A 15-year-old boy collapsed and was rushed to hospital after taking a “legal high” on his school lunch break.
The Grove Academy pupil was taken to A&E at Ninewells shortly after he smoked the substance in a wooded area near the school.
On walking back to school, the boy collapsed then, when back in the playground, he collapsed again and was violently sick.
Fearing for the boy’s health, a friend raised the alarm by telling staff who called an ambulance and informed the police.
The boy’s mother said doctors told her he was very lucky to have come through the ordeal last Tuesday without major injury.
“It was so scary,” she said. “I had voicemails from the school saying he had collapsed twice and that they thought he had taken a legal high.
“The messages were haunting because you could hear the fear in their voices.
“When I got to the hospital, I was told he had been very lucky. His heart was stable, but it was beating much faster than it should be.
“He also had problems with his circulation, resulting in cold patches all over his body.”
The boy told his mum he had only had four puffs of the drug, but that was enough to bring on a serious reaction.
She said she was “horrified” by the incident.
“It’s shocking how easy it is to get a hold of these things,” she said. “The kids who take them are very naive, because these legal highs can kill.
“I don’t know how many kids were doing it with my son.
“Doctors are at a disadvantage when treating people because they don’t know what is in these things, so they don’t know what to use to counteract the effects.”
The boy returned to school this week and his mother says he is ashamed of his actions. However, she praised the way his friends dealt with the situation.
“They were mature enough to realise something was drastically wrong and, instead of trying to hide it, made the teachers aware of what was happening. That could have saved his life,” she added.
A spokesman for Dundee City Council said: “We are aware of an incident and the school has taken appropriate action.”
A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: “We received a call from the head teacher at Grove Academy, Broughty Ferry, on Tuesday November 11, informing us of an incident whereby a pupil had collapsed at the school.
“The pupil was taken to hospital. It was a medical matter.”
Dave Barrie of drug and alcohol charity Addaction says more and more of Dundee’s drug-related deaths and illnesses involve new “psychoactive substances”.
He described the situation as “very worrying” and described it as a “major problem” facing the city’s drug services.
Mr Barrie said people who consume the new psychoactive substances think they are safer than illegal drugs.
However, he said, often the substances can be as strong as heroin.
He said users “might think they are smoking something like cannabis but in fact it’s much, much stronger than that”, adding: “Most weeks we see somebody presenting with problems using these substances as there can be four to five different chemicals in them.”