whoyg10385

There can be no better endorsement for a product that purports to make you high than for a government to confirm it does exactly that. John Clarke and Jo Hall knew whenever Spice was in the news because they would receive a week's worth of orders in a single day. New customers flocked to long-ignored head shops, enticed by the Spice frenzy.

One user I spoke to said that he was so inflatable impressed by the effects of Spice he immediately went online to investigate what else was out there. "I'd always thought the stuff you could get from your average head shop was laughable," said Tim, a 38-year-old sales manager from Surrey who preferred not to give his real name. He bought some Mephedrone, about which there had been some recent buzz ("It seems to be the most talked about with clubbers," Mixmag's features editor Duncan Dick told me). An amphetamine-like chemical that arrived in powdered form, it was supposed to have an effect similar to MDMA, and Tim gave it a go. He started with a 250mg dose, in a capsule, and the results were good – euphoria, stimulation – so he kept taking it, eventually consuming a gram in 12 hours. "I had taken a lot of amphetamines in the past and two or three grams over an evening was a reasonable amount for me. I wasn't worried."

But the next day, Tim woke up shaking and soaked in inflatable tent sweat, his heart beating frighteningly fast. The state persisted, along with near-permanent anxiety, for days. "I've had comedowns in the past where you feel a bit grotty for 24 hours and then after that you feel a bit better. This time, even a week later, I was genuinely struggling to function." His doctor prescribed Diazepam to calm the anxiety, but a month on, when we spoke, he was still feeling twitchy and on edge. Tim's error had been to base his dosage on Mephedrone's illegal equivalents.

DrugScope's recent survey highlighted the inflatable castles falling quality of street drugs as a reason why legal highs are growing in popularity. The Mephedrone Tim took was far cleaner than anything he was likely to have bought from a dealer. It had not been cut with chalk, or mashed-up aspirin, or Dreft detergent; it had been mass-produced in a factory, probably in China, imported by a wholesaler, and sold to him by a head shop – pure. He posted a description of his experience on an online drug forum, to warn others about making the same misjudgment.

It started as a skirmish between supermarkets, of interest only to those in the grocery trade. But Asda's decision to repeatedly slash the price of its bananas now threatens to undermine the fair trade movement and spells catastrophe for those who work in the wholesale pearl jewelry industry, according to leading organisations representing fruit growers.

Renwick Rose, the chief executive officer of Winfa – the Windward Islands Farmers Association, whose 4,000 banana farmers export almost exclusively to Britain, has described the price war as "a scandalous way of doing business at the expense of farmers" and warned it will plunge banana growers into a "race to the bottom" that will benefit no one in the long term.

He was speaking after Asda cut the price of its loose bananas to 38 pence a kilo, its sixth cut in six weeks and a move that placed acute pressure on rivals to follow suit.

In a sign that the price war is spreading, European giants Aldi and Lidl have also drastically slashed the price of their bananas, something that will have disastrous consequences for growers in the medium to long term, according to the Fairtrade Foundation which guarantees to buy the fruit at an agreed price from banana farmers.

"Price cuts serve only to devalue bananas yet pearl jewelry further, creating a false illusion among shoppers that they can be sustainably produced for such give-away prices," said the Foundation's Barbara Crowther.

That the banana – Britain's most popular fruit – finds itself on the frontline of a supermarket turf war is nothing new. With more than 140 million of them eaten each week in the UK, bananas are supermarkets' best sellers after lottery tickets and petrol. For this reason, changes in their price, as with other staples such as bread, milk and baked beans, are keenly noticed by consumers.

UK sales have risen by some 150% over the past 17 years, but the cultured pearl massive increase in the volume of bananas flooding into the country has brought with it deflationary price pressures. Four years ago the price of loose bananas fell below 84p a kilo, down to as low as 67p a kilo, before clawing back up to about £1 last year.

But the scale of the price slashing by the supermarkets this time represents an unprecedented and possibly devastating blow for the industry. It could not have come at a worse time for the growers. Banana farmers in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific are freshwater pearl currently begging the European Union to increase a potential €100m bailout to €500m claiming the soaring prices of pesticides, fertilisers and oil, as well as a spate of storms, have left them nursing significant losses that threaten to put them out of business.

No wonder Rose is a worried man. Charged with promoting the interests of Fairtrade banana producers in Dominica, St Vincent, St Lucia and Grenada, he freshwater pearl earrings has a big job on his hands. Since 1992 some 20,000 of the 24,000 farmers in the islands have gone out of business. Now the future for its remaining farmers looks bleak.

Already in the past year, before prices fell off a cliff, Dominica saw a 50% reduction in the number of farmers exporting Fairtrade bananas to Britain while the number in St Vincent has declined by more than 30%.

