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

by Power, Mike

  4. Julian Palacios, Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe (Plexus Publishing Ltd, 2010), p. 298

  5. Dennis Romero, ‘Sasha Shulgin, Psychedelic Chemist’, Los Angeles Times, 5 September 1995

  6. Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Transform Press, 1991), p. 860

  7. Ibid., p. xvi

  8. Ibid., p. xviii

  9. www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/

  shulgin_rating_scale.shtml

  10. Shulgin, PIHKAL, pp. 876–877

  11. Ibid., p. 733; see also www.erowid.org/library/books_online/

  PIHKAL109.shtml

  12. www.maps.org/media/kleiman040204.html

  13. Hugh Milne, ‘Bhagwan, the God that Failed’, cited in Matthew Collin, Altered State (Serpent’s Tail, 1998), p. 33

  14. Anthony D’Andrea, ‘Ibiza: The Real Story of a Global Utopia’, Cultura, Ibiza, Summer 2001, pp. 46–47; www3.ul.ie/sociology/index.php?pagid=23&memid=18

  15. Peter Nasmyth, ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’, The Face, October 1986, Issue 78, pp. 52–55

  16. Nicholas Saunders, E for Ecstasy (Octavo, May 1993); http://ecstasy.org/books/e4x/e4x.ch.02.html

  17. The Face, August 1990; http://testpressing.org/2010/07/the-face-europe-a-ravers-guide-august-1990/

  18. www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health3/deaths-related-to-drug-poisoning/2010/stb-deaths-related-to-drug-poisoning-2010.html

  19. Simon Reynolds, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (Faber and Faber, 2006), p. xvi

  The Birth of an Online Drugs Culture

  The first thing ever bought or sold on the internet was marijuana. The deal was done in 1971.

  The history of the internet is bound up with the counterculture, and the counterculture finds some of its richest expression in the use of psychoactive chemicals. Technological protocols and cultural pipedreams aligned and collided. The drug and music countercultures and the early technological innovators informed and inspired each other – and were often the very same people. The acronymic utopias enabled by internet technologies such as TCP/IP aren’t so different from those offered by LSD: equality, connectedness, awareness of life as a sum greater than its parts.

  In the early 1960s, American computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, and, later, Britain’s Donald Davies, a physician at the UK’s National Physical Library in Teddington, independently conceived of the same way to send data around a telephone network efficiently by splitting it into chunks and routing it through nodes around the network to later arrive, reassembled, in the right place.

  These deliberate first steps towards cyberspace had a greater impact on the history of mankind than the simple stroll on a rock high above our heads two years later. This ‘packet-switching’ concept was to become the central structure in international telecommunications and, later, data networks.

  Four months after the moon landing, on 29 October 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the world’s first packet-switching data network, consisting of four computers in separate university sites, jumped into life. The first message ever sent was meant to say ‘login’, but the system crashed, and the first word ever sent from one computer to another was the accidentally portentous ‘Lo’. As an opening line it’s a little more truncated than Samuel Morse’s famous dashdot message, ‘What hath man wrought’, sent from the Supreme Court chamber in the American Capitol building in Washington DC to Baltimore’s Mount Clare railway station in 1844, but the meaning was essentially – if unintentionally – exactly the same.

  ARPANET is often described as the birth of the internet, and is equally often reported to have been designed to survive a thermonuclear strike, meaning that if one node or cell of the network were destroyed, the others would gather the digital slack and reroute the information around the surviving nodes.

  However, the aim of ARPANET was not to preserve national security in the event of warfare, but to allow university researchers separated by geography to share information; the net’s roots were indisputably collaborative and altruistic. Its technological cornerstone – the packet-switching network – underpinned all the later digital developments that would enable the reeling madness and quotidian mundanity that comprises a day online today – a day that includes buying groceries, paying bills, sharing photos and ideas, updating the world on your latest hairstyle choices, and, for many more people than is currently acknowledged, talking about and buying drugs.

