by Power, Mike
A kilo could be imported to the UK in a matter of days from China, and customs officials were powerless to intervene. Now that there was serious money to be made, more professional outfits stepped into the market, and started selling it blatantly on public websites, with slick design, smart-ordering systems, sharp back-end databases and overnight delivery, one-click orders and thousands of positive online reviews.
Soon dozens of Chinese labs were pumping out tonnes of the drug every week, feeding a voracious demand. It was a move of considerable ingenuity on the part of many British manufacturers to avoid setting up laboratories here in the UK with all the attendant risk and expense, and simply to outsource production to a country where the well-established chemical and pharmaceutical industry was willing to turn a blind eye to sketchy export dockets, where local officials could be paid off cheaply, and where labour costs were lower. It had worked in every other manufacturing sector so why not for designer drugs, too? Legitimate Chinese exports to the EU in 2003 were 106.2 billion euros. They more than doubled to 231 billion euros in 2007. By 2010 they stood at 292 billion euros – a threefold increase in under seven years. Business, both legal and para-legal, was booming.
The owner of one factory sent me a list of his consignments to the UK at the height of the mephedrone phenomenon in February 2009. Posing as a bulk buyer for an undercover report for the Mail on Sunday’s ‘Live!’ magazine’s Reportage slot, I had demanded references from satisfied clients. He was more than happy to help. He revealed that he had sent fifty kilos of mephedrone from Shanghai to the UK in a single week, by Fedex and DHL, through Charles de Gaulle airport via Gatwick and Stansted, to every corner of Britain, and hundreds more kilos all across Europe. As the UK shivered under its first real snowfall in a decade, the country was buried under an avalanche of a very different white powder. Within a few months, Chinese mephedrone had Britain and Europe in its fierce, eye-rolling grip; it was like the Opium Wars in reverse.
The 2011 MixMag drugs survey, the world’s biggest, clearly showed the explosive growth of mephedrone. The majority of the more than 2,000 drug users recording their habits for the previous year for the clubbers’ magazine said they had taken the drug, which now ranked fourth behind Ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana. There had not been a new drug since Ecstasy in 1988 that had such immediate and dramatic effects on patterns of consumption.
That year, other modified drugs also came on to the market. There were new analogues of mephedrone itself, such as methylone, butylone and pentylone, and other stimulants, such as the powerful MDPV (active at just a few milligrams and responsible for users posting reams of alliterative nonsense online); there were flephedrone and buphedrone, brephedrone and dozens of other drugs in the cathinone family: all emerged in rapid, dizzying succession, all potently psychoactive, and all completely legal. Research chemicals had now been remarketed, with considerable skill, as legal highs. Some websites sold the pure chemical compounds, others sold branded sachets that carried no information about their contents.
Marijuana replacements also came into vogue between 2008 and 2010, as alternatives to a popular, but illegal drug. Again, the research chemical scene and Chinese laboratories were responsible for the appearance of these new, untested drugs. Before that time, anyone who bought legal alternatives to marijuana was almost guaranteed to have been sold an inert substance that would irritate the lungs, empty the wallet and do very little else. Given the easy access to marijuana in most of the world, the market for such function-free products was narrow, limited solely to the very young, the gullible, the exceedingly stupid, or the very cautious.
But at more or less the same time as mephedrone appeared, reports started to emerge on dozens of drug forums that a new synthetic marijuana product, named Spice, was actually very powerful, and that it smoked very much like marijuana. News of its potency spread around the web as quickly and pungently as billowing gales of ganja smoke through a festival crowd. But just as with mephedrone’s first appearance in the NeoDove capsules, nobody knew what the active ingredients were in these bags of herbs.
The bags of Spice were sold for about fifteen pounds each for the classic pot dealer’s measurement of three and a half grams, or one-eighth of an ounce. Manufacturers claimed a hitherto unknown synergy between the ingredients, which were listed as baybean, blue Egyptian water lily, skullcap, lion’s tail and sacred lotus, albeit in the original Latin for added authenticity and confusion. The real truth of Spice’s power lay in the laboratory of a brilliant chemist named John William Huffman.
