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

by Power, Mike

  In April 2001, seventeen-year-old Joshua Robbins from Cordova, Tennessee, did not heed the most important of warnings repeated endlessly online: he too snorted an unmeasured quantity of 2C-T-7. He died in pain, screaming, Rolling Stone magazine reported, ‘This is stupid, I don’t want to die.’ The same month an unnamed man died in the Seattle area after combining an unknown quantity of 2C-T-7 with 200 mg of MDMA.10

  It was alleged that one of these victims died from a compound sourced from JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables. The site was shut down by the DEA in 2001. The owner, Mark Niemoeller, received a sentence of three years of supervised probation, twelve months of home confinement with electronic monitoring, a fine of US$12,100, and the forfeiture of US$200,000 and a vehicle. But it was a warning shot that few in the industry heeded.

  In 2003, the DEA’s Operation Pipe Dream arrested fifty individuals who sold paraphernalia such as pipes, bongs, rolling papers and other such tat online. DEA acting administrator John B. Brown III told journalists: ‘One important facet of this case is the use of the Internet by drug paraphernalia marketers. There’s no easier way to reach young people – and to get around their parents – than through the Internet. It takes a lot of hard work to get at these sites. But we can assure worried parents that today there are 11 dot.coms that are dot.gone.’11

  Brown’s vanity in believing that he had controlled the situation seems even more pronounced when viewed from the perspective of 2013.

  The new drugs scene kept rolling for a few more years, but for every high, there’s a low, and the ultimate comedown hit hard when it came. It is possible that the 2003 launch of the Research Chemical Mailing List (RCML), which aimed to facilitate the purchase of these new drugs by recommending companies not listed on the .alt forums, played a part in the DEA’s discovery of this hidden scene. The RCML collated and aggregated information from trusted contributors and other sources and attempted to regulate what was, essentially, an illegal industry. ‘This list is an attempt to bring a comprehensive, up-to-date listing of all research chemical companies that do not require DEA licensing from their consumers,’ the admin announced in 2003. It went on, ‘Because of the publicity research chemicals have gained recently, it is no longer safe to publish the names of these companies in public forums like alt.drugs.psychedelics. There are also new companies springing up all the time. Some of these will undoubtedly be fraudulent. That is why we are promoting a private dialogue between list members for the discussion of these companies, the grade of chemicals they sell, and their prices.’12

  The RCML administrators were respected and despised in equal measure for the move, since it handed valued information out to anyone who subscribed. The research chemical market had, by 2003, grown worldwide to a multimillion-dollar business and presented lawmakers with a unique set of challenges. Users knew more than the police about the laws, and about the drugs they were using. The drugs themselves were so small they could be sent anywhere in the world. But money trails and paper trails were now added to data trails, and it was inevitable that the hammer would fall, and the party would end. On 21 July 2004, the authorities swooped. Operation Web Tryp was a DEA clampdown that resulted in the arrests of ten vendors and the closure of five research chemical vendor sites: Pondman.nu, American Chemical Supply, Omega Fine Chemicals, Rac Research and Duncan Lab Products.

  The DEA announced its success – the war was over, mission accomplished. DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy said:

  Operation Web Tryp investigated Internet websites distributing highly dangerous designer drug analogues under the guise of “research chemicals” primarily shipped to the US from China and India. These websites are known to have thousands of customers worldwide. One website operator is known to conduct estimated sales of US$20,000 per week, while another is known to have been in business for more than five years. These websites sold substances that led to the fatal overdose of at least two individuals and fourteen non-fatal overdoses. These dealers now enter into the privacy of our own homes to entice and sell destruction to our children veiled under the illusion of being safe and legal. The formulation of analogues is like a drug dealer’s magic trick meant to fool law enforcement. They didn’t fool us and we must educate our children so they are not fooled either. Today’s action will help prevent future deaths and overdoses, and will serve as notice for those dealing in designer drugs and the illegal use of the Internet.13

