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

by Power, Mike

  Previously the research chemical market had been self-policing, and with a small number of vendors and users the risks were contained to a small group and generally, if not universally, understood. That’s a view confirmed by a European research chemical vendor, André*: ‘The scene has drastically changed. Back in 2003 it was unknown both in the street and the internet, there were just a few users spread here and there who knew about the books PIHKAL and TIHKAL,’ he told me. ‘[The scene] was mainly around a few discussion boards where the admins ran their own shops in a private way. After the mephedrone hype, it became public everywhere, in the media, on the streets, social networks, YouTube. Now this scene is not underground any more, as it should be. Everyone tried to make fast money out of mephedrone, there were kids selling this chemical everywhere for a ridiculous price. The market was flooded … Of course these people were not even [aware of] what they sold.’

  One branded powder, Ivory Wave, looked likely to become an early candidate for a mephedrone replacement. Originally, when mephedrone was legal and many new substituted cathinones were appearing on world markets for the first time, it had contained MDPV – a powerful cathinone-related stimulant active in tiny doses (around 5–10 mg) which, if taken in excess, causes psychosis.

  The manufacturers did not list the ingredients on the label and the truth would only be found out later, when analysis had been carried out by professional organizations. The makers of this branded legal high also mixed in numbing agents that mimicked cocaine but had no psychoactive effect – a hugely irresponsible move, since typical lines of cocaine are around ten to twenty times as large as the active dose for MDPV, and presenting the drug in this fashion led users to take far too much.

  When MDPV was banned along with mephedrone, the Ivory Wave manufacturers maintained the name of the brand, but switched the ingredients to include a different, legal compound, desoxypipradol, which belongs to yet another category of drugs, the even more potent piperidine class of stimulants. The drug is active at tiny doses of 1 to 2 mg and its effects last for twenty-four hours. Many people who had been buying mephedrone, now accustomed to buying legal highs online, bought Ivory Wave instead. Its sale coincided with a sharp increase in hospital admissions for people suffering from psychosis and paranoid delusions. Twenty-four-year-old chef Michael Bishton, of Ryde on the Isle of Wight, was the first victim, found dead in August 2010 after jumping to his death from a cliff top, reportedly suffering from paranoid delusions. He died before he learned that his fiancée was carrying their first child.

  Dr Kate Willmer, consultant cardiologist at West Cumberland Hospital, told the Daily Telegraph, ‘People are coming into the hospital in an extremely agitated state, with acute paranoid psychosis. If you try to give them anything to help them, they are convinced you are trying to harm them so we have had to completely knock out two or three of them in order to treat them … it is taking two to three days for the agitation and psychosis to wear off. I have never seen anything like it.’1

  Mephedrone refugees were in for an exceedingly tough time in the coming years, their inexperience and their lack of knowledge and respect for these powerful chemicals almost guaranteeing horrifying experiences. A comprehensive pharmacopeia of the years following mephedrone would be several volumes long, but a few statistics give a sense of the scale of the issue.

  In 2010, the Lisbon-based European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), said in its annual report that in the thirteen years between 1997 and 2010, just 150 new drugs appeared on the market.2 Record numbers of new drugs appeared in 2009, when twenty-four new compounds were discovered for sale in a single year. In 2010, there were forty-one. In 2011, 150 new drugs were initially reported, though later figures would revise this down to forty-nine. By early March 2012, there were already thirty-six more – a staggering 150 confirmed new compounds in just three years, with no indication that the market would slow down.

  An early mephedrone replacement was, supposedly, naphyrone. It was branded as NRG-1 and vendors refused to reveal its chemical structure for fear of others copying the synthesis and capturing their market, as had happened with Biorepublik’s NeoDoves and SubCoca. Its manufacturer promised vendors that this new drug had a substantially similar effect to mephedrone, and many of them bought it and sold it to hundreds of their customers. Unhappy reports surfaced almost immediately, saying the experience was unpleasant at best, and dangerous at worst. No wonder: a British Medical Journal piece in June 2010 found that of the twelve legal highs it analysed, most sold as NRG-1 or NRG-2 contained either a banned cathinone, caffeine or inactive ingredients.3 Many online dealers were selling anything and calling it a legal high, or NRG-1, naphyrone or any other eye-catching name, not knowing or caring what they were selling. Users were just looking for a new drug to replace mephedrone.

