MOST of us, by now, should know of the risks attached to taking drugs – they can cause severe health problems, even death, and taking them can bring even those who have no ill-effects to the attention of the law.

Drugs ruin lives, it’s as simple as that. But an altogether greyer area is the trade in so-called “legal highs”, which can carry just as many health warnings as banned substances, but which are freely available over the counter and on the internet.

Make no mistake, just because these drugs are “legal” does not mean they are safe, or have any official endorsement. It merely means that they have not yet been formally banned or listed alongside the more commonly-known drugs as prohibited.

As more and more tests are carried out, many of the substances used in these brightly-packaged products will and do find their way to being formally banned. But the tide of such legal highs flooding into the country is a difficult one for the authorities to deal with.

So well done Lincoln City Council for taking the decision to ban the sale of these synthetic, mass-produced drugs from open sale.

Those who trade in legal highs would argue that they merely ape the effects of banned drugs. But any substance that alters the chemistry of a person’s brain or body, or both, can have severe consequences – even if it is just to lower inhibitions and cause people to act as they would not normally, putting them in potentially dangerous situations.

The Lincoln experiment will be worth watching and, if successful, should be something adopted here in Bradford. If it saves just one life, it will have been worth it.