  Tandy didn’t give fuller details of the American Navy raves she briefly mentioned, where randy sailors were caught distributing and consuming a drug bought at one of the busted sites. The drug was 5-MeO-DIPT – a potent aphrodisiac. In common with many research chemicals, there has been little to no academic research carried out into the drugs’ effects and it is impossible to say how this famously erotic compound works. But reams of online reports attest to its potency in the bedroom. Shulgin reported in TIHKAL: ‘(with 7 mg, orally) In one hour I was in a marvelous, sexy place. Everything was shaded with eroticism. Sex was explosive.’14

  Operation Web Tryp was followed by other arrests in the US. In 2005, the owner of Pondman.nu, fifty-two-year-old David Linder of Bullhead City, Arizona, was jailed for 410 years, because a court found him responsible for the death of an eighteen-year-old man, Phillip Conklin in Hancock, New York, who took an overdose of another drug, AMT. Linder, known online as Dr Benway, was also much criticized by many of his customers for sloppy packaging and dubious business practices.

  Operation Web Tryp was the first time the US had targeted drug dealing on the internet, and the first time the research chemical scene got coverage in serious newspapers and magazines. But despite the seriousness with which it regarded the crimes, the US did not judge the threat level correctly and therefore did not change its drug laws. It left the Analog Act in place and did not add many new compounds to the schedules. The fuzzy edges of that law meant that hundreds of drugs existed in a legal limbo and the customers were not an easy target for prosecution.

  Only in the UK, where these drugs were completely and specifically illegal, was the decision made to target users. A few months after Operation Web Tryp, on 7 December 2004 officers involved in its British counterpart, Operation Ismene, arrested twenty-two people for purchasing the hallucinogenic drug 2C-I, again a Shulgin compound, from the companies busted in the US. Dozens of police officers from fourteen counties stormed people’s homes for the crime of importing small personal doses of the ultra-rare psychedelics which, thanks to the 1999 law change, were illegal. One of those arrested in the UK action recalls ‘the day of infamy’: ‘December 7th – it was like bloody Pearl Harbor! It was early one morning when they came for me. I was sleeping in and I answered the door bollock naked – I’d got stoned the night before. Next thing I know I’ve got a load of police in my flat, telling me to get dressed because they had a woman police constable there with them. A few months previously, I’d bought some 2C-I online, a tiny bit, from an American research chemicals vendor. But I thought the cops were looking for my hash, so I just co-operated, and handed them my stash tin. I had about 80 mg of 2C-I left. It seemed best to just be polite to them, I handed it over with my hash. They arrested me, but no charges were brought. I think the UK operation was carried out in order to appease the American Drug Enforcement Agency,’ John told me.*

  The boss of Britain’s now-defunct National Crime Squad, Jim Gamble, who handled the raids, announced the events to the BBC. ‘The internet has become the street corner for many drug users. By working in partnership with the DEA, the Crime Squad and police forces throughout the country have been able to arrest people suspected of purchasing drugs online. A drug supply route between the USA and the UK has been dismantled,’15 he thundered.

  The ‘drug supply route’ he claimed to have destroyed was actually a loose, unconnected group of twenty-two people making private purchases of extremely rare phenethylamines mainly for their own use. No one was jailed, and most were released without charge. It was hardly the crime of the century, and nor was it
the investigation of the century – the customers of the websites had all paid for the chemicals using their credit cards. The DEA had emailed their names and addresses to the British police, who simply knocked on their doors or smashed them open with battering rams.

  The British police did not monitor the online designer drugs market after that raid, and trained no officers in web surveillance techniques specific to drugs. Meantime, chemists and users’ knowledge of the law, and of the new drugs available, were growing faster than the police could keep up with.

  ‘The research chemical scene was an underground thing at first, there were only twenty-two of us in the whole UK who got nicked,’ says John. ‘But it really started to take off after that. I think it was Operation Ismene that brought it to the attention of many more people. It was all over the papers. People who’d never thought of buying drugs online thought: “Oh, great, look – you can buy drugs online!”’

