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

by Power, Mike

  Like all academic chemists, after his work on 4-MTA had been peer-reviewed Nichols published it, on this occasion in the European Journal of Pharmacology in 1992.2 Papers such as these are available to anybody, either archived in public libraries or nowadays, in many cases, online. In the late 1990s 4-MTA was found on the streets of the UK and in shops in the Netherlands. When it was taken recreationally its effects were slow to build, and so users simply took more pills, chasing the effects. Most collapsed, and some died, as they had at the Shepton Mallet rave. It was one of the first instances of the widespread use of research chemicals, though this drug, in particular, was not mainly sourced online, and was sold under false pretences. Five people died from use of the drug in the space of about a year.

  4-MTA was initially sold in the ‘smartshops’ in Amsterdam, where psychoactive seeds, herbs and smart drugs, such as nootropics – supplements and non-licensed medicines that improve cognition and memory – were sold, legally. These shops also sold magic mushrooms, recovery kits that claimed to ease drug comedowns, Ecstasy-testing kits and other high-tech drug paraphernalia.

  The smartshops stopped selling 4-MTA in around 1998, when it was found to be dangerous. Remaining stock was then smuggled to the UK, where a seizure of 25,000 pills, each containing 100 mg of the compound, was found in 1998. Many more got through, with fatal consequences.

  Nichols explained on Erowid why he had originally made the compound:

  We had been looking for drugs that cause the release of neuronal serotonin, with the expectation that they might have therapeutic value similar to the SSRIs [anti-depressants similar to Prozac]. I am sad to see it being used on the streets. I can’t imagine what pleasure it might produce in users, because our tests with similar compounds in rats showed the substances to have aversive or unpleasant effects.3

  A user of the drug confirmed that in an Erowid report:

  I was screaming inside my head but couldn’t talk properly. I ran desperately around to try and get the experience to end, my mind was ruined. I knew I had gone too far taking this drug … amphetamines, psychedelics, even ketamine I can handle, but this was beyond recognition, beyond comprehension … I could hear voices telling me I was going to die and that I should probably end it all. I was sweating like a PIG. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, everyone else was breathing air. But air wasn’t right for me, I needed another gas. God, I felt lost. God was telling me I was.4

  After the gathered scientists of the LTG had discussed 4-MTA, it was no surprise that, in common with their European counterparts, they recommended that it be controlled.

  They then turned to the next item on their agenda: the impacts of a new and emerging designer drug craze that some of their members had identified, in which potent new psychedelic chemicals made by Alexander Shulgin were also being sold on the web. Minutes of the meeting note:

  Dr Les King of the Forensic Science Service outlined the Misuse of Drugs Act and its application primarily to the phenethylamine group of compounds. All Class A phenethylamines are ring-substituted and are hallucinogenic. These are listed both specifically and generally under the Act. Other phenethylamines are found in Class B (amphetamine and methylamphetamine) and Class C (benzphetamine). The book by Alex Shulgin PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) contains 170 ring-substituted compounds and these are covered under the Act as Class A drugs. Around 34 compounds listed in the book, together with 4-methylthio-amphetamine (4-MTA), were found to have escaped the general classification [in 1971 and 1977], but these are now to be covered by legislation under Statutory Instrument 1999.5

  The earlier ban of phenethylamine and tryptamine compounds in 1977 – when the Misuse of Drugs Act had first been amended to outlaw many ring-substituted amphetamines following the discovery of the psychedelic drug bromo-STP in the Midlands – had missed dozens of Shulgin’s compounds, mainly because his chemical ingenuity was more advanced than that of British lawmakers or government advisors.

  But now Shulgin’s books neatly did legislators’ and advisors’ work for them, by collating in one place with great accuracy all the remaining possible variations on the basic phenethylamine structure he had discovered until that point. The Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), the independent body that advises the British government on drug-related issues, would draw on this discussion by the LTG, and its advice to government was to blanket-ban the rest of PIHKAL and TIHKAL.

