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

by Power, Mike

  Methcathinone

  Methamphetamine (crystal meth)

  Mephedrone

  Over the next few hundred words Kinetic laid out, in a remarkably concise yet exhaustive guide, the method, tools, chemical reagents and potential pitfalls involved in the manufacture of this new drug. He did this not to earn money, or to get a job, but to show off his mastery of organic chemistry, to gain kudos, to share his knowledge freely. It was certainly not his intention to trigger a worldwide drug craze, but within a few years, that’s exactly what happened. Kinetic told how he had spent the day synthesizing the material, and a few hours after scraping out the 4.8 g of crystals from his reaction cylinder, had snorted 400 mg. His central nervous system rode the waves of powerful, if short-lived euphoria. He wrote:

  400 mg was quite a lot to take in one evening, but it wasn’t too long-lasting so I kept ‘topping up’. The rushes after each line were amazing, and I remember feeling very much like I do when coming up on Ecstasy, but four times! That beautiful weak feeling, when you just think ‘Oh, fuck, I feel so fucking good …’ It’s more euphoric than I remember my first time on the butane methcathinone analogue to be. I felt very compelled to do things, but I was completely unable to keep my concentration on literature searches I was trying to do at the time. I had a very strong urge to socialise, and almost went clubbing, but thought better of it. I could feel the rushes of energy coming across me, and after that, a fantastic sense of well-being that I haven’t got from any drug before except my beloved Ecstasy.

  Kinetic’s new drug, which later became known as mephedrone, was indeed similar to Ecstasy, in that it made you euphoric, excited and energetic, and it provoked empathy and openness. Not only that, but mephedrone was easy to make and it was legal in most countries in the world, since no country had ever seen a methcathinone analogue before, and in the UK, certainly, there had never been a need to pre-emptively ban modifications around the basic methcathinone molecule. The drug’s main difference to Ecstasy was its short duration – about forty-five minutes compared to the four- to five-hour Ecstasy experience. This would make it addictive – as soon as users came down, they wanted more.

  On 5 April 2003, at 21.33 exactly, Kinetic posted another message: ‘Oh, and I really just have to say a big “Fuck You” to the UK government and their stupid drug laws, since I’m high as a kite and there’s nothing they can do.’

  Kinetic was right: he was defiantly exploring a class of drugs, cathinones, analogues of which had never been controlled in British law, unlike the phenethylamines and tryptamines. And as there was no analogue ruling in UK – unlike America – that blanket-banned products and left legal doubt hanging over users and vendors, he simply rerouted around the law, safe in the knowledge that by obeying it, he could not be punished. Nor could those who followed his instructions, four years later, to create the legal drug that would fill the MDMA gap.

  The consequences of this underground bulletin board posting were as unintended as they were unanticipated. Perhaps just a few dozen highly dedicated, highly educated scientists (and various ‘lurkers’ who listen in, but do not contribute to the discussion) were privy to Kinetic’s quietly seismic message. But that post fired the starting gun on the current chemical arms race between clandestine chemists and governments worldwide. ‘The designers of mephedrone stumbled across something with the pharmacology somewhere between cocaine and Ecstasy that was cheap, legal and freely available. And this coincided with a drop in the quality and availability of other drugs,’ says John Ramsey, chief toxicologist at St George’s, University of London.

  The global MDMA drought caused the mephedrone phenomenon in a pitch-perfect piece of substance displacement – if one drug disappears, another will replace it. Substance displacement would soon cause the new research chemical scene, now rebranded and introduced to the public as the legal highs scene, to grow at a rapid rate. The internet and the use of social media and new ecommerce techniques guaranteed its influence spread even faster. The way many drugs are bought, sold and taken in the UK and across the world was to change for ever.

  At first, mephedrone was hidden inside branded products rather than being sold as a chemical compound in its own right. In early 2007, an Australian subforum on the Bluelight bulletin board was buzzing over the release of branded legal highs named NeoDoves and SubCoca. They were sold by a firm named Biorepublik, who operated out of Tel Aviv, Israel. Previously, legal highs were regarded as a rip off, a hotchpotch of allegedly psychoactive herbs, caffeine and piperazines, the kind of products sold as Herbal Ecstasy at dayglo stands in festivals to the young, the gullible, or those facing drugs tests at work. Nobody knew what was in the Biorepublik products, but they ate and snorted them by their thousands. Australia, like the UK, geographically isolated and without land borders to any other nation, making smuggling harder, suffered the worst of the MDMA drought, as did the UK, and after the MDMA bust that year, the market there was starved. Cocaine is also extremely expensive in Australia – costing AUS$300, or around £195 per gram compared to £50 per gram in the UK – which is why the synthetic stimulant drugs market in Australia is so much more developed and entrenched than it is in the UK. Crystal methamphetamine use has grown there more dramatically than it has in Europe – three per cent of Australians over the age of fourteen have used the drug.

