14/01/2013 Inside Out South East

We expose the deadly chemicals being sold legally on our streets.

Germaine Greer on the woman from Canterbury who set the trend for

female writers. I love her because of her ridiculous courage.

The Surrey man who returns to Bosnia to commemorate a lost love

in a time of war. No reason to think anything might happen that

day. It is war, you can never tell. I'm Natalie Graham with untold

stories closer to home. From all round London and the South East,

Hello, I'm in Canterbury. I'm back later, but first up tonight: Drug

abuse is a serious problem, but it's made worse by the fact that

new drugs are being invented faster than they can be banned. So-called

legal highs are freely available in the South East, and of course much

of the supply is routed through London. Mark Jordan now reports

from the capital on the chemicals which are one step ahead of the law.

Imagine a capital city where, in a single night, thousands are exposed

to drugs untested on rats, let alone humans. It happens in London

every weekend. The deadly lows of legal highs. The worst I've seen is

someone's kidneys stop function. was possessed. I went into Tesco

naked and assaulted a police officer. Shouting screaming,

hallucinating. We needed four or five people to sedate them. Hester

never made it to hospital she just died. Created in labs, new legal

highs are emerging every single week. Some are even stronger than

the illegal ecstasy, cannabis and cocaine they mimic. But the

chemistry keeps these users the right side of the law. Black Mamba,

Bliss Bomb, Go E, this has become a highly profitable industry. It is a

cat and mouse game as chemists cook up the latest legal high and the

law tries to catch up Users buy them and review online and friends

The doctors and toxicologists left to identify what's in them are

getting scared. We put a urinal in Wardour Street, Soho, and found 60

different drugs in that. 60? Yes. With 43 deaths linked to legal

highs in just a year, toxicologist Dr Ramsey fears it's just the

beginning. These people are the first to take these compounds and

they have never been evaluated anywhere in the world before.

they lab rats? Yes, they are! They can't possibly know the risks of

the compounds they are taking. Nobody does! A weekend's legal

highs have just arrived from a single A&E. These are the samples

brought by the police, taken from an A&E department. Great big

sticker - not for human consumption. It's the only way they can legally

be sold. It seems suprising to me that somebody would spend quite a

lot of money on that and read not for human consumption and then

consume it! Those chemicals are legally sold at Head shops. Have

you got Benzo Fury? And there are hundreds of online retailers So,

there you are, one pack of Benzo Fury. This is one of the most

popular legal highs. Scientists have manipulated the chemistry for

the effects of illegal ecstasy. So, what do you get for �10 of legal

high? 19-year-old Katie Wilson got more than she ever bargained for.

thought I'd try it to have a giggle. I remember happiness, euphoria. I

presumed like ecstasy. But then came the psychosis. After the Benzo

wore off, in my head I thought I was going to die. I told them to

tell my mum I loved her. I smashed the phone, wrecked their flat and

just left. I was possessed. It wasn't me in my head. All cars just

stopped, like a movie. I saw Tesco. Do you remember walking naked

though Tesco? No. To a lot of people its funny that I went in

Tesco naked and assaulted a police officer. Because I was kicking and

punching they held me on the floor and I'm going proper mental. They

asked, are you on heroin, crack or crystal meth? Back at that wrecked

home, things were even worse for her friend. He only took a few more

than me and had a paramedic come to the house as his lungs were going

crazy. He was in a coma. Two weeks later he came round and can only

open his eyes. He's brain damaged. In the basement at Chelsea and

Westminster Hospital, the Club Drug clinic picks up the pieces and the

long-term damage is now emerging. It can be extremely life-changing.

We have people who have had to have their bladder removed because of

ketamine, psychosis from methadrone and many calls from parents. What's

the problem? Ketamine with bladder problems. 300 patients are now in

treatment here. The concern I have is that what we will see is, in two

to three years, we'll begin to see the consequences of the harm that

is going on now. Its actually too early to see it at the moment and

so we may just be seeing the tip of the iceburg.

