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

by Power, Mike

  The Bluelight bulletin board launched in its earliest iteration in 1997 as a small community for American MDMA users. It grew in size and influence following Operation Web Tryp, as more people became aware of the possibility of buying drugs online and net use became more prevalent, and is today one of the net’s busiest communities of drug-users, with over four million posts on 200,000 threads. There are 195,000 registered users, and the site gets over one million visitors each month and serves over three and a half million pages in the same period. In the last year, it has had 10,967,685 visitors and served almost fifty-five million pages, demonstrating that the site is read by many who are casual visitors rather than registered members. It is a one-stop shop for anyone who is researching drugs and who demands detail and accuracy – something sorely lacking in most media reports and official discourse. The popularity of the site is one of the key measures of the popularity of the online drug scene. It now rivals Erowid as a place to learn about research chemicals and other drugs, though it is far less formal and respectable.

  Although Bluelight is a freewheeling and anarchic place, it has an avowed goal of harm reduction, a drug strategy that is now commonplace in countries such as the UK. Harm reduction advocates would argue that as long as people are going to take drugs, and they remain available, and jail capacity and public funds are not infinite, the most rational response is to reduce the amount of harm drugs cause users. This, officially, might mean offering advice on how to inject heroin hygienically, or offering needle exchange programmes. On the web, it could include information on the steps you might take in order to diminish an MDMA comedown, or advice on making and smoking crack cocaine less harmfully. The concept, naturally, is rejected by the less liberal, and by those ignorant of the realities of drug use in the twenty-first century.

  Bluelight’s most rigorously enforced rule is: no sourcing. Ask for a source for drugs or research chemicals and your threads will be deleted. It’s an understandable position to take when the substances under discussion are either illegal or extremely potent and can harm inexperienced or ignorant users.

  The site is well moderated by those expert in each field of the subforums, which cover hundreds of drugs and other areas of interest. The users there range from the supremely expert to the inarticulate to the terrified or addicted. But generally Bluelighters are at least a couple of years ahead of the curve when it comes to new drug trends, and some of them far more informed than many doctors, police, or policymakers, and the site is often approached by radical academics looking for assistance with cutting-edge research into users’ changing habits. It is both the frontline of an avant-garde web drug culture, and the first place any informed drug user or academic looks when new chemicals appear on the international markets, especially the online market.

  Many posters share their encyclopedic, often professional or academic knowledge freely, collaborating to advance knowledge of harmful combinations or to explain dangerous metabolic processes that the body exerts on drugs. For example, when cocaine is taken with alcohol, the liver bonds the two molecules – cocaine and ethanol – to produce cocaethylene, a more toxic and longer-lasting poison than either alone. Advice such as this from expert users with knowledge of biochemistry sits happily alongside the confused ramblings of newcomers. Experts also explain which combinations of drugs lead to better or more intense experiences, and PhD-level knowledge of biopharmacology and organic chemistry is sometimes required to decipher some of the information. Some vendors worldwide have extracted information on new drugs from posts written by the site’s expert users, then synthesized the compounds and sold them on the web.

  Some users on the site are themselves chemists, or know chemists who make new drugs in home laboratories, much like latter-day Shulgins. Synthesis discussion is banned on Bluelight, but naming novel compounds and reporting on your experiences with them is not, so vendors need only cut and paste the chemical names from these trip reports, email them to labs in China or Eastern Europe, commission a custom synthesis, and then import and sell them.

  Again, Ecstasy had a starring role in the genesis and development of this online hangout. ‘Bluelight began … as a small message board hosted on Bluelight.net called the MDMA Clearinghouse,’ said Alasdair Manson, a forum moderator. There, people gathered to accumulate every scrap of information on how to take Ecstasy safely and enjoyably, the web and users filling the void of official inaction. ‘It had a small number of regular participants and was a close community. It was suggested that a more permanent home be created so the board could be stable and the content could be better managed and stored more permanently,’ Manson told me.