  Few involved in the early days of the internet could ever have imagined how central to billions of people’s lives it was to become, but some of them dreamed of it. A year before the ARPANET came online, on 9 December 1968, Doug Engelbart, the ultimate unsung conceptual, philosophical and practical pioneer of modern computing, addressed a crowd of 1,000 programmers at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. It was an event that was to become known as the Mother of All Demos, and during it Engelbart displayed publicly, in one gargantuan techno-splurge, many of the concepts of computing that are so ubiquitous today: the mouse (‘I don’t know why we call it a mouse. It started that way and we never changed it,’ Engelbart said that day), video conferencing, hypertext, teleconferencing, word processing and collaborative real-time editing. It was the beginning of the modern age.1

  Engelbart, in common with many intellectuals and technologists of the era, had attended LSD-assisted creativity sessions in the 1960s at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a California psychedelic research group founded by a friend of Alexander Shulgin’s, Mylon Stolaroff. The Shulgins wrote the preface to Stolaroff’s book Thanatos to Eros (1994) detailing his experiences with LSD, MDMA, mescaline and a number of Shulgin’s creations.2

  Author Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase ‘Information wants to be free’ in 1984, was responsible for filming the Mother of All Demos, and that same year he launched the Whole Earth Catalog, the ad-free samizdat techno-hippy bible. Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech. It now reads much like a printed blog; it was a paper website, in the words of blogger and author Kevin Kelly, that was sprinting before the web even took its first shaky steps.3 Its statement of intent in its launch issue reads like a manifesto that has been realized by today’s web users: ‘A realm of intimate personal power is developing – the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.’

  Brand, whose collaborations with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters would evolve into the Acid Tests, the 1960s proto-raves fuelled by LSD and documented by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, felt that information technology was the next stage in humans’ evolutionary progress.

  Info-anarchists and cyber-utopians not only laid the foundations for the internet, but would act as outriders for the free software movement. The net’s founding mothers and fathers wanted to share their knowledge, and everyone else’s knowledge, all at once, all the time, for free, with no centralized control system. Instead, they preferred – and created – a devolved, leaderless model of equalized authority. It was a computer in Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute that would make the second node of the ARPANET. His dream was a future where workers would sit at personal computers connecting and collaborating.

  At the same time as many social hierarchies were being challenged, the technical architectures and hardware that would become the internet were taking shape. The links between the 1960s Californian freak scene and the pioneering days of early personal computing are chronicled in John Markoff’s 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter
culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book’s title is taken from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track). In it, Markoff revealed that the world’s first online transaction was a drug deal: ‘In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at SAIL engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at MIT. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of ecommerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.’4

  In 1979, a worldwide discussion system called Usenet was launched, and became the first step in the creation of the technical and cultural infrastructure that would personally connect humans across the planet, gathering enthusiasts and specialists into one digital conversational space.

  Usenet was massively popular with about twenty million users in the early, pre-web 1980s and 1990s, and in many ways it was the first true example of social media, hosting thriving discussions on thousands of topics, known as newsgroups. It resembled a cross between an email and a web forum, similar in style and intent to such contemporary web communities as Mumsnet.

  Usenet historians at Giganews.com note: ‘Usenet was not only an important technical development; many social aspects of online communication were introduced, refined, and became de facto standards thanks to Usenet. Emoticons, flame wars, trolls, signatures, and even slang acronyms (BRB, LOL) found their first common usage on Usenet.’5

  Users could not access Usenet’s newsgroups unless they knew rudimentary coding skills. The system required knowledge of the Unix command line to set it up – there were no Windows-based computers at that time, so you couldn’t simply type the name of the group you wanted to join or read, or click on an icon to access the software. Information technology and by extension, the internet, was for geeks, by geeks. And those geeks required bottomless oceans of patience, as the information trickled down the copper wires of telephone cables at a rate of bauds rather than megabytes.

  As the service became more popular, Usenet groups became more chaotic and information harder to find and categorize. In 1987 a group of users known as the Backbone Cabal reorganized the service into hierarchies of interest, in a process known as the Great Renaming. These top-level hierarchies were: computers, news, scientific subjects, recreational activities, socializing and talk, with ‘miscellaneous’ covering the rest. In time the subsections in newsgroups covered every subject known to woman and man, and in an age before search engines, they were one of the best ways to find information online – or anywhere, since they were populated by the most extraordinarily helpful, altruistic and technologically adept users in the world.

