How long is this particular piece of string?

One thing that was very conspicuous in its absence during the recent media frenzy over mephedrone was any real acknowledgement of either the scale of the trade, or how legitimately it was being operated. Quite unexpectedly, though, Hansard's transcription of Parliamentary business revealed what could be counted as a useful and interesting proxy in the form of a written answer to a question put by the Conservative Enfield Southgate MP David Burrowes:

Import Duties: Mephedrone
Mr. Burrowes: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much has been collected in import duty on mephedrone in each of the last three years. [325798]

Mr. Timms: Mephedrone is listed as a Home Office controlled drug. Import consignments of mephedrone will have been entered under commodity codes 293299 85 90 (prior to 1 January 2009) and 293299 00 90 (from 1 January 2009).

The information requested is set out in the following table. Imported mephedrone attracts an import duty rate of 6.5 per cent.

Import duty collected on consignments of mephedrone (£)
2007 - 174,900.06
2008 - 158,546.69
2009 - 250,857.43

[Source: ''Hansard'', 7 April 2010]

Not surprisingly, this information didn't go entirely un-noticed by the press, with The Sun reporting a few days later:

Government makes £2m profit on meow
THE taxman has made £2million from deadly drug meow meow, it emerged yesterday.

Import duties and VAT on sales of the powder totted up to the huge sum.

Treasury Minister Stephen Timms slipped out the import duty figures in an end-of-parliament written answer about the drug - linked to 27 deaths in the UK.

He said mephedrone, the drug's official name, raised £584,000 during three years.

But the official take from the "legal high" is even more - with all sales subject to VAT. This raked in an estimated £1.5million, The Sun can reveal.

Tory David Burrowes, who asked for the import duty figures, said: "Many will think it's obscene that so much money has been raised by the Government while so many young people have suffered."

Meow meow was ordered to be banned by Parliament just hours before it packed up on Thursday for the General Election. It will be illegal from next Friday.

The Sun had campaigned for a ban and told yesterday how the mum of Will Filer, 18, blamed the drug for his hanging death last month.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling last night blasted ministers for "dithering" over banning the drug.

[Source: ''The Sun'', 10 April 2010]

As can only be expected from this "newspaper," there is a certain amount of spin here, with the pejorative adjective of "deadly" being used, as well as the claim of it being, "linked to 27 deaths in the UK," but we'll put that to one side for a moment, and look at the maths first.

As noted, the import duty detailed above was levied at 6.5%, so the declared value of the mephedrone on import would have been:

2007 - £2,690,770.15
2008 - £2,439,179.85
2009 - £3,859,345.08
Total = £8,989,295.08

If 17.5% VAT was also applied on import - as would be expected - that would give us the following:

2007 - £470,884.78
2008 - £426,856.47
2009 - £675,385.39
Total = £1,573,126.64

The Sun's figure of "£1.5 million," then, seems valid. Except, of course, that that's only the VAT on import. A cursory examination of various sites selling mephedrone and other substituted cathinones I did a few months ago showed that many of them were charging VAT at the point of resale within the UK. I'm not much up on tax legislation, but would assume that VAT charges on import would be offset again VAT at resale, rather than being in addition to them. Anecdotally it seems that mephedrone was on average being resold at ten times its cost from the manufacturers in China, so imported product worth just under £9 million would therefore be resold at around £90 million, meaning potential VAT earnings not of £1.57 million, but a whopping £15.73 million!

Now let's return to the issue of just how much imported mephedrone the above figures represents. Again we have to rely on anecdotal evidence on various forums and discussion boards, but overall it seems that prices progressively dropped from £4,500 to £1,500 per kilo, so let's apply those to 2007 & 2009, and £3,000 for 2008. This would convert the above declared value on import over the three years to the following weights:

2007 - 598kg
2008 - 813kg
2009 - 2,573kg
Total = 3,984kg

This would seem to tally well with the widely reported situation of mephedrone being used on only a very limited but expanding scale in 2007-2008, before demand increased dramatically throughout 2009, something that has been attributed to both the decline in quality of cocaine, and the almost complete drying up of supplies of MDMA throughout the same year.

Regardless of why it ended up in the UK, though, a shade under four metric tonnes of mephedrone is clearly a huge amount, but what does that equate to in terms of doses? There seem to be many stories of people bingeing on a whole gramme or more in a single session, but these would appear to be very much the exception, rather than the norm. For the sake of argument, then, let's assume an average does of half a gramme, which would mean that the aforementioned 3,984kg would be good for a staggering 7,968,000 doses.

Let's return to the issue of the reputed 27 deaths claimed by The Sun, and many other newspapers lately. This undoubtedly has its origins in a report from the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths (np-SAD) to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), which was cited in the latter's report on substituted cathinones to the Home Secretary on 29 March that initiated the impending ban.

The np-SAD report noted that upto 26 March 2010, there had been 18 deaths in the England, eight in Scotland, and one on the Channel Island of Guernsey, which does indeed come to a total of 27. However, it also clearly stated that in one of the English cases, "the coroner concluded that the death was “natural” and that an inquest was not required." This was undoubtedly 14 year-old Gabrielle Price, whose death on 21 November 2009 was widely reported as having died, "after taking mephedrone." Only local Brighton newspaper The Argus bothered to relay the information (on 16 December) that, "A pathologist's report showed the 14-year-old died of broncho-pneumonia following a streptococcal A infection," yet the likes of The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and The Sun continue to blame mephedrone many months later. Of the remaining sixteen English deaths, six had proved positive for mephedrone at post mortem, but all were still awaiting inquest.

Of the eight Scottish deaths mentioned in the np-SAD report, one was confirmed as, "Adverse effects of methadone and mephedrone." The heroin substitute methadone is, of course, already linked to literally hundreds of deaths in the UK every year. Mephedrone was detected in a second case, but "underlying health issues contributed to death." Of the remaining six, only one had tested positive for mephedrone. In the single Guernsey case, toxicology showed mephedrone was present, but it was still awaiting inquest.

In short, then, the case for such empahtic claims that mephedrone - and mephedrone alone - had "caused" 27 deaths is decidely wanting. Yet even so, let us remember the previous estimate of potentially at least 7,968,000 doses coming into the UK between 2007 and 2009. If even only Gabrielle Price's clearly non-attributable death is deducted from the total, reducing the number of deaths to 26, it would suggest that the odds of a single dose of mephedrone resulting in a death are 1 in 306,461 or 3.26 per million - about twice the risk of horse riding or MDMA, in fact. Of course, the reality is almost certainly that mephedrone was not solely responsible for all 26 deaths, so the odds will be even longer, even before factoring in the amount of mephedrone that could have been consumed between 1 January and 26 March 2010.