Back at St Georges, Dr Ramsey is haunted by an American student's

disastrous creation of a legal high for synthetic morphine. This

compound was only taken by 20 people, but all developed

Parkinson's disease. If it was produced now and widely distributed,

we could have a catastrophe. Nobody looking at the structure of that

compound could have predicted it would cause those problems. There

is a risk we might find something similar. Thalidomide is another

good example. We might find something that causes birth

defects.These things are made in China, shipped over here. John told

me of a disused toxic chemical created in the 1940s. The recipe

has been dusted off and now sells for highs and sexual arousal.

Unknown risks. Guaranteed profit! You can legally order a kilo for

�640 from China. This is how it comes. We've covered the name up to

stop copycats. It says causes respiratory problems, harmful if

swallowed, may damage unborn child - avoid breathing dust. If exposed

call a poison centre, and in clubs across London people are snorting

this. Divide it into one gram bags, add a warning sticker and sell for

�15. So, �640 for the kilo divided up, put in bags and sold on the

internet will bring you �15,000! Legal highs bring a guaranteed

smile for dealers. Entirely within the law, Max Mulley

owns 10 shops and sells legal highs. They have clear labelling to say

what they are not for and people go off and do things. That's basically

up to them, I can't control that. What alcohol does to people is far

worse than anything we are doing. Current regulation is not fit for

purpose. Those picking up the pieces gather here at the Maudsley.

The Governemnet has already created powers to outlaw specific highs

like Methadrone and ketamine, but even police chiefs wonder how to

keep up. The kids are sending round party invites with a link on where

to buy your drugs. The Home Office, I'll be very candid, and police

find this very hard to get our heads around and we are flat footed.

The Metropolitan Police declined to take part in this film. The UK

Border Agency also refused. UKBA have great hangers full of little

packets of powder, but don't have the technology or recourses. They

don't know what's in them! There are kids dying every week. The

youngest was 14. Maryon lost 21- year-old Hester to GBL, now a

banned substance. She was an absolute delight. Because she was

going to be a doctor and wanted to save lives as part of her career, I

felt setting up the Angelus Foundation was something I could do

to keep her footprint alive. Maryon's foundation teaches the

dangers. No easy task when you meet young users. You were 13 and an

addict? Yes. Did you ever think this is a chemical never tested?

didn't care because the high was so massive and it outweighed all the

badness. Then everything started to kick-off. Me getting kicked out of

school and my friend trying to kill herself, to throw herself in front

of a lorry. Only then did he kick the habit. So, what now? Tell every

user they'll die and they'll laugh. Ban every substance and the next

chemical could be even more deadly Controlling substances, all it does

is spawn the production of the one that isn't controlled. We are

damned if you do, damned if you Coming up. Returning to the scene

of lost love. It has taken so long Now, books written by women for

women are selling by the millions these days but the roots of these

kinds of novels go back a lot further than you might think. And

Books by female writers take up shelf after shelf in any modern

bookshop. From children's stories to controversial adult only fiction.

Many of the authors are British and household names, from Jane Austin

to JK Rowling. But once upon a time, the world of literature was very

much a man's world. In fact, it was unheard of for a woman to be a

professional writer. Back in dirty, smelly, poverty-stricken England in

the 17th century, even men struggled to make any kind of

living from writing and women simply wrote to amuse themselves.

Until a debt ridden woman from Kent decided she was going to do devote

her life to writing and pleasure. Her name was Aphra Benn and she

still has fans today. I love her. I love her because of her ridiculous

courage. She is a fascinating woman. She crosses so many boundaries that

we do not imagine a woman of the time being able to cross.

definitely had lovers, possibly of both sexes. She is a one-off,

unique. Aphra Benn wrote plays, poems and one of the very first

novels ever written. The story of her life reads just

like something straight out of a best seller. The story goes that

she was born near Canterbury in 1640 and started writing for a

living when she was 30, by which time she had become a widow, served

time in prison and been employed by King Charles II to spy on the Dutch.

To find out more about her undercover work, I have come to

interrogate Professor Jackie Eales of Canterbury Christchurch

University. The English were involved with

trade wars with the Dutch so there is trade rivalry, naval rivalry.

