Kavanagh TCD with Sinead Mc Namara The Drug Treatment Centre Board National Laboratory, et al. which was posted at the Pharmacy Conference held in Belfast at the end of March 2010 won ‘best poster’ at the conference. The poster also won ‘best poster’ at the launch of the Trinity Student Medical Journal (TSMJ) on 29th April 2010.
The Characterization of ‘Legal Highs’ Available from Head Shops in Dublin
P.V. Kavanagh1, S. McNamara2, D. Angelov1, S. McDermott1, D. Mullan1 and S.A. Ryder3
1) Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, School of Medicine, Trinity Centre for Health Sciences, St. James’s Hospital, Dublin 8
2) The Drug Treatment Centre Board (DTCB), Pearse Street, Dublin 2.
3) School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Trinity College, Dublin
“We have successfully characterized some of the most popular legal highs available in Dublin headshops. These products were found to contain the cathinone derivatives mephedrone, methylone, flephedrone, butylone and MDPV. The stimulant caffeine, and local anaesthetics benzocaine and lignocaine, were found in a number of samples. Mephedrone was present in just over one quarter of the samples analysed. This is of concern as media reports have linked this cathinone to several deaths.”
