For Twenty Years this Man Has Been Selling Legal Highs at UK Festivals

Yesterday, Glastonbury became the latest high profile festival to publicly ban legal highs from being sold on their grounds. They joined over twenty festivals - including Reading, Bestival and Lovebox - by blacking out their website with the message "Don’t Be In The Dark About Legal Highs" and not posting anything across their social media channels for 24 hours from 9am yesterday morning.

A lot of festival promoters have made it sound as if this ban affected individual punters consuming or selling legal highs when, in fact, festivals have allowed official legal high stalls to trade for decades. Herbal Highs, perhaps the most iconic legal highs stall, has had a deep-rooted relationship with Glastonbury, Womad and other festivals going back 20 years. Their website proudly displays photos and videos taken of happy customers at UK festivals.

I spoke to Donal from the "people’s favourite legal highs company" to hear about the implications of the ban and what his plans are for the future of Herbal Highs.

Noisey: Why has the issue of legal highs come to such a head recently?

Donal: It’s actually been progressively happening over a long period of time. The events have become more corporate and it’s been a target of the councils, historically, dealing with the events over a number of years. Nitrous oxide (laughing gas) happened a year or so ago, and then suddenly overnight it was banned from every event. This wasn’t due to legal reasons - it was definitely licensing reasons - councils just told festivals that if they didn’t comply then they wouldn’t grant then a license next year.

Do you feel betrayed by the festival circuit?

Of course, but unfortunately this what they call progress. More progress, less civil liberty. When we started doing events 25 years ago, it was a more free and open time. Events have become progressively more corporate, and have got tied up in more rules and regulations. They've become much more sterile and clinical. This is taking away any potential "dangers" but also potential opportunities to have fun.

Did this outcome surprise you or were you expecting it to happen?

We’ve been less and less involved with festivals over the last couple of years. This isn’t news to us.

Are there any festivals around that you’re still welcome at?

Personally, I haven’t had bad relationships with most of the events; the banning of us from trading at those events has been brought about by circumstances outside of the organisers’ control. If you’re an events organiser and you’re told that having herbal highs at your event would negatively influence your licensing next year then you're just not going to have them. For them, it’s either have a festival with legal highs or don’t have a festival at all.

So when the festivals came and said ‘thanks but no thanks’, did you just hold your hands up?

We couldn’t stand our ground because it’s not the festivals that are saying it - it’s the council. At the end of the day, the people we were dealing with weren’t the people who had the power to make those decisions. Our ground is being pulled away from underneath us, all we can do is adapt our business model to the way the world is moving.

Do you think the banning of legal highs is just another example of Daily Mail scare mongering?

Absolutely. Unfortunately Britain is full of Daily Mail readers - it’s the biggest selling newspaper in the UK and has had several hundred front-page headlines about legal highs being ‘deadly’ or saying they can ‘kill you’ and being so dangerous that they should be banned. That’s how they sell newspapers. Unfortunately, people believe newspapers and they’re concerned about headlines, not about the seven people who died last year from swallowing wasps.

How damaging will the latest changes be in the grand scheme of things? What are your next steps going to be?

We were a business that was heavily associated with doing music festivals, right through the nineties and noughties and it’s very disappointing that we’re no longer welcome there. From a business point of view, 20 years ago people used to go to events with cash in their pockets and they’d go to buy things. Now, the experience is very different.

In what way?

There used to be a great mix of people. Now, everyone who goes to a festival has to have the money in their bank account months before the event happens and pay with a credit card. Glastonbury had a license for 80,000 people but used to get 200,000 people turning up at the event. People were jumping over fences to get there. They weren’t dishonest, they weren’t criminals - it was a part of the fabric that created the event. People went to festivals to go shopping; they took money to buy things they couldn’t find in the villages. Now, everything is available online and we’re part of the facilitation, that’s how our business has progressed.

To what extent is the fun slowly being removed from festivals?

Ten years ago I was at Reading Festival, before the smoking ban, and people were asking if we could smoke in the arena and they weren't talking about cigarettes. People used to sit around campfires and play music, and now there are fire police actually preventing people from lighting a fire, which gives them a greater resemblance to concentration camps than the festivals I remember in my twenties.

What do you say to all of the figures that are being thrown around about the dangers of legal highs?

68.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot. The figures are nonsense, they’re based on nothing. Of course there’s always an element of risk in any sort of fun that people have, whether in a sporting capacity or if you’re rock climbing. But it’s about managing risk. If you want to have a completely safe world, you’d lock yourself in the room and feed yourself intravenously just in case you might possibly get food poisoning. But there has got to be a balance between risk and being wrapped up in cotton wool.

What steps are you taking to make sure that what you’re selling is 100% safe?

We do our own tests. We have a chemical test done. We’re now looking to put together an independent body to make people who sell legal highs part of that body and not independently tested. We take safety very, very seriously, we’ve been around for a very long time and we want to continue to be around for a very long time.

Are you looking to take your business abroad to festivals around Europe?

We have done this previously and that is one of the routes that we may potentially take. But Herbal Highs is synonymous with UK festivals – it would be like starting all over again.

Would you ever go to a festival in the UK anymore, with Herbal Highs or not?

When you’ve actually traded at these events and have been such a large part of them, it’s obviously difficult. When you go to one and you’re not involved in it, it’s a very different experience. And it’s not an experience that I particularly enjoy.

Follow Lev on Twitter - @levharris1

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