  In the event, thirty-six individually named drugs were added to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and the rest of Shulgin’s published work was outlawed in the UK, effective 1 February 2002. The drugs were categorized as Class A, alongside heroin, cocaine and other addictive substances, even though they are not, arguably, as harmful, and certainly in no way physically addictive.

  However, the new law inadvertently left the door open for any other drug that did not match these descriptions. Like water, drug designers would soon find their way around these obstacles. Indeed, the obstacles, if viewed from a certain perspective, conveniently outlined with great clinical, pharmacological and legal exactitude exactly what was legally permissible.

  On the other side of the Atlantic the loopholes were not only wider, they were created by an opaque law. The USA did not have a catch-all ban on the work of Shulgin, and instead relied on the 1986 Controlled Substance Analog Enforcement Act, which attempted to thwart the work of criminal chemists by banning drugs that were ‘similar’ to banned substances. ‘A controlled substance analog shall, to the extent intended for human consumption, be treated … as a controlled substance in schedule I,’ the Act declared, defining an analog (analogue in the UK) as a substance that is chemically substantially similar to the banned drug it is based on, that has a stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect similar to the parent molecule, or is presented as such.

  However, this blunt phrasing ignores the complexity of both organic chemistry and English grammar. To be illegal, need a new compound satisfy one, two, or all three of the requirements? The matter hinges on that clumsy, and innocuous ‘or’ at the end of the second clause, said Shulgin in PIHKAL, who added that the American law is written so unclearly as to appear to be a deliberate act of obfuscation, enabling legislators to jail people at will. In an area as complex as organic chemistry, it was legally and socially myopic.

  Long before the new drugs market burst out online in 2000, Damon S. Forbes of Colorado was brought before the courts for purchasing alpha-ethyl tryptamine (A-ET), a medicine in the tryptamine family, from a chemical supplier online. A-ET works as an antidepressant if you take a low dose; ramp it up and you’ll find yourself hallucinating. On 20 November 1992 Judge Lewis T. Babcock had the unenviable task of deciding whether A-ET was an analogue of DMT, under the Act. ‘Defendants contend that this section requires a twopronged definition. The first prong requires a substantially similar chemical structure. The second prong requires either a substantially similar effect on the human nervous system or the intent [my emphasis] to have such an effect. The government argues that a substance may be an analogue if it satisfies any of the three clauses. I agree with defendants,’ he said. ‘I hold that the definition of controlled substance analogue as applied to A-ET under the unique facts here is unconstitutionally vague. Without doubt, it provides neither fair warning nor effective safeguards against arbitrary enforcement,’ he ruled.6 The case was dismissed.

  Charges based on chemical structure and effect could be successfully challenged if you had good enough lawyers. Proof of intent to supply for use as a drug could be argued away with a label stating ‘Not for human consumption’ – a move of transparent sophistry that would partially inspire a later wave of net-based designer drug vendors to label their goods as ‘plant food’ or ‘bath salts’, winking at prospective buyers while dodging drug, food and medicine laws.

  The inadequate patchwork of international legislation around synthetic drugs was soon to be weakened still further by the connective power of the web. And no matter what the laws did or did n
ot say, there was a sense in the US – and beyond – in 2000 that online, drug laws didn’t really apply, especially when the chemicals people were buying did not feature on any banned list of substances anywhere in the world. After years of synthesis discussion on Usenet and at the Hive, by 2000, as web use grew and after the publication of PIHKAL online, the research chemical business was starting to take off. You could buy many of Shulgin’s psychedelics and have them delivered anywhere in the world in just a few days. The lid was lifted on the psychedelic treasure chest of PIHKAL and TIHKAL and hallucinogens and empathogens such as 2C-I, 2C-E, 2C-T-7, 5-MeO-DMT, 2C-D, 2C-T-2, and AMT became available to anyone with a credit card. Research chemicals were sometimes sold in very small doses and so large stocks were not necessary to maintain decent inventory: 1,000 mg, or one gram of 2C-E could quite easily be sold as 100 separate and powerful 10 mg doses.