"The prices are ridiculous, it almost makes a nonsense of the concept of trade," Rose said contemptuously. "I don't know if that price [Asda's] can even cover the cost of transportation."

It is not just the farmers who will lose out if the islands' banana freshwater pearl ring industry collapses. In the Windward Islands, bananas pay for schools, buses and crucial infrastructure. They have no plan B.

Asda and the other retail giants insist their suppliers will not take the hit – and that the real winner in this battle will be consumers. Alex Brown, Asda's produce director, said: "We're footing the bill so we can guarantee the move won't have any impact on the price we pay our suppliers, and any other retailer following our lead should make that same commitment."

This is another advantage of legal highs, according to Clarke. When people have better evidence as to what they've taken – because a substance bears a brand name, or because it is produced in a factory to roughly the same strength from dose to dose – effects can be compared with some kind of accuracy. Sites such as Drugs-Forum.com and Erowid.org throb with pearl jewelry testimonials and advice. "With generic ecstasy there are so many different pills out there with different things in them that their effect is not going to be consistent," says Clarke. "It makes similar discussion almost impossible."

Most predict that Mephedrone will be the next substance to come under government review ("I imagine most users will be stockpiling supplies before the inevitable," said Mixmag's Duncan Dick). Martin Barnes told me that, even in the week leading up to our conversation, DrugScope had received an increase in calls from treatment centres, asking for information about the drug. "I don't want to give the impression that there are all these laboratories furiously trying to come up with new pearl earrings chemicals," he said. "But the traditional perception of what we meant by legal highs is changing. Head shops are selling more than just Kratom or Salvia, stuff to take to music festivals with a niche appeal. Spice and Mephedrone are something quite different, a couple of molecular tweaks away from controlled substances. That's a big challenge for legislators."
Mephedrone was the final legal high I tried. Already nervous after listening to Tim's tale, I was ratcheted up to a state of sheer terror by a warning from the salesman in pearl jewellry Edinburgh that he knew it to be horribly addictive ("Should you decide to take it, which we don't recommend…"). But my experience was actually very pleasant. Even a relatively small dose had a significant effect: the urge to participate in every conversation in the room, the sudden conviction that I should have always known that it felt good to move my eyeballs around in their sockets. I took it with friends, many of those who had once suggested I smoke nutmeg, or tap up a dodgy barista for his whipped-cream can. All reported similar effects, and all asked the same question: "Is this really legal?"

But the complex economics that underpin the banana trade suggest in the long term both small and large scale banana growers could suffer from a price war.

The timing is significant. In January the supermarkets will agree new contracts with their suppliers. Given the historically low prices at which the pearl jewelry big chains are now selling bananas, they are likely to demand hefty cuts from their suppliers.

Any squeeze on suppliers' margins will be passed down the chain, with consequences for plantation workers. "Do these guys not realise what they're doing to us?" said a spokesman for the Coordinating Body of Latin American Banana Workers' Unions. "They are putting all the costs of the 'crisis' in Britain on our backs."

Plantation workers have been feeling the effects of the price wars since the millennium. "Prices to suppliers are one-third lower than seven years ago and few plantation workers now earn anything like a living wage," said Alistair Smith, international coordinator with Banana Link, which campaigns for banana workers' rights.

Downward pressure on prices has been exacerbated by a gradual lifting of tariffs in the EU to comply with world trade agreements. As a result, the Latin American plantations, and an increasing number from West Africa that farm bananas on an industrial scale, are replacing higher-cost smallholders. The shift has been dramatic. Between 1992 and 2007, UK banana imports almost doubled cultured pearl from 545,000 tonnes to 927,000 tonnes. Over the same period, banana imports from Caribbean countries fell from 70% of all imports to less than 30%. Cheaper Latin American "dollar" bananas now make up about half of UK imports.

The Fairtrade Foundation has attempted to protect smaller growers by setting a minimum guaranteed price paid to its farmers. The system seemed to work with many shoppers prepared to pay a small premium to buy Fairtrade bananas. Sainsbury and Waitrose even switched all their bananas to Fairtrade – which means they have had to absorb big hits to follow Asda's price-cutting lead.

"We know shoppers are concerned about ensuring that farmers and workers are treated fairly, and want to do the right thing," Crowther said. "Seven in 10 say shell pearl jewelry they will buy products on these principles if they are slightly more expensive."

But with Asda selling Fairtrade bananas for £1.29 a bag, the huge discrepancy between the price of Fairtrade and normal bananas is obvious. The consequences for the Windward Islands, which exports close to 200,000 tonnes to the UK each year, are catastrophic, according to Rose.

If you can read this post, it means that the registration process was successful and that you can start blogging