Lethal drug mixture on the rise in Britain's cities

A deadly mixture of drugs responsible for the deaths of the comedian John Belushi and the actor River Phoenix is taking hold in cities across Britain, drugs agencies have warned.

The practice of speedballing involves taking heroin and cocaine together to combine the sedative effects of the opiate with the energy rush of the stimulant.

But drug agencies said that the growing availability in Britain of crack cocaine had vastly increased the risks from speedballing, which is on the rise in Brighton, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds.

The national drug charity Addaction said speedballers were now injecting crystals of crack cocaine – instead of the relatively less dangerous powder – together with heroin.

The crystals can block the veins of drug users if they are not fully broken down and act as a powerful anaesthetic that numbs nerve endings and greatly heightens the chances of drug users injecting directly into an artery and killing themselves.

Rosie Brocklehurst, a spokeswoman for Addaction, said dual injection of heroin and cocaine had been particularly noticeable in Brighton and was "highly dangerous".

One of the charity's directors of operations, Kevin Molloy, said the trend is creating problems for drug workers who traditionally use different kinds of treatment for opiate and stimulant users.

Speaking about hard drug use in Brighton, he said: "In the last two or three years, it has become noticeable that people have been not only using both substances but injecting them, and injecting them at the same time – speedballing."

Mr Molloy said Brighton drug agencies had worked mainly with opiate users until the mid-1990s when "a crack culture swiftly emerged". Though Belushi died in 1992, speedballing only began to establish itself as a wider problem in America about a decade ago, with Phoenix becoming a high-profile victim in 1993.

Crack cocaine is increasingly being injected because "there's a perception that they are getting more for their money and none of it is going up in smoke", Mr Molloy said. "It's not just a Brighton phenomenon. It is happening in various cities across the country."

Speedballing was practiced by two distinct groups, Mr Molloy said: those who had graduated from using heroin on its own, who were mainly in their late 20s and 30s, and those who had begun smoking crack and then taken to injecting both drugs, who were more likely to be younger than the first group and who included a number of female sex workers. The drugs charity Coca staged a conference in London last November in which they discussed the growing problem of speedballing in Britain.