Xanax WARNING: New prescription drugs craze is a deadly game of roulette

One site offering Xanax for sale in fact supplied us with Tramadol, an equally controversial opiate painkiller linked to hundreds of deaths.

MP Bambos Charalambous said: “These young people don’t know what they are putting into their bodies. They have no control at all.”

Rick Bradley, of the anti-abuse charity Addaction, said: “Purchases are either on the clean [legitimate] or the dark web or on the street. “The clean web is safer because it will be dispensed with information which might enable the user to take the drug more safely.”

Mr Bradley, who also sits on a new substances watchdog for Public Health England, added: “But that doesn’t make it safe at all.”

The Daily Express set out to establish how easy it would be to buy Xanax – trade name for the tranquiliser alprazolam – amid a chilling surge in its recreational use.

Because it relaxes brain activity, the pills induce a feeling of mellow drowsiness combined with heightened confidence.

UK authorities treat it as a “Class C” controlled drug, and it can be obtained legally on private prescription, although not from the NHS.

Worried parents have warned that their children have become violent and troubled after Xanax produced a dramatic change of personality.

Two young women hanged themselves in separate incidents after taking Xanax and dozens of schoolchildren have needed hospital treatment for its effects.

Our investigator bought a batch of pills advertised as Xanax on a legitimate-looking website.

Run by British-registered firm United Pharmacy, wpills.net offers a dazzling array of prescription pills. Our order of 30 pills was taken without any questions about age, medical history or if a prescription was available.

After processing our payment of $ 170 (£120), the order shipped from India and took almost three weeks to arrive. But analysis by a Home Office-licensed laboratory found the pills were Tramadol.

The drug is especially dangerous to those suffering from depression or addiction which are hitting teens with increasing frequency.

For teenagers who buy Xanax online, the reality is they face a game of roulette with no way of knowing what will be sent their way.

Mr Charalambous, who represents Enfield Southgate, in north London, said the craze has been fuelled by rap music stars and social media.

He said “Xanax is like Valium but 20 times more powerful. It is highly addictive and the body craves it. One of its effects is amnesia, so the person has no idea where they have been or what they have done. “Another is that they become aggressive in their behaviour. They can become physically violent.”

Mr Charalambous, who was alerted by a constituent whose daughter became a user, added: “The problem is much more widespread than we thought. We need more research. If we are not careful we could have more deaths.”

A Department of Health spokesman said: “Controlled prescription-only medicines such as Xanax can be potent, by their very nature.

“They should only be prescribed by a doctor or appropriate healthcare professional.”

Withdrawal led to suicide

Raven Hunt’s family demanded a criminal investigation after she hanged herself while suffering from Xanax withdrawal.

Mother Emmy Hunt, 42, believes her daughter was supplied with the anti-anxiety pills by a member of her student circle in Bristol.

“We know the withdrawal of Xanax can lead to suicidal thoughts,” she said. “This dealer gives Xanax to the girls to get them on it and then gets them to pay for it after.

“We feel he needs to answer for the role we believe he has played in Raven’s death.” Miss Hunt, 21, had taken the pills for six weeks to help battle anxiety ahead of her final exams at the University of the West of England.

After she came off the drug she struggled with depression and was found dead two weeks later in a wooded nature reserve in Bristol. Miss Hunt, who had wanted to be a social worker, was found to have traces of Xanax in her blood after the tragedy in April last year.

Her mother, who lives in Southampton, added: “I will never get over it or accept it. She meant the world to me. As a family, we will only be able to really come to terms with what has happened if the suppliers of Xanax are stopped.”

Dramatic personality change

A Coroner attacked the “pernicious influence” of Xanax when she heard how bubbly student Georgia Jackson hanged herself after taking it.

Veronica Hamilton-Deeley said the 21-year-old University of Brighton student had suffered a dramatic personality change.

Friends found the second year accountancy student dead in the rented home they shared last December.

Blood tests revealed traces of Xanax and horse tranquiliser ketamine. Miss Hamilton-Deeley, senior coroner for Brighton and Hove, declined to give a suicide verdict.

“I cannot record a conclusion that Georgia took her own life,” she said.

“Because the Georgia who was found is not the Georgia that I have come to know. “It was somebody who was affected by a pernicious drug – Xanax.”

“Georgia died when she hanged herself whilst her ability to make rational decisions was impaired.”

Two days before her death last December, Miss Jackson had become uncharacteristically angry after taking Xanax.

After the narrative verdict, her parents Martin and Cherry said: “She was everything to us. She was just a brilliant girl.”

COMMENT – ANDREW HALLS, Headmaster at King’s College School, Wimbledon

Xanax is coming soon to a town near you.

Drug crime is exploding in UK cities, rural towns and villages. It is destroying countless lives and shadowy internet suppliers make a fortune from the weakness and suffering of others.

In 2016, the proportion of 15-year-olds in England who said they had taken drugs increased by over 50 per cent in just one year.

NHS figures show that hospital admissions for illicit drug poisonings have risen by 40 per cent in a decade, while the UK death rate from drug abuse is now three times the average for Europe as a whole.

Now health experts are warning of a crisis with a drug that has started to make headlines for all the wrong reasons.

The only good thing is that we are at last beginning to tell the truth about drugs – how cheap they are, how available they are, and how dangerous they are. Xanax is a powerful and addictive anti-anxiety drug that is now the fifth-most prescribed drug in the USA.

In a recent survey of 85,000 people aged 13-24 in the UK, over a third said they had friends using Xanax.

Only six per cent had not heard of it. And yet Xanax is not available on the NHS. So what are these young people really taking?

Through the internet, young people can buy fake Xanax, packaged just like the real thing, and probably costing less than a pound per pill.

But it will have been made in unregulated laboratories in the Far East and adulterated with anything that makes users like it – and crave it. Often this is the opioid fentanyl, 50 times stronger than heroin and incredibly cheap to make.

Needless to say, it’s a killer.

This is why I have written to the parents of pupils at my school to warn them of the dangers created by drugs that are cheaper than tobacco and easier to access, for minors, than alcohol.

I want us to be open about the problems we face – as families, as schools and as society.

We need to educate our young people; we need to be truthful about the extent and the dangers of drug abuse. And we need to resist the endless calls for drug liberalisation.

The law may be hard to enforce, but it is better than no law at all.