Both countries build up huge navies. Any information you could bring

back about the navy and trade, about the movement of ships would

be very useful. How common was it for a woman to be spying? It is

less usual than men doing it, but during the English Civil Wars,

women had got much more involved in spying on both sides. There was a

belief that women were actually better at passing themselves off,

as been very innocent and not being involved in anything underhand. I

think a number of women were used and were continuing to be used.

Charles II's reign marked the restoration of the monarchy

following a turbulent time of civil war and Oliver Cromwell's short-

lived rule as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England. It was an

extraordinary period of our history, a period that fascinates Germaine

Greer. It is a strange time in English history because it is being

run by some stunningly beautiful and quite immoral woman. They were

running the King. They can run the King because they can still

interest and excite him. He had been rather bored by the whole

business as long as he could remember. The problem for Benn was

King Charles II was not very good at paying people. With no one to

cover her expenses, she returned to Britain penniless and ended up in

debtor's prison. In 1669, she was released from prison. One theory is

that she had her debt paid off by an anonymous benefactor. That was

when she started writing for a living, presumably she wanted to

make enough money to make sure she never had to return to a place like

this. And she was remarkably prolific. As well as writing

political documents and translating scientific texts, she wrote

romantic novels, love poems and bawdy comic plays. The settings for

many of her stories and her ability to speak several languages appears

to indicate she was very well travelled. Her most celebrated book,

Oroonoko, tells the story of an African slave in the South American

colony of Suriname, a place she appeared to know well.

wonderful thing about it is you have the African prince, you have

also got the Caribbean Indians who are hunter-gatherer people. It is

an amazing confrontation between the two. It is not about slavery.

It is actually about the relationship between the different

groups in a colonial society. No way she could have written it

without having experienced it. Otherwise, it would not be so

numinous. Every time you look at it, you see another thing that you have

just learnt about societies with a history of slave ownership.

Benn was a pioneer of something called amatory fiction, stories

about love, romance and sexual attraction. Kim Simpson, a PhD

student at the University of Kent, says her 17th century stories are

really where the romantic novel begin. Benn was really the first

amatory writer, others include Delarivia Manley, Eliza Haywood. It

was writing by women for women. It addresses issues like sex, desire,

gender, fantasy. Those sort of things. But it also still engages

with the question about power, relationships between men and women.

And it is very dramatic stuff. You have got incest, bigamy and all

sorts of kind of crazy plot developments and things like that.

I think it would make for some quite good TV maybe.

Benn also wrote popular comedies for the stage. Kent based

playwright Samantha Hall says that while the paying audiences loved

them, the critics were often less than kind because they did not

think a woman should write such bawdy and outrageous material.

There was a horrible double standard which was introduced

because restoration comedy is bawdy anyway, but coming from a man that

was accepted. But written by a woman, it was seen as an outrage.

So you get a lot of poets at the time, her fellow writers, all

actually writing poems against her and some of the kind of vindictigve

poems are actually really sad to Racy novels and bawdy plays are not

the kind of things you would expect to find in the library of

Canterbury Cathedral. But this is where some of the oldest surviving

examples of her work are stored today. Here you get a sense of

Benn's range as a writer. This is a collection of her plays. Over here

in the middle, we have a book that would have been her bread and

butter, a translation about trees which has her name on the page. And

here, this would have been a huge compliment to Benn, one of her

novels has been adapted into a play and performed in the Theatre Royal.

On paper, Benn looks like she made a successful career as a writer.

But she struggled for money all her life, yet she never gave up.

Despite great hardship and pain, she kept writing until her death at

the age of 48. Before she died, she explained that she had such gout in

her hand that she could not hold a pen. So she is probably dictating.

She is supposed to have died of want of care in her physician. What

that means is that she died of an overdose. Laudanum probably. Or

what ever version of opium there were selling in those days which

was probably given to her in brandy. But I think she was mercy killed

because she could not go on any more.