  An early forerunner in the American research chemicals scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s was JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables, which had a bold Amanita muscaria mushroom on its home page, but links on pages beyond that brought up dozens of different compounds skirting legality, including 2C-T-7, a drug Shulgin noted for its colourful hallucinations, and which his research group responded to almost universally positively. One of them wrote:

  PIHKAL #43 2C-T-7

  (with 20 mg) I lay down with music, and become engrossed with being as still as possible. I feel that if I can be totally, completely still, I will hear the inner voice of the universe. As I do this, the music becomes incredibly beautiful. I see the extraordinary importance of simply listening, listening to everything, to people and to nature, with wide-open receptivity. Something very, very special happens at the still point, so I keep working on it. When I become totally still, a huge burst of energy is released. And it explodes so that it takes enormous effort to quiet it all down in order to be still again. Great fun.7

  These drugs had seldom been tasted by humans (except by friends of Shulgin), so Erowid became an essential source of information on both their effects and the best means of ingestion – whether they should be smoked, snorted or injected, or taken as an enema (a popular method known as ‘plugging’, favoured both by those looking for stronger effects and by the thrifty, for doses are lower if absorbed by the membranes of the anus).

  The sense of excitement and community was palpable during those years from 2000–4. New reports and new compounds were emerging with dizzying speed. Some of these drugs were being sold not only online but also in backstreet headshops, techno-hippy neon-lit caves, their hugger-mugger shelves also filled with the new nootropics such as piracetam, Chinese erectile dysfunction analogues and Oaxacan dreamherbs like Calea zacatechichi.

  The scene quickly became global. Japan was an early adopter and headshops there, after years of stocking ineffective legal highs, started selling compounds that had previously only been seen in Shulgin’s shack. As in today’s anarchic scene, the new drugs were sometimes sold with labels that hid their true contents. 2C-T-7 was sold online and in the streets of Roppongi, Tokyo, in 18 mg vials under the brand name Blue Mystic Powder (its true formulation wouldn’t emerge for years). People who bought it knew full well they were buying a drug, and shop-owners would advise, quietly, how it was supposed to be taken and what effects might be expected.

  In an interview published in September 2012 in VICE, a designer drug manufacturer told journalist Hamilton Morris about the roots of that drug’s appearance:

  Around 1998 there was a group of us that were trying to work on some of Shulgin’s thio-compounds, the 2C-Ts. They were a lot more difficult than the standard phenethylamines and we just couldn’t do it effectively. So eventually a private group of chemists and investors pooled their resources and commissioned a laboratory in Poland to produce a kilogram of 2C-T-7. It was ridiculously expensive, and the entire process felt like a really extreme measure. To the best of my knowledge, that group effort was the first instance of custom syntheses of a gray-market drug by the end users. Less than two years later, the chemical took off and was introduced as Blue Mystic in the Netherlands, and then as a pure chemical [online] in the States. 2C-T-7 was one of the first ‘research chemicals’ in the modern designer-drug sense, and I think some of its initial popularity came from the fact that it had been totally unavailable due to the difficulty of producing it in a clandestine lab.8

  The Netherlands was a European hotbed of the early research chemical scene, which existed as much on the streets there as it did on the web. A drug marketed as Explosion was sold diluted in bottles of so-called ‘room deodorizer’ in Holland. Their contents were later identified as a simple solution of BK-MDMA, or methylone – a sort of MDMA-lite that was created by Shulgin in the years after his books first appeared in print. (Nobody knew at the time, but it would have been legal to sell methylone in the UK, since its specific structural modification on the phenethylamine skeleton had been missed by both the 1977 and 2002 amendments.)