  In June 2010 the Cambridge News regurgitated uncritically the news from the website of a local headshop, Cambotanics, that it was selling a fantastic new legal high, this time, known as ‘woof woof’.4 It was in fact MDAI, a non-neurotoxic derivative of MDMA developed by chemist Professor Dave E. Nichols at Purdue University, which he made as part of his work studying serotonin receptors. But the effects were reported to be mild at best, and the drug did not catch on.

  The laboratories in China which are producing these new drugs are normally legitimate companies that also produce generic drugs, such as anti-retrovirals for HIV and heart disease drugs, or that are dedicated to the production and sale of fine chemicals, raw materials, pharmaceutical intermediates and biological products. In both kinds of set-up, workers, normally young chemistry graduates, either carry out syntheses after hours, diverting the necessary precursors from their use in the production of legitimate products and keeping the money themselves, or they work with the complicity of the laboratory owners, who take a cut of the profits.

  Payments are made to uninvolved third parties, often using global money transfer giant Western Union, and shipments are carried out by legitimate courier firms such as EMS, Fedex, TNT or DHL. Bribes are paid to Chinese officials to avoid the need for paperwork or export permits. Multi-kilo quantities are labelled falsely as nappy deodorizer or carpet cleaning chemicals, or, in the case of small orders, they are secreted in envelopes and marked as documents. These factories deal with individuals, or with retailers in the UK, the US and the EU, some of whom repackage the drugs they receive into branded legal highs, while others sell the compounds by the gram.

  ‘Eric’, a Shanghai lab technician, is a typical manager of such a facility. In a sting operation I set up for a report in Britain’s Mail on Sunday’s ‘Live!’ magazine in April 2010, journalist Simon Parry visited the laboratory that was, at the time, producing most of China – and Europe’s – mephedrone.

  After winning Eric’s confidence over a number of weeks in a lengthy email correspondence, in which I posed as a large, London-based wholesaler of legal highs, I had made an order for 120 kg of MDPV – enough for 2.4 million doses. I chose MDPV deliberately, as it had been banned in the anti-cathinones legislation in the UK, and I wanted to see what effect the ban had had on the supply-side of the new drugs. Eric told us he was able to ship the products via express courier to a ‘soft’ country such as Greece, from where the products could be trans-shipped. ‘We have agents in Europe so we can send to Ireland, Austria, Spain and Italy. Then the package will be re-sent to the UK from those countries. If the package comes from outside Europe there might be trouble. Within Europe, the UK customs normally will not check,’ Eric told Parry. ‘If it is stopped we always refund or reship. That is why we have so many customers in the UK. There is no risk for them.’

  I insisted on a site visit to the lab before confirming the order. Parry visited the factory as my local agent, keen to examine the facility, but in reality, it was to interview Eric in person and to take photographs of the inside of the laboratory that had, up until the ban in the UK, supplied hundreds of kilos of mephedrone a week.

  Eric’s lab
oratory is the size of a small flat, and is near the city’s international airport, with neighbours including offices of GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and AstraZeneca. Inside, a team of young scientists engaged in various tasks, wearing white coats and face masks. These syntheses are not complex, given the correct equipment, a graduate-level organic chemistry education, and easy access to precursors and reagents. The laboratory was filthy and disorganized, with the standard lab equipment found in any legitimate chemical firm, including vacuum pumps, heat-plates, reaction cylinders and drying facilities.

  Parry reported:

  Young, rich and brimming with energy, Eric embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of modern China. He sits at his desk beneath a cabinet of spirits and cigars that he dispenses liberally to his overseas clients while secretaries totter in and out carrying samples and price lists.

