Highlights of this issue

Abstract

Highlights of this issue (Not so) legal highs?There's been a zombie outbreak in Gotham City.Before you yell for Batman, the culprit is a novel psychoactive substance ('legal high' to use the incorrect but problematically enduring term) called 'AK-47' that is causing a bizarre intoxication profile in consumers: Kaleidoscope (pp.237-238) investigates the rise of the ultra-potent cannabinoids.Meanwhile Matthew Nour and Robin Carhart-Harris (pp.177-179) evoke a sense of oceanic boundlessness in a mesmerising editorial on psychedelics and the science of self-experience.This class of drug is fascinating on many levels, having been used as entheogens in spiritual practice by human cultures for millennia, and producing a unique range of altered states of consciousness with a -relatively -low side-effect profile.In a return to their 1960s countercultural zenith, interest is renewing in their therapeutic potential and what they can tell us about the neuroscience of the self.Somewhere in an alternative dimension, Sasha Shulgin is smiling benignly.Drug use -licit or illicit -and its acceptance or otherwise is largely sanctioned on societal and political grounds rather than being based on any scientific evidence of harms -think alcohol.Corrigan et al (pp.180-181) explore the stigmas of different addiction types, provoking us to recognise how, unlike mental illness more generally, discrimination against those with addictions can be legal and indeed authorised for use in health campaigns and as part of self-stigma in treatment programmes.They challenge whether it is acceptable to use stigma as a public health tool.Their argument about stigma in substance misuse is very clear: stop it.