Risk of nervous damage, death

Dubai: The narcotic ‘Spice’ is known among young addicts as ‘manufactured hashish’. The substance belongs to the category ‘Synthetic Cannabinoids’ or ‘Cannabimimetics’, which includes around 200 others.

The impact of this drug is greater than traditional drugs as it can cause serious damage to the central nervous system.

The drug resembles a dark-coloured herb and can lead to death, if reports in the United States are anything to go by. It can also trigger delirium, hallucination, confusion, laughter, abnormal behaviour, fits or convulsions, and inability to estimate distances.

Synthetic Cannabinoids were produced for pharmaceutical researches at the beginning of the 80s in order to discover the relation between the chemical composition of drugs and receptor activity of the brain.

It has also been produced in pharmaceutical factories and universities as a substance for scientific research but seems to have found its way to laboratories in China and Europe, where they were promoted as an alternative to cannabis.