Huffman is now eighty years old, and has recently retired after a long and distinguished career as Professor Emeritus in organic chemistry at Clemson University in South Carolina. You’d never guess that this elderly gentleman, with his tidy beard, plain spectacles and owlish manner, is responsible for getting thousands of people incapably stoned. On a mild spring afternoon in 2012, Huffman was kind enough to speak to me while relaxing after a recent bout of painful surgery. The professor chuckled down the Skype line mellifluously, sometimes gazing at the nearby Smokey Mountains, as I asked him how the Spice story happened.
Between 1984 and 2011, Huffman and his colleagues had created over 400 synthetic cannabinoid compounds while studying the structure-activity relationship between a series of compounds that resembled tetrahydrocannabinol, the active constituent of marijuana, and the human brain. The human brain has cannabinoid receptors, and the molecules that are found in marijuana and hashish, such as THC (a highly active constituent of the drugs), act as keys to open those locks. Huffman wasn’t looking to create a psychoactive compound in his research – quite the opposite. He was following in the research footsteps of American firm Sterling Winthrop Pharmaceuticals (SWP), who were trying to develop non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, a class of drugs to which aspirin belongs. One of the compounds SWP discovered turned out to be a weakly active cannabinoid. Huffman’s team’s work was based on this series of chemicals, and the new compounds they produced were tested on rat brains. ‘We were trying to relate chemical structure to biological activity,’ says Huffman. ‘The way you do this is to make a series of compounds, varying the structure from one compound to the next, and we were then trying to figure out how these interact with the same receptors that THC interacts with.’
His motivation? ‘Pure science, scientific curiosity,’ says Huffman. ‘As it turns out, the human endocannabinoid system, as it’s called, has profound effects on human behaviour, pain, mood, nausea and appetite, and lots of other important biological functions. And here we have these compounds that don’t look anything like THC, and they don’t look like the endogenous cannabinoids, but they did have activity.’
In 2008 a German newspaper sent the mysteriously effective bags of Spice for nuclear magnetic resonance analysis, which peered into the molecular structure of the sample and definitively identified it. Spice did not work through any herbal synergy; the active component was JWH-018.4
Somewhere, somehow, this experimental medicine had escaped from the medical journals where it was published in 2006 and was being sold for profit on the research chemicals market. More brands quickly appeared, such as Black Mamba, SKUNK! K2 and Abama. Clumsy though these brand names may be, they’re certainly snappier than (1-pentyl-3-(1-naphthoyl)indole), or JWH-018. The compounds were soon being exported from China in massive bulk to the US. Thanks to the relentless hedonistic imperative, and laws prohibiting the use of marijuana in much of the world, in the space of a couple of years these herbal mixes sprayed with JWH-series drugs would be seized by police in every city in the US.
‘My immediate reaction [upon hearing people were smoking these compounds] was that I thought it was humorous,’ Huffman said. ‘I heard somewhat later that these compounds have extremely bad side effects and they are much, much worse than marijuana. The synthetic compounds seem to cause some serious psychoses.’
Some dealers then dropped the herbs and started synthesizing the pure compound and selling it by the gram. As the
compounds were legal in the US and UK and Europe, Chinese labs would send kilos of the white powder under plain cover for a few hundred dollars. Profits were around US$10,000 to US$20,000 per kilo. The synthesis of the compounds is relatively simple, and with a digital grapevine trembling loudly with the news of ‘legal pot’, thousands of sites appeared in a matter of weeks. Some of them sold what they promised, others were rip-offs, but all of them made large amounts of money by selling an array of Huffman’s compounds – even some of the inactive ones. A very early JWH-018 pioneer fills in the gaps. ‘It started out with just me, then a friend and his partner helped out – they’d been in the RC [research chemical] business since the early to mid-nineties. They gave me access to resources I would never have had otherwise, such as the ability to produce and ship JWH-018 in the USA on a monumental scale.’
Setting the company up wasn’t without its trials, he says, and an early problem was payment and banking. ‘PayPal never allowed research chemicals traders, and they’re bastards with your funds if you get caught by them. I managed to trick them for nearly two years by developing a fairly convincing yet totally fake website for JWH-018 “Bonsai fertilizer”, which was guaranteed to produce bigger and taller bonsais. Yeah, I was the original “Bonsai food” vendor!’
