Chasing legal highs a waste of police time But the chief constables argue that temporary bans are not a long-term solution to the challenges posed to the police by the speed with which new drugs are produced. The police also appear to question how realistic it is to stop young people taking drugs through legislation. "The police will continue to focus their energies on serious criminality and take a less robust enforcement approach on matters relating to personal possession," the submission read. Instead of using over-worked police, Acpo suggested the Government could look at whether existing consumer protection could be used to tackle legal highs being sold online as "pond food" or "bath salts." Under their proposal, owners of shops selling legal highs would be made liable for any subsequent harm to the user of the legal high. Drug advisers and think-tanks lined up to support the police's position. The UK Drug Policy Commission, the independent body that analyses drug laws, said police are too busy to spend time cracking down on yet another drug. The Advisory Council of the Misuse of Drugs, the Government's officials drug advisory group, said that in the past two years more than forty legal highs have been identified, often emerging from South East Asia where chemists design compounds that replicate banned drugs such as Ecstasy. Therefore picking them off one by one is "not necessarily very productive." The Home Office insist that legal highs must be banned in order to protect people from the unknown effects. "The UK is leading the way in cracking down on new psychoactive substances by banning them while the harms they cause are investigated," said a spokesman. Drugs ruin lives and cause misery to families and communities. Our strategy is to keep drugs off the streets and punish the dealers. The National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths logged 127 suspected deaths in Britain that had links with a "legal high" drug, mephedrone, over the past two years. Forty-two cases were confirmed as having a link with mephedrone, although none of the logs gave the drug as the cause of death.