Poland moves to crackdown on designer drugs

"We\'ve prepared a very restrictive, razor sharp and I believe efficient draft law," Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters in Warsaw.

"We want to create a situation in which designer drugs are categorised as narcotics, which is what they in fact are," Tusk said.

The drugs can be sold legally as their molecular structure differs from banned substances even though they have similar effects.

Tusk said his government would urge the European Commission to ban designer drugs across the European Union. "The issue of designer drugs isn\'t just a Polish problem," he said.

The draft legislation, which is to be fast-tracked through parliament, will allow public health inspectors to shut down the production and sale of psychoactive substances, to seize supplies and to impose fines on producers and sellers.

The fines may be reimbursed if the seized substances are found to have no health risks.

"I\'m aware there will still be those who try to sell designer drugs on the Internet and underground -- for this there will be the police, prosecutors," Tusk told reporters.

"We won\'t eliminate 100 percent of the sales but we will eliminate this insolent, legal trafficking with causes hundreds of thousands of children and young people go to the shops every day to buy this crap," Tusk said.

On Monday Justice Minister Krzysztof Kwiatkowski said new legislation on designer drugs would include a three-year prison sentence for anyone who supplies minors with a substance posing a risk to their health or life.

The trendy drugs for so-called "legal highs" have made headlines over recent weeks with several users ending up in hospital. There have been a handful of fatalities believed to be linked to their consumption.

In a nationwide crackdown in recent days, police and health inspectors placed seals on the doors of around a thousand shops selling laboratory-created drugs, which imitate the effect of banned narcotics but whose individual chemical components are not necessarily illegal.

The authorities have had trouble clamping down because the drugs\' makers have kept one step ahead, varying the composition -- as soon as one chemical component is banned, they replaced it with another that has a similar effect.

In addition, sales outlets have used ruses to duck inspections, such as labelling packets of drugs as collector\'s items or garden fertiliser, or marking them unfit for consumption.

Another amendment planned by the government includes allowing health inspectors to pull from the market any substance suspected of being harmful for at least to 18 months while tests are carried out.

The owner of a chain of shops selling the chemical highs told the Polska newspaper he would take legal action over the state shutdown.

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