Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High

by Power, Mike

  Drug laws had by this point been tightening for decades, both domestically and internationally. Ostensibly the legislation was introduced to protect the health of nations, and it is impossible to argue that many of the drugs banned worldwide today are not addictive, harmful or problematic if used to excess. Practically, though, it could be argued that the banning of drugs has been as much to do with notions of morality, and with the need for a sober and compliant workforce, as it has been to do with protection.

  International drug law is today controlled by three United Nations treaties: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971 – a draft of which was released in 1969 and served as a blueprint for later American and British drug laws – and the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988, which bans commonly used chemicals required to produce and synthesize illegal drugs. The vast majority of UN member states are signatories to these three conventions, and bound by law to criminalize the production, distribution, purchase, sale and possession of the hundreds of drugs they list for anything other than scientific or medical purposes.

  In the UK, drugs are currently controlled by two Acts of Parliament, the 1968 Medicines Act and the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. It is the latter act that is usually cited in criminal drugs cases brought against individuals, and it prohibits the production, supply and use of hundreds of individually named compounds. It separates drugs into three classes, C, B and A, with progressively harsher punishments for those involved with drugs that are deemed to be more dangerous.

  The US, a key driver in the internationalization of drug controls, consolidated decades of piecemeal legislation into the 1970 Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. It named specific drugs that were banned federally, and classified drugs into five different bands, or schedules, based upon their addiction potential, with corresponding punishments for each. On 17 June 1971, serpentine president Richard Nixon announced the start of formal hostilities as he fired the first shot of the War on Drugs: ‘Ladies and gentlemen: I would like to summarize for you the meeting that I have just had with the bipartisan leaders which began at eight o’clock and was completed two hours later. I began the meeting by making this statement, which I think needs to be made to the nation: America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.’11

  The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was established in 1973, with responsibility for enforcement of drug policy handed to the Justice Department rather than the Treasury, underlining the new political view of drug abuse: previously an economic crime of tax evasion, now it was framed as a socio-moral offence.

  In a pattern that repeats to this day, drug laws actually exacerbated the social problems associated with drugs. It was the emergence of synthetic drugs from the 1960s onwards that enabled the creation of a mass market and a recreational drug counterculture, and that in turn was powered by the alchemical ability of chemists to produce drugs using nothing more than laboratory equipment and chemicals. But it was the act of banning substances for which demand was so high that made their manufacture, import and supply so disproportionately profitable – and popular. Drug laws have produced a situation where an ounce of gold, at around £1,000 in late 2012, costs about the same as an ounce of cocaine of average purity, which is a simple extract from a plant that grows wild with little attention. A kilo of crystal meth can be made for a few hundred dollars in Mexico, and is sold on the streets in individual deals for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  The process by which drugs are banned in the UK has been guided, since 1971, by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). It is a twenty-strong committee with experts taken from many disciplines – pharmacology, toxicology, neurology, criminology, law, chemistry and many more – whose job is to assess a drug’s harms via a process that draws on their collective expertise. This involves dozens of scientific procedures, and it can take many months to come to their conclusions; when they do, they recommend the best course of government action. It is not currently possible under British law simply to ban a compound because it has a psychoactive effect.

  Even in the first few years after the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act came into force, rogue chemists were pushing at its boundaries. Laws around drug use and drug chemistry tend to be highly complex, and suppliers will always find ways to sidestep the legislation.

  In 1975, a chemist in the Midlands had been churning out ring substitutions on illegal drugs, making hallucinogens and stimulants that did not feature in the Act. Specifically, he had been making a designer drug named bromo-STP, a potent hallucinogen. Police had found this and other new designer drugs on the streets, and the ACMD had recommended that it be banned. Britain uses a generic model of drug categorization and control, and so the government asked the ACMD to look at the drugs the Midlands chemist was making and to extrapolate from there the likely steps he or others might take next, using their collected chemical knowledge to suggest a law that might pre-empt such steps.

  John Ramsey, chief toxicologist at St George’s, University of London, explains the process. ‘When the government is trying to write a new drug law, advisors to the legislators are asked to try and guess what other compounds might be made by chemists in order to get around the legislation they are trying to put in pace. If you didn’t do that, it’d be like having a speed limit just for blue cars, when you want a speed limit for all cars,’ he says.