  Over the next few years the unintended consequences of those raids were to crystallize. The police had wanted to clamp down on the trade, but had only encouraged its proliferation. And with the number of people using the web growing and connection speeds getting faster every year, they would soon be running a slow second place to the frontrunners in the field.

  Notes

  1. Shulgin, PIHKAL, p. x

  2. Xuemei Huang, Danuta Marona-Lewicka and David E. Nichols, ‘p-Methylthioamphetamine is a Potent New Non-Neurotoxic Serotonin-Releasing Agent’, European Journal of Pharmacology, Vol. 229, Issue 1, December 1992, pp. 31–38; www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/

  0014299992902829

  3. www.erowid.org/chemicals/4mta/4mta_info1.shtml

  4. jimmywoo, ‘Flatlined Beyond Comprehension: experience with 4-MTA (ID 83154)’, 30 April 2010, erowid.org/exp/83154

  5. www.erowid.org/psychoactives/law/countries/uk/

  uk_misuse_phen_2.shtml

  6. www.erowid.org/psychoactives/law/cases/federal/

  federal_analog1.shtml

  7. www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/

  pihkal043.shtml

  8. www.vice.com/read/criminal-chlorination-0000350-v19n9

  9. http://everything2.com/title/JLF+Poisonous+Non-Consumables

  10. www.erowid.org/chemicals/2ct7/2ct7

  .shtml#deaths

  11. ‘Operation Pipe Dreams Puts 55 Illegal Drug Paraphernalia Sellers out of Business’; www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2003/February/03_crm

  _106.htm

  12. www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/

  pr072204.html

  13. www.erowid.org/psychoactives/research_chems

  /research_chems_info1.shtml#dea_announcement

  14. www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/

  tihkal37.shtml

  15. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4111625.stm

  * Not his real name.

  The Calm Before the Storm, and a Curious Drought

  After the Web Tryp and Ismene busts in the UK and the US, the global research chemical scene hunkered down and went even deeper underground. Many users commented on forums that the people involved in this drug culture were responsible adults who were being made to pay the price for the greed and indiscretion of the suppliers. Liberty was now clearly at stake for some people, and the net drug culture was on the radar of the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. There was less online chatter about the drugs and their effects, as an informal code of silence settled like the dust after a stampede, but the scene continued happily enough.

  Users like Benny, a pseudonymous ‘thirty-something office worker’ were by late 2004 discovering the joys of PIHKAL for themselves. Benny, who prefers not to reveal his nationality, was finishing university and was winding down his commitments at NGOs, where he volunteered and worked as a political activist, and now had time on his hands. He had always been fascinated by psychoactive drugs, but he was living in a backwater where there were no good drugs available, so he went online and ordered a mushroom growkit from a Dutch smartshop. He successfully grew mushrooms, was surprised by how easy it was, and said his first trip, in retrospect, was almost an overdose. ‘It changed me. Irrevocably. From then on, psychedelics became part of my life,’ he told me.

  He, like many other research chemical users, wanted to use these drugs as a means to self-exploration and self analysis: ‘Psychedelics disassembled reality and showed me a new way of looking at basic concepts like time, space, the concept of self and the distance we have from other people; or the construct of one’s own personality, and the way we manipulate and write and rewrite the narrative that we think is our life. This was fascinating – to take a step back and rethink those concepts that I’d taken for granted all my life. After coming back from the first trip, a few things were clear: first, psychedelics would gradually change me. And I was keenly aware that the changes would be beneficial, that they were benign in nature; I was sure of it so I pursued it. In life, you’re battling through the undergrowth and every so often it’s good to climb a tall tree to get your bearings – this is what psychedelics do for me.’

  Benny started reading obsessively about the psychedelic experience, and soon came upon Shulgin’s work, which was by then available free online to anyone with a cheap home computer and an equally inexpensive modem.