  Methylone is similar to MDMA, but its effects are less dramatic, less profound. Some users say it is a more ‘honest’ version of MDMA, which they feel can engender what seems in retrospect a phony intimacy. For every user, there is a different experience, though, and because of this many posts on forums where these drugs are discussed ended with the disclaimer acronym ‘YMMV’ – Your Mileage May Vary. Psychoactive drugs are subtler than alcohol, and the state of mind of users and the environment in which they consume them can change the effects of the drug enormously.

  The number of drugs on the market and their availability were expanding every few months in the late 1990s and the start of the 2000s. Some drugs and the groups using them were truly bizarre: one compound, DiPT, was said to make music sound as if it had dropped an octave, while another powerful tryptamine, DPT, was believed by members of The Temple of the True Inner Light, an esoteric religious movement in Manhattan, to be the literal flesh of God.

  Online vendors started to commission custom syntheses in laboratories and fine chemical companies in China started to take over most of the manufacturing. The names of the Chinese companies began to be jealously guarded – as well they might be, for this was slowly becoming a multimillion-dollar business. Chemists were winning a game the authorities did not even know they were playing, and people were taking, making, buying and selling all manner of novel psychoactive compounds and talking about them openly online. And they appeared to be evading legal repercussions for the first time, re-routing around the laws stemming from Nixon-era diktats and trite Reaganite homilies as lithely and blithely as data squirms past censors.

  The American war on drugs had created not only a market, but a motivation for both the sale and consumption of these drugs. If a drug user wanted to experience something akin to LSD without being jailed they could simply buy these neo-legal alternatives. Vendors believed, wrongly as it turned out, that the pseudo-scientific nomenclature of research chemicals and the enclosed instructions not to eat them would save them from the attentions of a 4 a.m. battering ram from the DEA. They believed that if it came to a court case, they could claim they sold the drugs as curios, collectors’ items for chemistry geeks. JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables had a fairly comprehensive disclaimer that it thought would protect it from the authorities. Its mockery may have cost it dear:

  Do not take orally (into your mouth) as a food, a beverage, a chew, a toothpick, a nutritional supplement, a medicine, a recreational drug or an agent of suicide. Do not inject, inhale, snuff, snort, smoke or slam. Do not stick, put, insert or throw into your or another person’s mouth, nose, ear, eye, anus, urethra, vagina or any other orifice or port-of-entry that may exist on your or another person’s body. Do not allow any carbon-based product to become moist, then allow it to decompose with a pathogenic micro-organism, then allow the foul-black-rot to come in contact with your body, (especially mucous membranes) or insert into the orifices previously mentioned, thereby causing an infectious disease. Do not do that. Also, do not do this: Do not deploy any of JLF’s pr
oducts as weapons of war or tools for violence such as dangerous high-speed projectiles aimed at people or property. Do not use for tinder to start a fire to commit arson or to burn yourself or another or any public or private property. Do not leave lying on the floor to trip over or slip on to incur personal injury.9

  Within that rather too-pleased-with-itself disclaimer there was an interesting reframing of drug use as a set of choices for which each user is responsible, with the individual the sole arbiter of right and wrong. The subtext was clear: if you know what you’re doing, if you have done your research, read the books and the sites and the trip reports, then why should the nation’s drug laws apply to you? It, and more generally the entire research chemical scene, was startlingly individualistic and felt like a digital-age updating of 1960s philosophies.

  But some did not use the new drugs correctly, and overdosed and died; the margins of error and safe usage were narrow. Several people died after dosing on 2C-T-7 incorrectly – they snorted it, which intensifies its effects since the drug is not metabolized first by the digestive system. These deaths led to the very first exposé of the research chemical scene, in Rolling Stone magazine, in 1999. In October 2000, a twenty-year-old Oklahoma man, Jacob Daniel Duroy, snorted about 35 mg of 2C-T-7. Within moments he was vomiting and yelling about being attacked by evil spirits. An hour and a half later, on the way to the hospital, he died of a cardiac arrest.