  Eric wears designer clothes, drives a Buick SUV and works such long hours his wife moans that he treats the luxury villa where they live like a hotel. But, for all his infectious charm as he chats and jokes in pithy English in his office in an upmarket Shanghai apartment block, there is a sinister side to the business that has made this chemistry graduate conspicuously wealthy aged 35.5

  Sipping on a Red Bull – his only vice – the chemist said to Parry, ‘I have no time for holidays … I have a lot of business on my hands. I need all the energy I can get.’

  Uncle Fester, aka Steve Preisler, one of the USA’s methamphetamine pioneers and the original narcotic folk devil of the pre-internet age, has kept up on developments in the trade, and says Chinese outsourcing was a logical step for US-based drug manufacturers. ‘The cooking of the materials has been outsourced to China because it is impossible to do it here,’ he told me by email. He continued:

  These materials are too complicated to be cooked up by a basement chemist and they require access to precursors unavailable to US-based cooks … Even if it might be quasi-legal, the cops would just simply be crawling all over them, and if nothing else putting them in jail for violations of hazardous waste laws or [health and safety] violations in their shop. They don’t have to worry about that in China, and it’s nice work if you can get it … The folks on the US [and EU] end are more properly described as marketers. They have little to do with the production end other than picking out exactly what material they would like produced.

  Preisler did have concerns about the risks to users. ‘I do agree that these designer analogues are quite dangerous, more so than the already illegal drugs they are designed to mimic or replace,’ he wrote. ‘The banned drugs have quite a history of human usage, and so their side effects are known and long-term usage of them has already been experienced. This is not so with the designer variants. It’s all experimental and the users are doing the pioneering.’

  Soon after our report, Eric started to sell exceptionally dangerous and novel chemicals under the guise of other, newly popular drugs and word spread around the web that he was not to be trusted.

  Chinese chemists profit from the differences in international drugs legislation – at the time of our report for the Mail on Sunday, none of the drugs we ordered was illegal in China, and many hundreds of designer drugs remain legal there. Even today, China’s drug laws lag far behind those of Europe and the US, with enforcement there focusing instead on the drugs most popular in China itself – methamphetamine, heroin, ketamine and, increasingly as China modernizes and its economy and middle class grow, Ecstasy. And whereas in the past the custom synthesis market was small, underground and operating in the shadows of the web, now, with the growth of the trade and of ecommerce, many more are willing to carry out the work without qualms and openly.

  While Chinese chemists innovated, accessing vast databases of scientific literature and anecdotal evidence reported online, as well as books like TIHKAL and PIHKAL, governments Europe-wide chipped doggedly away at the newly exposed narcotic rockface with their blunt, broken and rusty tool of prohibition. Ireland closed hundreds of headshops, and Reuters reported in May 2011 that shop owners in the recession-hit country would face life imprisonment if they sold substances with ‘psychoactive effects’. (Originally, headshops there and elsewhere had sold pipes, bongs, and other cannabis-related paraphernalia. The emergence of mephedrone and other legal highs soon saw chemicals jostling with rolling papers for shelf-space – a picture that can now be seen worldwide. The nascent trade in legal highs had already disturbed Northern Irish paramilitary groups seeking to protect their monopoly on the regular drugs trade, with punishment shootings meted out to headshop owners.)

  Scandinavian countries clamped down on mephedrone, dozens of related cathinones, and many of the fake marijuana compounds in 2010, and new laws were also passed in most European countries banning many of the new drugs that had appeared in the previous two years, though there was no central ruling as there had been on mephedrone. Poland shut 1,200 headshops and closed down hundreds of websites with crude laws prohibiting the sale of ‘substitute drugs’. Days before the law was enforced, queues were fifty-strong in many stores.

  In August 2010, the UK government decided to tackle the market in new drugs by drafting new laws. James Brokenshire MP, working then as minister for crime prevention in the new coalition government, and now minister for crime and security at the Home Office, announced that the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was to be amended once more. The new law would not be enacted for over a year. On 15 November 2011 the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act would introduce the government’s flagship response to the new drugs problem: new measures known as Temporary Class Drug Orders (TCDOs). These would allow the British government to temporarily schedule any new compounds that came to the attention of the ACMD – or the media – for a period of a year while the ACMD analysed the dangers and pharmacology of the new substances. ‘TCDOs enable the government to act faster, on consideration of initial advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), to protect the public against emerging harmful new psychoactive substances while full expert advice is being prepared,’ the Home Office announced.6

  The new law would not specifically name any novel substances; its purpose was political. It was designed to enable the government to react decisively and quickly to the appearance of new drugs without further weakening the authority of the ACMD, which had been so summarily mistreated and ignored over the mephedrone law change.