  The site today is well organized into subfora, with support groups for people addicted or suffering from problematic use. Each forum is managed fairly by voluntary moderators and discussions are, in the main, polite affairs. I asked Manson how he felt about the fact that people might read Bluelight and harm themselves as a result of information they found there. Any journalist with malicious intentions could scoop dozens of stories and quotes from the site to use as evidence that it encourages damaging behaviour. He told me, ‘It’s inevitable that, given the very nature of the subject matter, people will learn about things they didn’t know if they had never visited Bluelight. Could one person learn something here which might ultimately harm them? Sure, but users also have to take responsibility and that’s a common theme in discussion at Bluelight. I do not believe we’re enablers in the broader picture, and perhaps the single most obvious example of that in practice is our rule about “no sources”. I’m proud of the fact that, ten years after I joined, Bluelight is still going strong and doing its job. If anything, I’m most proud of the fact that Bluelight is very much a product of its participants. A core of dedicated individuals (staff and participants) has donated time and money to keeping it running. People use Bluelight because they can’t get the information it provides anywhere else. The world is a free market of ideas now, and the internet is an enabling tool the scale and shape of which we’re only just beginning to understand.’

  The site is far more trusted by drug users than official services such as the UK’s much-derided Talk to Frank drugs helpline. It’s a difficult truth for the government to accept, but people are taking more drugs than the authorities even know exist, in ways they would not believe, and it is sites such as Bluelight that keep them safe. Another Bluelight moderator is clear on why official services can only ever fail to achieve their goals. ‘People don’t take government services seriously; it’s the official tone that’s the problem,’ he told me.

  That official tone can be more than high-handed – it can be dangerous. ‘Someone I’m very close to rang the government’s Talk to Frank [helpline] when they were having a panic attack after overdoing a few substances and booze,’ said one poster on the drugs subforum of Urban75, another busy bulletin board based in Brixton, south London. ‘Frank told them they were very stupid and that mixing drugs and alcohol can lead to brain damage and death. Really cool thing to say to someone who’s having a panic attack.’ Mike Slocombe, Urban75’s owner, told me, ‘People are going to take drugs no matter what the government think. On Urban75, we give honest advice, like an older brother who’s been there, done that.’

  From 2004 onwards, the web was changing the way people swapped information and bought and sold goods. Web use started to shift inexorably away from a passive model of consumption into a more active model of participation. This was the beginning of the Web 2.0 era, though it wouldn’t be called that for a few years. It became possible for complete technical novices to self-publish web content using simple blogging software, doing away with the need for any skills in HTML or other coding languages. Free webhosts launched, supported by advertisements, giving users the ability to share and disseminate their ideas and thoughts at no cost.

  Wikipedia, launched in January 2001, was arguably the first widespread Web 2.0 technology, for which users supplied content using their own expertise and drawing
on their own interests and obsessions. At first the content was as flaky and patchwork as an online encyclopedia created by untrained volunteers might tend to be. Today, though, the site has twenty-three million articles, 4,079,607 of them in English, and grows by the day, as volunteers, or Wikipedians, mass-collaborate to update, create and revise the pages almost instantly. (By comparison, the Encyclopedia Britannica, which halted printing in 2012, had just 85,000 articles.) Wikipedia soon became an essential resource for those looking for information about new drugs, and the site started publishing entries on the drugs along with their Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) numbers – the unique identifying code that serves as a chemical Dewey Decimal system. With this information, would-be vendors or users could easily find chemical firms that carried the compounds they wanted.

  In 2003 MySpace opened the web to a whole generation of teenagers, to whom the concepts of packet-switching were as alien as the concept of not using the net as their first port of call for entertainment or communication. The site, with its super-vernacular design, clumsy layouts and clashing colours, was as riotous and impenetrable as any poster-adorned bedroom wall of previous eras.