  In the UK in 1977, the House of Lords met to debate these proposed changes to the Act, which sought to outlaw many dozens of variations on the basic tryptamine and phenethylamine structures. ‘The Council took note of the fact that further substances of a like nature but which would not be caught by the entries in the Schedule to the Act could be synthesized with relative simplicity by making minor molecular changes to the basic structure of the chemical,’ said Lord Wells-Pestell on 20 June 1977 in the House of Lords. ‘The Council accordingly instructed its Technical Sub-Committee to explore the possibility of closing the door on the production of such substances for misuse purposes, but with the minimum interference with possible legitimate medical and research use, by controlling all possible variations in each series by means of a generic description, or formula.’12

  He then asked his learned friends to forgive him for what he was about to say next. He was attempting to communicate major and complex new proposed changes to Britain’s drug laws. The chemical relay race was about to begin in earnest, with lawmakers attempting to keep up with a discipline – or a crime – they barely understood and which, even then, was quicker and more responsive than the legislative process. ‘The Technical Sub-Committee found that the particular compounds which produced undesirable hallucinogenic effects fell into two categories. First, compounds derived from tryptamine, or from ring-hydroxy tryptamines which have been substituted at the nitrogen atom of the side chain by an alkyl group or groups. Examples of this category which are already controlled under the Act are psilocin and psilocybin. The second category was that of compounds derived from phenethylamine by alkyl or other substitution in the aromatic ring. Examples of this category which are already controlled under the Act are mescaline, and STP and Bromo STP to which I have already referred.’

  Lord Platt concurred, and thanked Wells Pestell for his work, and spoke for everyone present when he confessed his mystification. ‘My Lords, it is customary for the layman to associate the doctor with some supernatural powers. I should like to assure noble Lords that there is not one doctor in thousands who understands the exact nature of these drugs. The noble Lord has made clear to us the reasons for this order and the kinds of substances which are included in it. I should like to support it.’

  This judgment led to a ban on drugs such as MDMA in the UK long before they ever became available here, and dozens of other drugs, in a similar fashion, at one stroke. But it did not ban all of
the new possibilities. A precedent was set and a cycle began.

  Whatever your stance on their efficacy and fairness, Britain’s drug laws have historically been subtle, intelligent and complex pieces of legislation that draw on the expertise of many different strands of science. The United States has a different method of legislating around designer drugs, one which bans compounds on the loosely defined basis of their effects and similarity to banned drugs, which is discussed in full in the next chapter.

  But subtle or not, all of these laws were written in an era before mass communications – before most homes even had a telephone line or a colour television, when news came a few times a day on screens and twice a day on paper. They were drafted in an age when air freight costs were prohibitively high for individuals, in an age when communication with distant, communist China was so slow as to be impossible. When they were created, computers were room-sized, and were owned in the main by governments. They were first written, that is to say, almost half a century before the web was born. These laws were made five decades before the creation of an entirely new drug whose effect on users would be different from that of LSD, but equally profound. This drug would leak into the global water table on a scale that would have given even the most extreme LSD evangelist pause for thought.

  One individual, allied with technology, would be a central figure in this new race between chemists, users, the culture and the law: American Alexander Shulgin, the world’s most prolific and genius-tinged psychedelic chemist, the godfather of Ecstasy.

  Notes

  1. C. F. Gorman, ‘Excavations at Spirit Cave, North Thailand: Some Interim Interpretations’, Asian Perspectives, Vol. 13, 1970, pp. 79–108

  2. www.antiquecannabisbook.com/chap2B/China/Pen-Tsao.htm

  3. www.shipman-inquiry.org.uk/4r_page.asp?id=3107

  4. Quoted in J. C. Poggendorff, Annalen der Physik und Chemie (Wiley VCH, 1828), Vol. 88, pp. 253–256; www.chem.yale.edu/~chem125/125/history99/

  4RadicalsTypes/UreaPaper1828.html

  5. Frank J. Ayd, Jr. and Barry Blackwell, eds., Discoveries in Biological Psychiatry (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1970); www.psychedelic-library.org/hofmann.htm

  6. William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, The Yage Letters: Redux (Penguin Modern Classics, 2008), p. 24

  7. R. Gordon Wasson, ‘Seeking The Magic Mushroom’, Life, 13 May 1957

  8. Havelock Ellis, ‘Mescal, a New Artificial Paradise’, The Contemporary Review, January 1898

  9. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/revealed-dentist-who-introduced-beatles-to-lsd-415230.html

  10. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1966/

  aug/04/drugs-prevention-of-misuse-act-1964

  11. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3047

  12. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1977/

  jun/20/misuse-of-drugs-act-1971-modification#S5LV038 4P0_19770620_HOL_148

  The Great Ecstasy of the Toolmaker Shulgin1

  A squirrel-infested shack containing a chemistry laboratory lies at 1483 Shulgin Road, Lafayette, California 94549. Its grounds are strewn with cacti and fringed with greenhouses; the front door is rickety, its hinges rusted now. This is the unlikely epicentre of a global drugs culture. The products that have emerged from it, the methodology that produced these new compounds and the career of its owner make it, indisputably, the world’s most storied and influential drug lab.

  For much of the last century Alexander Shulgin worked in relative obscurity. But in the mid-to-late 1980s, a new drug, MDMA, later known as Ecstasy, started appearing on the streets of the USA and Europe. This substance, a stimulant that prompted emotional openness, would change the world’s drug habits for ever, bringing the psychedelic experience to millions who, before its advent, would perhaps never have considered using drugs.