  But between the mephedrone ban in April 2010, and the enforcement of the new TCDO law in November 2011, many new drugs appeared. Alpha-methyl tryptamine (AMT), a psychedelic stimulant that fosters empathy and euphoria, had originally been prescribed in Russia in the 1980s as an antidepressant under the brand name Indopan. In 2010, post-mephedrone, it was sold in the UK, again as plant food. With deadpan brilliance, it had been noted by Russian researchers that the drug, widely prescribed to the elderly, caused inappropriate smiling. However, the drug never gained the kind of popularity that mephedrone did, since its effects lasted twenty hours, while most recreational users are looking for a shorter high. What’s more, some users suffered stomach cramps and diarrohea. A final death knell may have been its smell: occasionally an impurity produced in a synthesis of the drug, using indole3-carboxaldehyde as a starting material, forms a compound known as skatole, or 3-methylindole, which is the chief fragrance in mammalian faeces.

  AMT is still, at the time of writing, legal in the UK, since the compound has not been specifically targeted by name or by definition. Whereas many ring substitutions of tryptamines had been outlawed in the UK in the Misuse of Drugs Act in the 1977 amendment that so confused the House of Lords, AMT, with its simple structure, was legal. It still is.7

  Notwithstanding the problems mentioned above, dozens of sites selling AMT sprang up in summer 2010, many of them owned by web-and-drug-savvy individuals who knew AMT had slipped through British drug laws. Many people enjoyed the high, saying it was similar to MDMA and LSD, but with a longer duration than both, and with longer-lasting energy for users. The typical dose range is arou
nd 40–50 mg, and users must avoid all other drugs and alcohol if they take it. (Some drugs and even some foods contain chemicals known as monoamine oxidase inhibitors, MAOIs. When taken in conjunction with drugs such as MDMA, AMT, or many hundreds of other drugs that act on the serotonin system, MAOIs – which can be found in hundreds of legitimate medicines and other research chemicals – can amplify their effects to a dangerous level, causing serotonin syndrome, psychosis, or hypertensive crisis and possible death.)

  Some sites sell AMT in so-called pellets, to avoid the punishments they would face under the UK’s Medicines Act if they sold it as pills – but even at the time of writing they have little to worry about, since not one site has been targeted by British police, who are as confused as users as to what is illegal, real, banned or bunk.

  Many other categories of drugs have appeared for sale online since mephedrone was banned. Tranquillizers, long available only to those holding a valid prescription due to their abuse potential and addictive nature, became widely available when a legal, diazepam-like drug, phenazepam appeared for sale online on sites that had previously sold only mephedrone. It was legal as it was not included in the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act – unsurprisingly, as that law had been written four decades earlier, and the drug was a little-known Russian epilepsy treatment. Before the web and social media spread word of its use, it was neither available, used, nor known about, and therefore never deemed to be a danger to British people. Its legality shows that the UK’s drug laws are now hopelessly anachronistic.

  It only cost about two pence for a dose, and many would be grateful for the effects of the drug, especially after a night spent abusing stimulants. However, many dosed the drug inaccurately – hardly difficult, since the active range for the chemical is just 1 mg – and its side effects were wildly unpredictable, with some users reporting days of narcotic blackouts. It also has a half-life of sixty hours, meaning it remains present in the body for a much longer time than most safer illegal or scheduled prescription-only drugs. And because of the amnesia the drug induces, people often simply redose as they forget they have already taken it. The impacts of all of this are hard to measure, but in July 2011, Dundee University researchers told the BBC that the drug had appeared in nine post-mortem cases, though evidence that the drug killed the users was inconclusive.8