  Biorepublik, run by a mysterious and elusive character, pseudonymously known as Doron Sabag, sold these new products as health supplements, in plain capsules. Sabag refused to reveal what was in them, setting a disturbing pattern that would be seen repeatedly in the coming years. Producers wanted to keep the formula secret to preserve their profits. And users were unanimous in their verdict: the NeoDoves and SubCoca worked, and they worked well. They made users feel amazing, briefly, and, at four pounds each, represented better value than the contaminated Ecstasy pills dominating the market. Customs officials were powerless to stop their import since they were sold as health supplements and their contents were not listed. What’s more, they were being imported from Israel, not a country known for clandestine designer-drug manufacture and export, so packages were unlikely to be profiled and opened in any case.

  The capsules sold in the hundreds of thousands worldwide throughout 2007 and 2008, and supply soon outstripped demand. Users were rhapsodizing about their MDMA-like qualities. That their sweat after taking them smelled like an old kipper left out in the sun was no great hardship. The smell was caused by poor syntheses and by the fact that the compound was also badly dried, meaning solvents and by-products, some of which smelt fishy, remained in the end product – so much so that Swedish users referred to the drug as krebbe, or crab.

  The smell, along with the jittery comedowns, and the pounding heart and split lips and bleeding gums and ground-down teeth, didn’t seem to much bother users. These drugs, whatever they were, were so much better than almost all the available illegal drugs available in the UK, Australia and Europe at that time. Someone somewhere was getting very rich, very quickly. Unsurprisingly, NeoDoves and SubCoca were also psychologically addictive. Some users reported going on unintentional binges for days, losing their minds and willpower, destroying their nostrils by opening the capsules and snorting them, ‘fiending’ through their whole supply – intending to have a single capsule and eating a dozen – chewing through their lips, twitchy and delusional, chasing the fleeting high. Then they ordered some more.

  Their contents may have been a mystery, but it was a mystery worth solving for users concerned about their health effects after months of blithely swallowing the capsules, and for keen-eyed entrepreneurs who saw the huge profits available. A few months later, one of the compounds was identified on Bluelight as 4-methylmethcathinone, an utterly unknown chemical never before seen on the mainstream global drugs market. A poster at the Bluelight forum, phase_dancer, an Australian chemist working in harm reduction services for drug users was, along with others, responsible for the discovery. ‘We’ve never been an organization as such, more a b
unch of interested scientists working in different, but related fields. At the time, I was working as a chemist manufacturing reagent kits for Enlighten Harm Reduction, as well as researching improved formulations to better detect things like ketamine and PMA [a deadly impurity in MDMA pills],’ he told me. ‘No one seemed to know what the active ingredients were in the Biorepublik products. As popularity continued to grow, we put out word that there was a possibility drplatypus [a fellow poster] could arrange to have the products analysed. Samples were anonymously delivered to the hospital where he was working, which in turn passed them on to a colleague of ours from Adelaide Forensics.’

  In the end several compounds were identified in the capsules, but the most important was 4-methylmethcathinone – soon to become known as mephedrone. Longer-term observers of the chemical underground, though, recognized this formula as the same one that Kinetic had devised in his home laboratory and posted to The Hive one bored evening back in 2003. The research chemical scene had gone overground – and how.

  Mephedrone is chemically related to khat, or Catha edulis, a plant used for thousands of years in Arabic cultures, especially in Yemen and Somalia, as a social lubricant enjoyed for its stimulating qualities when chewed in a quid held in the cheek. Many shops in east London, home to immigrants from khatusing countries, sell the plant, which is legal and imported by established firms. It is brought in daily by air freight as it loses potency when less than perfectly fresh. The active ingredient, cathinone, is, if isolated and sold as a pure compound, a banned substance in most of Europe and is a Class C drug in the UK. Khat is banned in the US and some European countries, such as Holland, and its legality in the UK seems anomalous. It is perhaps overlooked because the number of people using it here is so small – around one-third of the UK’s 100,000-strong Somalian community. In October 2012, 100 Somalian demonstrators petitioned Downing Street to ban the plant, saying addiction to the drug was causing family breakdowns and health problems.

  Around 2004, in small kerbside newspaper kiosks in Tel Aviv and in nightclubs across Israel, a legal high known as hagigat, mixing the Hebrew words hagiga, meaning celebration, and gat, meaning khat, was gaining popularity. Hagigat capsules contained cathinone and were sold, legally, to buzz-hungry Israelis throughout the city. Cathinone, a chemical related to amphetamine, floods the brains of users with dopamine, the neurotransmitter that regulates mood, and which can be stimulated by safer methods including sex, good conversation and shared food – or by cocaine or amphetamines. Hagigat was banned in Israel in 2004, but continued to be sold more or less openly there.

  In 2007 an unknown chemist associated with the Israeli firm Biorepublik had taken advantage of Israel’s drug laws and, to beat the ban on cathinone, simply created 4-methylmethcathinone, a legal analogue of yet another cathinone derivative, methcathinone, and had sold the resulting drug as NeoDoves and SubCoca. Since the Hive was the most renowned underground synthesis board, and this synthesis and drug had never been seen on any recreational drugs market, it is overwhelmingly likely that the recipe was taken from the 2003 Kinetic posting on the Hive.