  It wasn’t until late 2004 that the phrase Web 2.0 was officially coined by technologist Tim O’Reilly, who correctly identified the future of the web – it would become a model driven by user-generated content, mass collaboration, global sharing and cross-border participation.2 That year, The Facebook, a web version of the college yearbook popular at American universities, launched. By 2008, it had lost its definite article and gained 100 million users; just four years later, in 2012, a figure comparable to the entire population of India – 955 million people – had an account and the site became many people’s primary locus of online activity. Every redesign of Facebook’s software was conceived and executed to encourage more and deeper sharing of content, to open and ease the flow of information from one person to another. Users have happily, if unknowingly, delivered millions of gigabytes of valuable data to firms whose only specialism is to analyse likely ways to use that data to sell users things. Within a few years, consumer goods would have their own pages, and people would befriend these brands.

  In 2005, YouTube came online and video sharing soon became not just a possibility, but a cultural norm. Today forty-eight hours of video are uploaded every minute, as handheld cameras have given way to smartphones and net users can add content on the move. Today, almost eight years of content are uploaded every day. The following year Twitter launched and was initially derided as a passing fad, a super-condensed, super-trivial microblogging platform for narcissists. Now, it is an essential tool for its 140 million members, who include politicians, brand specialists, marketeers and journalists.

  The launch of the iPhone in 2007, like the Macintosh in 1984 and the iMac in 1998, changed the way people used and made the net. Now, the web was mobile. Today, Apple alone has sold 315 million mobile internet devices. Hundreds more types of smartphones were launched in the following year. The western world wasn’t just online, it was always online, and producing and sharing content and information whose nature is human, but whose scale is beyond all human understanding. In 2000, there were 361 million people online. By the end of 2011, that figure had increased to 2.27 billion, with the majority of them, over one billion, in Asia. The number of web users in Europe has quintupled in the last decade in Europe, and doubled in North America. Overall, internet connections worldwide increased by 528 per cent between 2000 and 2011. Nearly everybody in all countries that had electricity in the northern hemisphere, in the rich countries, in the countries where boredom could be measured and avoided in the flickering of a synapse – in the drug-consuming countries – had net connections. The cultural shift away from suspicion and confusion over the net had been replaced by one of complete human-network symbiosis.

  By 2004 most net users were comfortable making purchases online. Amazon had gathered millions of credit card details and delivery addresses for its customers, and had started to increase its offering beyond books. It had also opened its marketplace to hundreds of thousands of other vendors, and allowed them an unbranded version of its highly complex ecommerce system. Suddenly every retailer in the UK and US had the option of selling their goods online easily. Meantime, Apple’s music service iTunes had harvested the credit card details of all its users and made the experience of buying music as simple as point and click. Online payment processors such as PayPal were now trusted and used by millions of people. Competitors and alternatives started gaining traction; among them Canadian firm AlertPay.

  That growth soon became deep-rooted: the Interactive Media in Retail Group said in a May 2011 report that business-to-consumer global ecommerce sales in 2010 amounted to 591 billion euros – a twenty-five per cent year-on-year increase, with the trillion euro mark set to be broken in 2013.3

  One of the first moments of mass online drug purchasing happened in the UK in 2004. Information started to come online at about this time that clarified a long-confused area of British drug law. Britain’s indigenous strain of hallucinogenic magic mushrooms, Psilocybe semilanceata, or liberty caps, with their distinctive nipple-shaped domes, are powerful, natural psychedelics, and grow only in the early autumn before the winter frosts set in (liberty caps are notoriously fragile and cannot easily be raised artificially or indoors). All mushrooms are the fruiting crop of a much larger organism, the mycelium, which lives underground and survives many years. This means that fields where the fungi appear annually will deliver the goods year after year, but their whereabouts is often not shared. These mushrooms grow in huge abundance in many areas of the UK, and since the 1970s free festival scene and the post-LSD growth in interest in psychedelics they have been a regular feature on the psychedelic cognoscenti’s calendar.

