300 people are stunned by deadly facts on legal highs

PAL, which has attracted over 1,100 members since it was formed just seven weeks ago, joined with the PSNI to organise the information evening.

On a night charged with emotion, the emphasis was very much on highlighting the dangers associated with drugs that are still legally on sale in the high street and through the internet, just like mephedrone, the plant food which is now a controlled substance after it claimed the lives of numerous addicts across the United Kingdom.

The audience sat in stunned silence as two sisters from Carrickfergus related their vastly differing experiences of mephedrone. Like Larne woman Emma Graffin, who told how she suspected the legal high had claimed her 20-year-old boyfriend's life, they met with standing ovations.

READ THE FULL STORY IN THIS WEEK'S LARNE TIMES And it scared me so badly.”

But it was only after her student sister Danielle came back from college and saw what a wreck her younger sibling had become that Rian turned a corner. Danielle locked her in her bedroom and eventually Rian was persuaded to see Hope Centre family support worker Leigh Stewart and to go to rehab where, she believes, a plea to God in prayer turned her life around.

Danielle said: “My loving, beautiful sister had turned in to a five-stone, seemingly bi-polar psychotic who tried to kill me several times – by attempting to throw me down the stairs and on one occasion throwing chairs at my head.”

Danielle formed the internet group Get Mephedrone Off Our Streets, which has 12,000 members. She receives more than 2,000 emails every day and has personally helped more than 40 people to seek out help.

Emma Graffin urged people against taking “cheap ‘legal’ crap”, adding: “This drug (mephedrone) is lethal. And the new ones coming out are worse.

“I want to make the point: just because it says legal, or you can buy it in a shop or on the internet, it does not make it safe.”

She added: “I’m telling you all this in the hope it will make a difference to at least one person, then this saves one person from the personal torment, it saves one family from the heartbreak and the constant nightmare that I am living.”