  Granted, the chemistry is not complex: methcathinone is a derivative of methamphetamine, and 4-methylmethcathinone – mephedrone – is just the parent molecule with a few extra oxygens bolted on. For a chemist, the difference is perhaps a few hours’ work, and analogous to a cakemaker simply decorating their product with a chocolate topping and a cherry. Whatever the truth of the drug’s provenance in its 2008 iteration, most countries’ drug laws were as inflexible as they are elderly and simply could not keep pace with these nimble online dealers.

  Within a few months of the massive Cambodian oil burn, in February 2009, I wrote the world’s first press reports about the MDMA drought, and the appearance of mephedrone and other new drugs in the specialist magazine, Druglink. My story was picked up by broadsheet and tabloid newspapers in the UK, who immediately gave the drug major coverage, catapulting it from an underground web cult to the news pages. Then things got even more bizarre, thanks again to the web.

  With the formula out and published widely online, British dealers had found out what was in the Biorepublik capsules and had started to order the drug directly from Chinese factories, and set up websites to sell it.

  Google’s AdWords programme automatically generates advertisements from keywords paid for by subscribing businesses and places them on websites where those keywords appear, and who subscribe to its AdSense package. Some of these include newspapers. AdSense started helpfully adding links to mephedrone webshops at the end of serious newspaper articles, thanks to AdWords subscriptions by mephedrone dealers. Links to mephedrone telephone delivery services, with dealers on motorbikes offering to drop the drugs off at your home or office within a few hours, were generated automatically and published on the websites of newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, which were demanding swift and decisive government action on the new killer drug menace. Mephedrone and other research chemicals received a vast, free boost.

  Google does not manually or pre-emptively check what its advertisers actually sell before it accepts the advertisements, and the newspapers had no control of the ads that Google was generating for their pages.

  While mephedrone was legal, Google also carried dozens of adverts paid for by the dealers on its own search pages. I approached the company and asked why, even at the height of the mephedrone story, adverts were appearing on its search pages. A spokesman replied, ‘Under our drugs policy we do not allow ads for mephedrone. If we discover that ads are showing that break our policies, we will remove these as soon as possible.’

  That afternoon, it took down dozens of advertisements, but refused to tell me how much it had earned by publishing links to sites selling the drug.

  With this inadvertently brilliant marketing campaign by early retailers of the drug, dozens more websites sprang up selling mephedrone, many labelling it as ‘plant food’ in a bid to avoid medicine, drug and food labelling laws. Mephedrone took hold of Britain that year much as the drug hits users – fast and hard. There has never been a drug craze like it before or since, in chemical, legal, social and technological terms – but it’s only a matter of time and molecular manipulation until another drug just like it appears.

  ‘I prefer mephedrone to MDMA,’ Dave Timms, a twenty-seven-year-old Londoner working in the fashion industry told me at the height of the craze in 2009. He was a sensible, intelligent, articulate guy who kept in good physical shape, dressed well, and liked to spend his weekends, from the second he left his office, getting as wasted as you can possibly imagine. He’d always liked taking drugs and partying, he said, but with the low quality of drugs available in the UK, mephedrone was just a better option – and far easier to get hold of. ‘Mephedrone is more reliable, cheaper and actually more convenient than going to a dealer,’ he said. ‘I pretty much stopped buying coke and pills and MDMA once I found meph. I’d just make a bulk order and send off the payment and the package would arrive a few days later. I’ve been doing it for fourteen months, and have not experienced any negative effects, except sometimes I’m a little less motivated in work and training at the gym. It makes me laugh when I see people try it for the first time. Many are sceptical that something that’s legal can actually work. But it does.’

  He said he preferred mephedrone to MDMA as it gave him less of an emotionally fraught comedown after a weekend’s use of the drug, and because it gave him greater mental sharpness. Timms once took it from Friday night until Monday morning without sleeping, and when he needed to straighten up and go to work, he simply snorted another line and put his suit on. He claimed during that honeymoon period with the drug that it had no downside, no comedown or hangover to speak of. And at ten pounds a gram, it was far cheaper than cocaine, which was selling then as now at around fifty pounds a gram for badly adulterated product.

  Mephedrone completely wrong-footed the police, politicians, health workers and newspaper editors that year; they had li
ttle idea what the drug was or where it came from. It was the first drug that worked at the pace and in the manner of a web viral, following the now-classical narrative arc of digital marketing, with delighted users recommending the drug to their friends, who recommended it to their friends. The drug gained mass-market popularity in a matter of weeks, especially in small towns, where supplies of illegal drugs were more heavily cut or prohibitively expensive, while mephedrone was cheap, plentiful, uncut and 100 per cent legal. By contrast, MDMA took years to become so widely accepted and used.

  Many sites that sold it referenced rave culture in both their graphic design and imagery, and it was clearly intended for use as a narcotic. Sites such as Ravegardener, Champagnelegals, Bubbleluv and market leader UKLegals sold the drugs by the vanload. Items to be sold for human consumption must pass food safety and medicine laws, but as with the earlier research chemicals, as long as mephedrone carried labels saying it was not to be consumed, vendors could avoid any of the customer protection laws that the UK had in place, as well as the Misuse of Drugs Act, which did not cover this previously unseen, unheard of beta-keto methcathinone.