  Alexander, or ‘Sasha’, Shulgin is, depending on your viewpoint, one of the greatest and most under-celebrated scientists of the twentieth century, or an irresponsible folk devil who has corrupted millions and killed dozens with the drugs he has created. He says he’s just a toolmaker. His most famous tool was MDMA, or 3,4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine; Ecstasy.

  Born in 1925 to Russian immigrant parents, Shulgin had an unremarkable early life, dropping out of Harvard aged nineteen to join the Navy. In the 2011 documentary about his life and work, Dirty Pictures, he mentions, casually, that for the years he was at sea he decided to memorize an entire biochemistry manual, thinking it would be ‘a neat challenge’. Those years of unwavering discipline are curiously at odds with his public image – which he hates – as Dr Ecstasy, a wild-haired, archetypal mad scientist. ‘It brings an element of notoriety that does no good,’ he has said.

  MDMA’s path from obscurity to ubiquity is so improbable as to sound fictional. Chemists at the German pharmaceutical company Merck could not have guessed, as they quietly synthesized the world’s first batch in 1912, that their work would one day be used first as a tool in psychotherapy – the discipline did not even exist at that time – nor that it would later surface as one of the world’s most popular recreational drugs. Referred to in the academic literature as ‘methylsafrylamin’, the new substance was designed to enable the company to make a clotting agent without having to produce it via a patented intermediary, or, to quote the firm’s papers, it was ‘a precursor in a new chemical pathway which was patented in order to avoid an existing patent for the synthesis of [a] clotting agent, hydrastinine’.2

  The instructions for the synthesis – the chemical construction in the laboratory – of MDMA lay undisturbed in the Merck archives for decades. But the foundations for much of today’s chaotic international drug scene were unwittingly laid in that very laboratory. Shulgin resynthesized MDMA in 1965, after receiving a mysterious tip-off about the compound from a fellow researcher in the field of psychedelic drug synthesis. He has never revealed more than that.

  MDMA is just one of the hundreds of psychedelic agents Shulgin synthesized and then tested – by ingesting them. After noting his experiences under each drug’s influence, he would carefully document his observations. Like a chemical Noah, he then carefully ushered his creations into safety, his chosen arks a pair of printed books containing dense and technical instructions on how to make them. His influence on generations of drug users is immeasurable yet mainly unknown; and his influence on the future of drug taking is only just starting to be correctly understood.

  In common with Huxley, Mayhew and Osmond, Shulgin’s chemical career began after a dose of mescaline hydrochloride crystals in the early 1950s. He spoke of the intensity of colours he experienced, of a childlike wonder, of accessing long-buried memories: ‘I thought: “What it’s doing is allowing me to communicate with parts of me that I had not communicated with for a long time.”’ He was, he says, astonished that a small quantity of white powder had unearthed such memories. If the powder did not itself contain those memories, he reasoned, then the answer to the mystery must reside within his own mind: ‘I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyse its availability.’3

  In 1954, Shulgin returned to his education, this time at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in biochemistry. He then worked for the Dow chemical company, where in 1962 he invented a biodegradable insecticide named Zectran. The product was so profitable that Dow gave him free rein to produce any compound he desired. He chose psychedelics, and set to work with the zeal of the convert, exploring all the possible variants of the mescaline form that had fascinated him so much.

  His experiments were carried out using precursors, or chemical building blocks, and reagents that set off chemical reactions to produce hundreds of new drugs, compounds that, until he invented them, did not exist anywhere in the universe. The process of producing new drugs in this way is known as ring substitution.

  The connection
s between basic chemical structures, drugs and the brain’s neurotransmitters can be represented in a molecular triptych. First, here is the molecule for phenethylamine: Power: DRUGS 2.0 Fig Ms page 45

  Phenethylamine

  Starting from the left of the molecule, the hexagonal structure is known as a phenyl group, and each of its vertices represents a carbon atom. This illustration shows a hexagonal ring of six carbon atoms. If that ring were not connected to any other groups or molecules, it would be known as a benzene ring. A hydrogen atom bonds to each carbon in that ring, but for visual economy, it is not represented here. Bolted on to the right of the phenyl group is an ethyl group, consisting of two more carbons (each of which is also bonded to more hydrogens). Finally, the last structure to the right represents the amine group, which is made up of one nitrogen and two hydrogen atoms connected to a carbon.

  ‘Phen-ethyl-amine’ is naturally produced in our bodies and brains, especially when we first fall in love, and there are high levels of it in chocolate, cheese and sausages. It is a neurotransmitter – a molecule that passes around our brains and activates receptors that ultimately govern whether we are hungry, angry, elated or sleepy. Phenethylamine also modulates other neurotransmitters and can accentuate their effects upon our minds and bodies.

  Second, here is a neurotransmitter that is related to and resembles phenethylamine, dopamine:

  Dopamine

  Dopamine is normally pumped around our brains when we are excited or sexually aroused, taking risks, or seeking or receiving rewards – or taking any one of dozens of other stimulants. It regulates muscle movement, the sensation of pleasure, and motivation.