Online today, young American users persist in discussing how they have ‘applied the material to their plant’s lungs with great success’, believing that this cunning subterfuge will outwit any jury and judge thrown at them.
But perhaps before mocking them, we might consider that drug laws in the US are among the most punitive on the planet. America’s incarceration rate is the world’s highest, and that shameful statistic has been largely driven by its war on drugs. America’s lack of credible nationwide action on drug law reform, in particular around decriminalizing marijuana, has turned many thousands of its citizens into unwitting lab rats, self-administering chemicals more dangerous and untested than the compounds they are substitutes for. In 2011 many of the new cannabinoids were banned in the US on a state, but not federal level. And again, the scientists simply went back to the labs, or the web, or medical literature, and cross-referenced the new compounds with their local drug laws.
Likewise, in the UK, as soon as the Misuse of Drugs Act had been amended to include the new cannabis-like substances a year earlier, in 2010, many more appeared. One of the new drugs that replaced JWH-018 in the UK was AM-2201, a particularly powerful compound active at such a tiny level – just a milligram – that overdoses were virtually guaranteed. This would not have been the intention of its creator, the eminent biochemist Alexandros Makriyannis of Northeastern University, Boston, whose work investigating the body’s cannabinoid receptor system is as respected as Huffman’s.
On 1 March 2011, the DEA temporarily placed five synthetic cannabinoids (JWH-018, JWH-073, JWH-200, CP-47,497 and CP-47,497 homologue) into Schedule I in the US for one year (extendable by six months). But hundreds, if not thousands of possible analogues of Huffman’s and Makriyannis’s work remain legal, their effects completely unresearched. And there are many Chinese laboratories willing to send these simple compounds to the West, making thousands of dollars in the process.
A poster named Where Wolf told the Bluelight drugs forum in 2008 why he smoked Spice instead of marijuana.5 During one of the unpredictable yet regular marijuana droughts that seize even the world’s largest capital cities, he had, he said, got fed up of smoking adulterated grass. In 2008, marijuana dealers in Holland, and Vietnamese growing gangs, particularly in London but also in the rest of the UK, had discovered that by spraying small silicone beads onto freshly harvested plants they could increase weight – and profits – by up to 20 per cent. What’s more, the small glassy balls looked like crystals of THC to the naked eye, their glistening globules promising a strong smoke. This adulterated grass became known as ‘grit weed’. It was dangerous to burn and inhale, but that didn’t concern the dealers much, since their profits were boosted by the extra weight. ‘I’m based in London at the moment, and have pretty much quit weed for Spice entirely now,’ wrote Where Wolf. ‘This is partly because, though I have a range of sources all over the city, quality has dropped significantly in the last few years: for all the press hysteria about killer skunk, I damn sure haven’t had any outstanding weed in years. Previously great sources have become so-so.’
He also said the drug laws banning marijuana had driven him online in search of an alternative. He wrote:
I hate carrying [marijuana] on public transport: I’m part Middle-Eastern (Israel: Arab-Jew), and get searched quite a lot. Random use of sniffer dogs at Tube stations is pretty common these days. I discovered Spice when the market first went to hell, and was amazed to find it worked. Tolerance does build quickly, but when you haven’t smoked anything for a while, 2–3 spliffs can produce a real glowing body-high. I’d say it’s as pleasant, if not always as potent, as a lot of the hybrid pseudo-skunk I’ve smoked over the last five years. Seems a really sad comment on the UK cannabis scene that there’s a legal product that’s almost as good.
It may have been as effective, in certain ways, but it certainly wasn’t as safe as marijuana, says Huffman. ‘The synthetics are much more dangerous,’ he explained. ‘No one has ever died of an overdose of marijuana. You’d probably forget where you put the stuff, because it has an effect on memory. These synthetic compounds, they interact differently with the cannabis receptors to marijuana. They have the same effects at a superficial level, but marijuana and THC lower blood pressure, whereas some of these compounds raise blood pressure dramatically, but we don’t know why.’
