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

by Power, Mike

  In December 2008, an eighteen-year-old Swedish woman in Stockholm had become the first woman in the world to die after using the drug. A day after her death, the drug was banned in Sweden. The first media reports of deaths in the UK appeared in November 2009, when Gabrielle Price, a fourteen-year-old from Worthing, in West Sussex, became ill at a house party where she had taken the drug together with ketamine. At first, it was claimed and widely reported that she had died as a result of the drug. However, a pathologist’s report showed the girl died of broncho-pneumonia following a streptococcal A infection. This kind of inaccurate reporting was repeated with grim regularity. By July 2010, fifty-two deaths were claimed to be associated with the drug in the UK, but coroners’ reports eventually and conclusively showed that over a quarter of the supposed victims hadn’t taken the drug at all, and no clear data existed to prove that mephedrone caused the deaths of those who had. Fiona Measham, a member of the ACMD and a senior lecturer in criminology at Lancaster University, says the reporting of the unconfirmed deaths by newspapers followed the usual cycle of ‘exaggeration, distortion, inaccuracy and sensationalism’. Not since the death in 1995 of fifteen-year-old Leah Betts (the Essex schoolgirl who died because she drank many pints of water after taking Ecstasy, fearing she was dehydrating) had the media launched such a concerted, and misinformed, campaign around a new drug.

  There is no doubt that the drug could be dangerous, as Winstock and other doctors have asserted with insights gleaned from two years of working with users, but media reports at the time were so misinformed and badly verified that they often had an air of satire. Some tales were laughably implausible, yet they were repeated verbatim, becoming part of the folklore. Newspapers reported how one user in County Durham in November 2009 had torn off his own scrotum after hallucinating for eighteen hours on the drug. The paper failed to mention that the press release on which it was based actually gave the source of that claim as a spoof testimonials section of a website selling the drug.

  The media reports of deaths continued, and a tipping point was reached in March 2010, when two young men from Winteringham and Scunthorpe, eighteen-year-old Louis Wainwright, and nineteen-year-old Nicholas Smith, were found dead at their homes. Later investigations found the pair had actually taken methadone, the potent heroin substitute that can slow breathing dramatically in users with no tolerance to the drug, leading to death. It is unknown whether Wainwright and Smith believed they were taking mephedrone, but certainly many people mistook the word ‘mephedrone’ for methadone around that time. No matter. Politicians had to be seen to act fast, and in the charged atmosphere of a tabloid feeding frenzy, it’s hard, on reflection, to blame them completely.

  The ACMD had a torrid year in 2009. Chairman David Nutt was sacked in October following his statistically accurate observation that Ecstasy was less likely to kill users than horse riding, and after his call for a new discussion on the classification of cannabis was rejected by the Home Office. There were five resignations in support of Nutt’s views. In March 2010, another member, Dr Polly Taylor, resigned in protest when the Code of Practice for Scientific Advisory Committees – new government guidelines, widely seen as impinging on scientists’ objectivity – were published. Science, the government had decided, was now the servant of policy. The ACMD had been weakened by these events and when the debate and press panic over mephedrone began, it was already on the back foot.

  In April 2010, after months of increasing media hysteria and misinformation on drugs generally, and mephedrone in particular, the government felt compelled to legislate. Usually, the ACMD would be allowed time to investigate and research a drug’s harmfulness and then offer its expert guidance to politicians. But the ACMD was pressured by the government to announce that the drug was harmful and should be made illegal. The British government then banned all the substituted cathinones, the chemical family to which mephedrone belonged. ACMD member Eric Carlin, an executive consultant in the drug and charity sector, immediately gave up his seat in protest, and said in his resignation letter:

  We had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people’s behaviour. Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure … I am not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalization of increasing numbers of young people.6

  In the April 2010 edition of British medical journal The Lancet, a leader writer lamented the ‘collapse in integrity of scientific advice in the UK’, berating the government for political interference in its haste to ban the drug without proper expert consultation. ‘The terms of engagement between ministers and expert advisers endorsed by Alan Johnson have been blown apart,’ wrote The Lancet. ‘During the past 12 years the Labour government has done a great deal to build up a strong science base in the UK and enhance the important role that science plays in our economy and society. However, the events surrounding the ACMD signal a disappointing finale to the government’s relationship with science. Politics has been allowed to contaminate scientific processes and the advice that underpins policy,’ it said.7

  China bowed to pressure from British institutions, including SOCA, and banned the manufacture, export and possession of the drug in August 2010. Mephedrone had now been banned in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK. The European Commission advised the remaining EU countries to ban the drug in October that year. ‘It is good to see that EU governments are prepared to take swift action to ban this dangerous drug,’ said EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding after the twenty-seven-nation bloc agreed the total ban, imposed in December 2010.