She was buried at Westminster Abbey. But in the centuries after her

death, her work was largely forgotten. The Victorians saw her

as immoral, the bad woman who wrote bad books. If Benn were alive today,

I think she would probably enjoy a very successful career, writing

novels and screenplays about relationships and sexuality. But

according to Germaine, even Aphra would draw the line somewhere.

tell you what she would not write, she would not write 50 Shades of

Grey. 20 years ago this year, the war in

the former Yugoslavia was making headlines around the world. And one

young fireman from Lingfield in Surrey saw the conflict as an

opportunity to fulfil his ambition to become a photojournalist. Sean

Vatcher went to Bosnia and while he was there he fell in love with an

American aid worker. But a passionate love affair went

horribly wrong. Two decades later and Sean has gone back and our

reporter Mark Norman went with him. Sean Vatcher and Collette became

lovers in the middle of a war zone. This was Bosnia in 1993, a country

at war in the heart of Europe. But there is no happy ending to this

love story and it has taken Sean 20 years to be able to talk about it.

She was the first person I can, hand on heart, say that I have been

in love with. This was the worst conflict in

Europe since World War Two. It brought Sean and Collette together,

it also ripped them apart. No reason to think anything might

I had first heard about Sean and Collette when I was in Bosnia in

the 1990s. Now I am back in the Bosnian city of Mostar to hear him

tell a story of one particular day they spent here. We have probably

been here a few hours, but Sean remembers this part of the city and

Do you think it's safe? I don't care, I am going.

It is abandoned and derelict because there is still a risk of

mines and booby-traps. But Sean and Collette were on this front line.

They picked their way through the trenches and bunkers.

This is where we would have crossed into our position on the day and

joined up with the other guys. decades ago, Bosnia was all over

our TV screens in the same way Afghanistan is today. Sean was a

part-time firefighter in Surrey but had ambitions to become a photo

journalist. He thought taking pictures in Bosnia would help his

career. 4000 miles away in America, Collette Webster made the same

decision for different reasons. She had watched the TV news and became

convinced she had to go to Bosnia to help refugees as an aid worker.

Hello, it is 13th January or 14th. Once Collette arrived in Bosnia,

she started recording her thoughts on to tape. What just happened,

very confusing. These people in some ways have such a hard life.

But you get used to things so quick. Just little things. You get used to

being dirty all the time, to not having food or clean water or

toilets. Sean and Collette met and quickly became inseparable. It was

an immense love. She was that special person to me. I put her on

a very high pedestal and still have her there.

But within weeks, they were being drawn further into the conflict.

Collette increasingly wanted to help where the need was greatest,

which meant closer to the fighting. Sean wanted to take photographs as

close to the action as possible. They accepted an invitation from a

Croatian army soldier to see it first hand. They were taken to the

top floor of an abandoned apartment block directly on the front line.

It is the building on the left of your picture. It is awful.

There are still shells falling. Just awful.

Collette and Sean carried on to the apartment block from the front line.

It is the same building he is bringing me to today.

Exactly as it was. Without the debris.

We were not in any major hurry to get up there. A slow amble. Made

our way to where the Croatian guy led us to.

Collette followed Sean up the 10 flights of stairs to the top floor.

The thoughts she recorded on tape tell us she was beginning to

realise that local people had no choice but to live through the

horror. We can go home any time. These

people have to stay here and have to live in this. You do your best.

You do your best with what you've got.

This is the room we ended up in that day. Saw the muzzle flash come

from the boulevard below. A rocket came through between the two of us

and exploded on the wall above us here.

Collette was seriously injured. Sean tried to get her to a

makeshift hospital. But it was too late. She died within a few hours.

This is the first time you have been back? The first time in 18

years in this room. It doesn't feel good. Does it feel like a bad

We tracked down the record of deaths in west Mostar that year.

Collette was the 348th victim, but the first American to die in the

It's taken so long to get back, I do not know when it is going to

happen again. If I put it aside, who else is there really? Outside

the apartment building where Collette was killed, there is a run

down children's playground. Sean now wants to restore it in her

memory. That way he can leave the city a more permanent reminder of

the woman he loved. Anyway, I'll see you later. I'll

talk to you more. I love you all. I really do. I love you so much. And

I miss you. I love you. I'll talk If you want any more information

our website. You can watch the show Coming up next week. The biggest

reorganisation of the National Health Service. What will it mean

for us? You might shop around for care. You would make choices.

Will monitoring ourselves at home unlock the beds in hospital?

know that it has fantastic potential benefits. It marriages it

to reduce premature death as well. And we are living longer which is