In the US there exists now the most knottily tangled of legal situations. Keeping marijuana illegal means people are taking largely unknown compounds of unknown strength with zero toxicology reports even in animal tissue, much less actual animals, since smoking them is less likely to end in a life-ruining jail term. Still, in the US, where US$23 billion is earmarked for the drug war in 2012, there’s a lot more money than logic going around. And it can only be described as a crisis of integrity that while President Obama has spoken openly of his habitual and much-enjoyed marijuana use in his youth, his administration offers no logical, scientific basis for the retention of the ban.
By the middle of 2009, the mephedrone market had turned into an even more frenzied free-for-all, with new vendors popping up daily. Quick profits were guaranteed, as mephedrone and other analogues could be bought for around £1,000–£2,500 per kilogram in China, and sold for £10,000 perfectly legally. Fedex, USPS, UPS and other international couriers were soon unknowingly sending multi-kilo consignments of designer drugs all over the UK and Europe to retailers. ‘We can send this under plain cover, marked as deodorizing crystals for babies’ nappies to you in Britain,’ said Eric, a major vendor who operated out of Shanghai.
Next-day delivery to individuals via the Royal Mail turned thousands of postmen nationwide into unwitting drugs couriers. Facebook groups dedicated to the drug sprang up, and pubs and clubs all over the UK began to reek fishily of mephedrone, which was sweated out as gurning users danced and ranted. When a Facebook page called THE MEPHEDRONE EXPERIENCE! appeared – presumably set up by an excitable user under the influence – it quickly gathered dozens of members, too stupid, high or careless to realize that they were sharing information about their drug habits with their workmates, friends and family. Many users were still so unaware of the drug’s exact effects or its power that they could be seen taken by surprise in the least likely of places. Even an upmarket private members’ club in London’s West End had a few staff giggling, saucer-eyed, over-tactile and unable to add up a two-drink order correctly, on the night I visited in early 2010.
Many internet forums dedicated to selling and discussing mephedrone and other new legal highs came online, with hundreds of thousands of page views in a month. An early gathering point for mephedrone users was Champlegals.co.uk, a forum attached to the website by the same name. Threads there stretched out to a
mindboggling size, with tens of thousands of page views. ‘Juice soldier’, posting on the Bluelight drugs discussion board, spoke for many users when he said on 4 April 2007 of the Biorepublik range, ‘After trying them properly, I can honestly say I got more of an md[ma] like buzz out of these than any pill I’ve eaten in over 12 months. That’s got to be saying something. Doesn’t last as long – but they are easily as effective if not more, not [heavy] like MDE – clean and euphoric like real MDMA.’
No one had the vaguest idea what the long-term effects of mephedrone and all the other new drugs were. People couldn’t even agree on what to call mephedrone: as its chemical name could be rendered ‘M-MCAT’, users on Champlegals jokingly said it could be called ‘Meow’. Soon enough, that information turned up on Wikipedia, was quoted verbatim by lazy journalists on short deadlines, and entered the popular culture rapidly. Until the newspapers called it Meow, no user ever did, seriously.
A simple web analytics exercise using Google’s tools showed an Everest-like peak for users entering the term ‘mephedrone’ into the search engine within weeks of my first stories appearing. But more tellingly, the tool showed an even more pronounced spike in the use of the term ‘buy mephedrone’. Later research would show that searches motivated by the desire to purchase the drug actually peaked most dramatically following news reports of alleged deaths from the drugs.
Like all parties, the mephedrone craze had to end, or at least wind down to the last few die-hards. Disturbing stories started to emerge. Users reported that their knees and fingers had gone purple, whether because the drug caused severe cardiotoxicity and vasoconstriction (narrowing of the arteries), in common with other cathinones or amphetamines, or because they were paranoid. Hospitals also reported a sharp increase in admissions of users suffering heart palpitations. Dr Adam Winstock, consultant addictions psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust and honorary senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, says the mephedrone honeymoon was short. He told me, ‘Two years after first encountering mephedrone and considering it as a relatively benign substance, I now think it has a deeply unpleasant harms profile with a high risk of abuse and dependence in many users. Users rank it as more unpleasant and risky than either cocaine or MDMA. It is early days still and there is lots we don’t know – but it is not a safe alternative to MDMA.’