  John Ramsey of St George’s, University of London, is an advisor to the ACMD. He also runs a commercial organization, TICTAC Communications, which produces and sells a database of chemicals bought from the internet or retrieved from amnesty bins at raves, festivals and clubs across the UK. Ramsey tests the drugs, and then publishes the database on a CD which police forces and hospitals use to identify the torrent of new tablets, powders and capsules that are washing up across the UK and Europe. He was among the first to identify mephedrone in UK pills and powders bought on- and offline. ‘Do come and look at the archives – did you notice on your way in?’ he said to me as I visited his laboratories at the hospital in May 2012. He showed me a huge row of metal drawers. Inside each, labelled with the careful exactitude of a taxonomist, were samples of drugs that this lab has tested. There were 27,000 samples of different drugs here, gathered by this careful and dedicated man. With his bookish air, smart dress and a keen and scholarly attitude, he was the least likely procurer of drugs I had ever met.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Ramsey mused over one small vial. ‘2C-B. There’s about 400 quid’s-worth here. I do wonder why they threw them away. I wonder what story lies behind these?’ he said, looking at the small butterfly-stamped tablets that were seized from an amnesty bin at a rave. ‘Why would they throw away such a huge amount of drugs? It’s baffling.’ Ramsey has the most comprehensive stash of drugs on the planet – and it’s very likely that he’ll soon need new premises. Since the discovery of mephedrone, the situation involving new drugs is ever more complex, and evolving faster than anyone can keep track of, he says. ‘It’s drug control that spawns it all to some extent. The link to the whole thing is the Chinese chemical industry, the ability to scale up from what you can do in a bedroom set-up to an industrial level,’ he says. ‘I’m sure there are people who, like Shulgin, tinker with stuff and then take it, but it’s never going to become mainstream unless you can make it in reasonable quantities.’

  If high-level pressure were to be placed on the Chinese, he says, it wouldn’t be long until production shifted somewhere else. ‘It would inconvenience them slightly, but it’d only be a matter of time until they moved elsewhere.’ One vendor supported Ramsey’s view, when he told me he believed the Chinese authori
ties were complicit in the mephedrone trade, until it started to gain Chinese users. ‘It all contributes to their surging economy,’ he said. ‘In the case of mephedrone, there was some external pressure from the UK government, but also, it was starting to show up in clubs in Taiwan, Hong Kong and even China. That’s probably why it was actually banned there. We tried to get a lab going again underground, but the Chinese authorities were right on top of it, even after bribes were offered, and so we had to give up,’ he says.

  Ramsey’s laboratories could not be further removed from the muddy fields and laser-lit clubs where these drugs were seized or surrendered. Bags of pills and white powders marked ‘V Festival, 2011’ and ‘Glastonbury 2011’ lie on the workbenches. There are bags with online vendor names from all over the world, including Taiwan and the US. ‘We sometimes buy in euro or pounds and they get sent in to us from Belize, all sorts of places,’ says Ramsey. TICTAC’s most recent research reveals much about current patterns of drug use in the UK, especially for those who feel this is a small market.

  Ramsey and his team asked anonymous volunteers to use a temporary toilet they had placed in the car park of a major London club. Analysing the urine afterwards, he found there were over thirty-five different metabolites in the waste, including many of the new drugs mentioned in this book. ‘It’s very widespread,’ he says. ‘The data is complex, but if I can just stick a toe in the water here, the problem is very widespread – and growing.’ A half-beat pause, then he cracks up in laughter. ‘Poor metaphor.’

  To identify the chemicals in the powders and pills, Ramsey has them crushed to a fine powder, then pinned with a diamond against a transparent plate, illuminated from below with a beam of infrared light. The resulting spectrum of each compound has a distinct signature, a translucent splash of psychedelia, which is then catalogued; check the library and if the image matches, it’s a drug. Gas chromatography is the next test, which splits the compound in a solvent and then analyses the gases. Then it undergoes mass spectrometry, during which a beam of electrons is smashed into the molecules, which are then ionized. That data is parsed electromagnetically into the substance’s likely chemical composition. Finally, if it’s still not clear what the chemical is, it’s sent off to the nuclear magnetic resonance machine, which ‘sees’ into the molecular structure and identifies, once and for all, what it is.

  Under the strip lights, there are also thin slices of rats’ brains kept alive in buffers fed with oxygen. Here, the new drugs that land in the laboratories have their first ever empirical and formal testing. This is pharmacokinetics, the study of the drug and how it reacts in vitro. Rats’ aortas, cut from their hearts, are flooded with the chemicals Ramsey and thousands of users worldwide have bought online. There are serotonin receptors in mammalian hearts, and these and the rats’ brain slices are monitored by micro electrodes that measure the amount of serotonin or dopamine released, as well as the pharmacokinetics – how the released neurotransmitters move around the tissue.

  This, other than taking it yourself in a Shulgin-esque game of chemical Russian roulette, gradually increasing from a small dose to a larger dose over a number of days, is the only way to tell the active dose of an unknown chemical. And this, perhaps, is the key issue in drug use today for many people. They are acting as Shulgin did – testing unknown compounds, but with the difference that they neither made the drug nor have any real idea where it came from. Receptor binding studies such as those carried out by professional pharmaceutical laboratories are vital, but they are a complex task of the kind unlikely to be commissioned by either Chinese vendors or resellers on the net, even though their cost – at between £1,500 and £2,500 per sample – is a fraction of the profits made by the illegal laboratories that come up with the new drugs. But illegal drug salesmen tend not to be renowned for their altruism.