  ‘With friends I had made on Usenet, I found that many of those substances were apparently readily available from fine chemical companies,’ he said. ‘I then wrote a lengthy and completely fake research proposal to a venerable chemical company, a reputable and viable operation which caters to universities. They were happy to open an account for me and I ordered some 2C-I.’ This is the drug many UK residents were arrested for in the Operation Ismene busts. 2C-I is a ring-substituted phenethylamine, a classically psychedelic drug that enhances colours and gives users a sharp energy jolt. It is active at around 10 mg, and one of Shulgin’s group of human experimenters recorded a positive experience of the drug in PIHKAL entry #33:

  (with 16 mg) The 16 was a bit much, I realized, because my body was not sure of what to do with all the energy. Next time I’ll try 14 or 15. However, my conversations were extremely clear and insightful. The degree of honesty was incredible. I was not afraid to say anything to anyone. Felt really good about myself. Very centered, in fact. A bit tired at day’s end. Early bedtime.1

  Benny found a firm in Switzerland that supplied the compound. ‘I don’t even know why this firm would carry this chemical,’ he said. ‘They usually carried pharmaceutical intermediates, but this one stood out and I ordered it … I found it so ridiculous when I received it … How could someone allow me to order powerful drugs from the internet and receive it via regular mail? It was inconceivable – and ridiculously easy. This was long before [today’s sites] came along and made it as easy as ordering books from Amazon.’

  In common with many other psychonauts, Benny soon perfected his skills at unearthing sources for the drugs found in PIHKAL and TIHKAL, using Google to search the new large chemical directories that came online at this point. If you simply type in a number identifying the chemical, you receive a list of companies that can provide it, with price quotes. ‘I’d compile huge lists of them and go through every one of them and try to see if they had anything interesting and to see if they would be prepared to send it to me,’ said Benny, who became something of a psychedelic completist. Pioneers like this were at this time acting in relative isolation; newsgroups and bulletin boards were the preferred hangouts, but within a few years as the technology became more transparent and web use became ever greater, such actions would become much more common. The entire process of researching and buying new designer drugs was becoming even more commercialized and commodified as internet use proliferated. For some people in the twenty-first century, taking research chemicals became as normalized as taking Ecstasy had been for their counterparts just a few years previously.

  In around 2004, net speeds in Europe changed as broadband connections became widely available, and the continent started to play
catch-up with the US, where faster connections had been commonplace for a few years. Telephone firms’ monopolies were being dismantled, their services packaged out, and bidding invited from the private sector. Customers started to pay flat subscription fees for constant access to the internet, rather than paying per minute to dial in, and the net became firmly embedded into everyone’s daily lives in a way that had never been seen before. Previously, modem speeds had been limited to 56K; broadband connections increased the speed by a factor of ten overnight, to 0.5MB. That doubled within a year.

  Faster speeds meant net users spent more and more time online as the experience grew less frustrating, and network effects – whereby the service became more useful as it became more populated – started to be felt. There was a corresponding increase in the use of the web for people with niche interests, who could now coalesce and communicate in ways that previously were available only to those with the skill to configure Usenet servers and subscriptions. Thousands of online communities were formed by people using the newly popular and much simpler bulletin board systems, such as those released by vBulletin. Some were open source, meaning that owners could tweak the boards’ look and feel and functionality easily, and that they were easier to technically configure than any previous web community software.

  Some of these forums were dedicated to the discussion of psychoactive drugs, indeed all drugs, from opiates and psychedelics to MDMA and research chemicals. There were sites discussing the most specific and niche of psychoactive interests, from DMT extraction to magic mushroom cultivation, from ways to potentiate a heroin hit to the most efficient ways to grow marijuana or make crack cocaine out of powder cocaine. There was a similar atmosphere to the early alt.newsgroup days, but the scene was much more open and accessible to non-expert users, and much more heavily populated. Whereas Usenet groups might involve a few score emails a day, now thousands of conversations were carried out in virtual real time across hundreds of topics. The online drug culture was becoming more established and more mainstream; this was a cultural as well as a technical shift.