The images capture a woman in a hauntingly familiar pose. On one of Manchester’s grandest streets, outside a department store, she is bent as if she’s trying to pick something up.
Almost touching her toes, she remains motionless for minutes. Before long, she collapses to the ground, and bystanders are calling police for help.
The disturbing scene is eerily reminiscent of another time. The time when the Manchester Evening News first reported on a scourge that was leaving vulnerable people frozen in ‘zombie-like’ states across the city centre.
The sight of people wasted on synthetic cannabinoids would become so familiar, seven years ago, that national headlines would go on to dub the city ‘Spicechester’, home of the ‘living dead’.
experts were bracing themselves for a deadly new wave of synthetic opiates
I’m bracing myself for a deadly new wave of anti-drug moral panic.
She says there are ‘so many people’ on what she calls ‘legal highs’ - despite the government having banned them back in 2016.
Almost as if the idea of treating drug abuse as a criminal issue rather than a health issue is fundamentally flawed.