  The drugs are getting into the UK in serious bulk because the Border Agency is overworked and underfunded. Once here, they find a ready market. ‘This is a trade like any other,’ says Ramsey. ‘You need several components: an innovator to think of structures, a manufacturer to produce it, marketing and advertising.’ Those elements combined made the research chemical scene burst on to the high street in 2009, in a drug-starved country reeling a from a banking crisis brought on by a lack of regulation. The cathinones, with their speedy, cocaine-meets-MDMA-like buzz, were the perfect drug for those outlaw times. Mephedrone was credit crunch cocaine, neither one thing nor another, an analogue of an analogue. The Labour government, its drug policy no more radical than the previous Conservative administration’s, swung into action and banned it, driving a coach and horses through both scientific concerns and all political protocol. Mephedrone is harmful if taken to excess, and many users could not control their use, but questions about its relative harmfulness were never properly asked of the scientists who are specifically charged with establishing those harms. That led, in the minds of many users, to a deepening mistrust of the government, whose politicized messages on drugs no longer existed in a vacuum of information, and were subverted by the views of users on the web.

  The anti-hierarchical structure of the web, created in an act of deliberate subversion and anarchy by countercultural, drug-loving hippies, instead offered the curious a range of voices, of experiences, and value systems that laid bare the prohibitionists’ stance as a flimsy charade. The dominant discourse was disrupted – permanently. Official responses over the coming years were often short-termist and morally panicked, but the bigger story was the change in consumer habits, and drug habits. Mephedrone changed attitudes to drugs overnight. People who had never heard of Shulgin, who would not previously consider buying a drug online in the original research chemical scene, who had never read a trip report much less likely written one, were taking research chemicals they had sourced on the web in the belief that they were safe because they were legal – or not caring either way.

  The mephedrone ban had a series of unintended but wholly predictable consequences. Rather than reducing harm; rather than limiting the production of new replacements; rather than reducing demand, instead, it increased all of these. All the circles closed in 2009–2010. The web had become a space where many of our cultural and economic transactions were taking place. Social media, knowledge-sharing and ecommerce were also now the norm. Drug use in the EU was so commonplace as to be an epidemic. By the middle of 2010 as mephedrone was banned in the UK, the scene was set for the next stage in the Drugs 2.0 revolution. The search for mephedrone’s replacement began in earnest, with users and dealers outdoing each other in ingenuity and greed.

  Notes

  1. Fauna & Flora International, press release, 2009: ‘Destruction of “Ecstasy Oil Factories” deals severe blow to criminals in Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary’; www.flora-fauna.org. See also Adam Yamaguchi’s video ‘Forest of Ecstasy’; http://current. com/shows/vanguard/91315580_forest-of-ecstasy.htm

  2. www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/WDR2011/World_Drug_Report_2011

  _ebook.pdf; data collated from pp. 33–40

  3. Posting to the Hive bulletin board, found in archives of the site that now no longer exists. No live URL available

  4. ‘Gefährlicher Kick mit “Spice”’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 12 December 2008; www.fr-online.de/rhein-main/frankfurt-gefaehrlicher-kick-mit--spice-,1472796,3375090.html

  5. www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/272660-Spice-Gold-Unbelievable/page5

  6. http://ericcarlin.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/my-acmd-resignation-letter-to-the-home-secretary/

  7. ‘A Collapse in Integrity of Scientific Advice in the UK’, The Lancet, Vol. 375, Issue 9723, 17 April 2010, p. 1319; www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140

  -6736(10)60556-9/fulltext

  Woof Woof Is the New Meow Meow

  After mephedrone was banned in the UK and the EU in 2010, supplies dried up as vendors closed shop to avoid prosecution. Many vendors and users searched for replacements, but the majority of the next wave of research chemicals – or
, as they had now been cleverly rebranded, ‘legal highs’ – were dangerous, ineffective and poorly made. The already vast and varied offering of new drugs rapidly grew, and often contained unknown stimulant blends. Many users blindly consumed new drugs that made even Chinese mephedrone look safe by comparison. Like the users, the tabloid press in the UK, too, were desperately seeking a mephedrone replacement. Editors know that drug hysteria sells newspapers, both to worried parents and to desperate or curious users.

  Newspaper editors, policy-makers, politicians, pundits and police had all failed to notice the strands linking the research chemical scene and the legal high market, the psychonaut to the high street. What had knitted the two together into such a tangled mess was mephedrone, and what had enabled that entanglement was the prevalence of social media and internet use among user groups and retailers. The research chemicals market was back – and this time the people involved were neither obsessives, nor evangelists, nor psychedelic philatelists collecting new drugs for fun. This time, it was all about the money.