Kids hospitalised as schools battle spice-vape influx
The evidence suggests social media continues to be the main vehicle for these illegal vapes making their way into the hands and mouths of children.
An investigation by LBC has found shocking numbers of vapes seized in Lancashire schools contained illegal drugs, with dozens of pupils ending up in hospital and others willing to conceal vapes internally to smuggle them into class.
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Three hundred and fifty vapes seized from pupils across East Lancashire were sent to a lab at Bristol University and tested for the presence of substances other than nicotine, and alarmingly 30% of them came back as containing drugs. In 95% of those cases, that drug was Spice.
Chris McKee, a constable with Lancashire Police, has been at the forefront of the investigation and told LBC: “Spice is a psychoactive substance made up of a huge number of chemicals and the affect it has on your body varies from child to child, but we’ve seen children admitted to hospital.
"In East Lancashire hospitals for a six-month period, we saw 33 children admitted, and they said they’d had a vape. Very regularly you’ll see kids in school having an episode, and I’ll often be called to schools to test a vape because they think it’s linked to a child’s decline in behaviour or a medical episode that day.”
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Aside from the concerns about children becoming addicted to nicotine, experts are worried an addiction to hardcore drugs like Spice will leave them facing a lifetime of torment.
Constable McKee added: "A young girl, 14, who we believe was really entrenched in the use of Spice, was concealing the tip of the vape which contained the drug within her person, in her vagina.
"Obviously it’s a really gruesome thing to think about, but what worries me most is that child is going to such extreme lengths to bring Spice into school so she could smoke it during the day, and that says to me that she’s entrenched in that addiction.”
Initial research by the University of Bath last year saw experts gather up vapes from concerned schools and police forces across England, with 596 vapes confiscated from pupils.
Spice was detected in vapes in 74% of the participating schools across London, the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire.
Approximately one in six of the vapes tested contained Spice while roughly one in 90 contained THC.
That research by the University of Bath was broadened out at a local level by Lancashire Police following concerns about escalating anti-social behaviour whereby young people at the centre of community unrest were seen with a vape in their hands.
In one East Lancashire town, schools seized and retained 215 vapes fit for sampling, which were then sent to the University of Bath for analysis.
PC McKee added: "We’re seeing a range of medical, social, physical, mental health issues arising from the use of these.
"There's no real way to tell if a vape fluid has lawful chemicals in it or not by the naked eye, so it's really difficult for a person to make a firm judgement on what they're putting in their body."
The evidence suggests social media continues to be the main vehicle for these illegal vapes making their way into the hands and mouths of children.
“The main route, we believe, is social media through Snapchat and TikTok”, PC McKee added.
“Dealer accounts saying, 'I'll meet you on street corners, five quid for a vape'. So, it's really difficult for us to map where those dealers are due to it being private servers, maybe rerouted across the globe or wherever.
“We really rely on teachers feeding information and intel into the police system so that we can then go after these dealers because Spice is a really addictive drug, and I think, whilst we're doing really great work educating young people, we also need to target the dealers as well, which is a two-pronged approach."
Constable McKee told LBC: "The biggest thing we do out of this is to educate young people because without knowledge of what you’re putting into your body you’re never going to prevent.
"If we find Spice on a young person, let’s not prosecute them or penalise them; let’s look at how we can work with them and help them to make better decisions. Whenever we’ve done this, the positive rates have dropped dramatically."
New research by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) estimates that around 370,000 (6%) of 11–17-year-olds in Great Britain currently vape, while around 1.1 million (19%) have tried vaping.
Current vapers aged 16-17 were asked about whether they had used any drug other than nicotine in a vape in the last 12 months, and more than one in five reported using THC (22%). An additional 7% reported using CBD and another 7% synthetic cannabinoids like Spice.
Prof Rachel Isba, Consultant in Paediatric Public Health Medicine at Alder Hey and Professor of Children and Young People’s Health at Lancaster University, told LBC: "Vaping can be harmful to children in two main ways.
"The first is that many vapes contain nicotine, which is highly addictive. Young brains are still developing, which makes them more susceptible to the effects of substances such as nicotine."
On the issue of vapes containing illicit substances, she said: “It’s difficult to comment on that; I’d bow to the scientists that are collecting vapes and measuring what’s in them, but I think children don’t always know what’s in a vape if they’ve bought it off a mate.”