  Until 2003, most people in the UK who used them knew the law: mushrooms were legal in their natural state, and you could only be prosecuted for having them if they were dried, frozen or cooked – that is, if they had been prepared for consumption. Debate among the sarcastic and the pedantic was split as to whether human beings lying on the ground and grazing on them, as other animal species might naturally do, were actually committing a crime.

  But it was well known that the Dutch allowed their citizens to buy artificially cultivated psychedelic mushrooms. These were sold fresh, year round in small punnets in shops that catered to the local market as well as curious visitors to Amsterdam. Might the web and the new technologies of ecommerce be able to bridge the gap? The answer came in 2003, when Home Office official Ian Breadmore sent an extraordinarily, if inadvertently, helpful letter to a headshop owner who had inquired as to the legality of fresh magic mushrooms in the UK. Breadmore told the inquirer with brilliantly British bureaucratic efficiency that it was not illegal to grow and pick psilocybin mushrooms and eat them fresh; nor was it illegal to sell or give away a growing kit containing mycelium, and nor was it illegal to sell or give away a freshly picked mushroom that had not been prepared in any way.4

  An online market began and grew rapidly from 2004 onwards, and there were dozens of sites selling the mushrooms fresh in polystyrene punnets via mail order all over the UK. These websites also sold simple growkits that would yield hundreds of grams of fresh mushrooms – enough for several people to hallucinate a weekend away – costing only ten to twenty pounds. It was inevitable that offline retailers would soon want a piece of the action, and soon every high street bong vendor and online headshop in the land got in on the act and started selling the fresh mushrooms and the growkits.

  These new mushrooms looked nothing like the spindly liberty cap: they were Mexican breeds, huge and chunky specimens of Psilocybe cubensis, descendants of samples harvested from fields of cow dung in Mexico and Cambodia, initially grown in Holland and sent by chilled express freight into Heathrow daily. The net had facilitated the exchange of expertise and information, and brought together consumers and producers across the seas. Later the UK market supplied itself. You could buy m
agic mushrooms legally in dozens of British cities. On Oxford Street in central London, shops sold them blatantly, advertising their wares with psychedelic hoardings in the street. By summer 2005 they were on sale in chic market stalls in wealthy London suburbs. Festival stands sold out within hours of opening, while eBay vendors did a roaring trade. At free parties the fungi were passed around daintily by dreadlocked ravers like bizarre hors d’oeuvres as the sun rose. Mushrooms were being eaten openly at gigs and parties and barbecues and raves as for a few brief months the government dallied and prevaricated.

  Just before Parliament went into recess in August, it closed the legal loophole that had been exploited by vendors in a ‘wash-up’ session, where outstanding legislation is quickly written into law, and mushroom vending became illegal.

  The mushroom craze demonstrated that as soon as new drugs became available, especially if they were legal, British people would take them. What’s more, they were happy to buy their drugs online in the same way they now bought books from Amazon.

  Fresh magic mushrooms were banned in Holland in December 2008 too, after a seventeen-year-old French girl, Gaelle Caroff, jumped to her death from a bridge whilst visiting the city on a school trip. She had a history of psychiatric problems, the Associated Press reported. Paul Van den Berg, who worked at a shop selling the mushrooms, told the Daily Telegraph, ‘It’s all the fault of tourists, especially the Brits. They misuse alcohol at home and come over here to do the same with hash and the so-called “magic mushrooms”.’5

  Dutch ingenuity quickly supplied an alternative: psychoactive sclerotia, or truffles, were soon bred for mass-market sale (they had been available previously, but the ban sparked a boom in their cultivation). These truffles offered exactly the same effects as the banned product, and remain completely legal at the time of writing in Holland. They are illegal in the UK, but for a few hundred pounds many vendors in Amsterdam will happily and illegally send a kilo or less by Fedex or UPS or DHL to most countries in the world.