  Computer scientist Brian Reid, and John Gilmore (an early internet pioneer, civil libertarian, entrepreneur and techno-renaissance man whose work around cryptography, censorship and drug law reform make him an unsung early hero of the digital age – and who is also, judging by his love of tie-dye and several anecdotes, no stranger to a dose or three of psychedelics) felt the reorganization would limit freedom of speech. Gilmore was refused permission to create a group named rec.drugs, and later, talk.drugs. Reid was unhappy at the renaming of a food group he ran, and so together the two men decided to use technology to achieve their goals. They found a way to create a new, top-level hierarchy that that did not require the permission of the Backbone Cabal and that would be accessible to anyone with a modem and Unix experience. It was called the .alt hierarchy. Not only could users read .alt groups, they could create their own .alt sub-groups. No one could grant or refuse you permission. By creating a new Usenet hierarchy that ironically neither accepted nor required leaders, as other groups did, Gilmore and Reid fostered true freedom of speech in cyberspace. ‘The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,’ Time magazine quoted Gilmore as saying in 1993, predicting twenty years ago changes that would come to affect our legal system and our entire way of life.6 The .alt hierarchy would be a free zone, and it was here that the earliest online drug culture formed.

  The groups hosted within this network were some of the most popular digital watering holes for the outré and avant garde. Here, the sacred and the profane met: priests, poets and librarians communicated, perhaps for the first time, with perverts and potheads, and the early online drug scene began to coalesce around the sub-groups alt.drugs, alt.drugs.psychedelic and alt. drugs.chemistry. The author of the FAQ for those wanting to establish an .alt newsgroup wryly nodded at most people’s mistaken assumptions about the new system: ‘“ALT” stands for “Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists”.’7 It was a joke, but the atmosphere in the .alt groups was ludic and countercultural to the point of cyber-anarchy.

  One of the main attractions of newsgroups, and what made them so popular and functional, was that they not only enabled social interaction, but also allowed information to be collated in one place. As universities linked up to each of the nets, the main problem people had was how to actually find what they were looking for. Their imagination, and net use, was limited by the size of the data pool, and the lack of any clear directions. There were no indexes or catalogues, and connection speeds were treacle-slow. This was a period before file formats such as the jpeg were widely used, when ASCII was the global lingua franca and attaching large documents to emails was considered an inconsiderate use of global bandwidth.

  The indexing systems that we take so much for granted – search engines – are central to all web users’ daily experiences now. But in the early days of the web, finding information was a complex task carried out only by the skilled and the professional. Systems such as Gopher, ARCHIE, VERONICA and JUGHEAD were as unattractive and mystifying as their capitalized acronyms.

  The domain name system, which uses words instead of numbers to request net pages from servers, was created in 1984. The curiously human Macintosh, by Apple Computer, was also launched that year, its use of icons and an onscreen cursor suddenly bridging the gap between person and machine, and bringing Engelbart’s mouse to the masses. Revealing the Macintosh to the world for the first time in 1984, in a presentation that was to become the archetype for the company’s hype-heavy launches, Apple boss Steve Jobs shocked the audience as he showed that the computer could speak, its rudimentary voice-emulation software ringing around the hall, sounding for all the world like a disembodied, time-travelling Stephen Hawking. For those who had seen Engelbart’s demo, though, Jobs’ entire presentational schtick looked more than a little familiar.

  In the early 1990s, Stuart Brand set up The Well, a legendary bulletin board that was an early gathering point for intellectuals and cyberutopians. The Well, or Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, was a virtual community that hosted conversations between some of the web’s earliest champions including John Gilmore. It was also an important meeting point for fans of the Grateful Dead, confirming for ever the association between high-tech geekery and psychedelics that would result in the virtualization of the illegal drugs market in the twenty-first century.

  Newsgroups disseminated the solid information on drugs that had been so lacking earlier. The Usenet newsgroup alt.drugs generated about 130 posts a day, its online FAQ said in 1995, and had about 120,000 daily readers. Alt.drugs. chemistry, a related group, began in 1994, and its sole topic was the covert manufacture of illicit drugs. It seemed unbelievable at the time that all across the world drugs policy was toughening in response to the new wave of designer drugs, such as crystal meth and Ecstasy, yet 120,000 inboxes each day received a series of innocent-looking text files that documented in meticulous detail how best to manufacture or take illegal compounds.

  Where once drug manufacture was a completely hidden science, the preserve of motorcycle gangs, hippy renegades and organized crime syndicates, now this arcane information took its place comfortably among the reading matter of a technically literate avant garde. The net democratized criminality – or information that would enable criminality – on an unprecedented scale. Both the quantity of illicit information, and illegal acts inspired by that knowledge, were set to grow.
<
br />   The FAQ to alt.drugs lined up the tattered and tie-dyed 1960s and 1970s drug myths – like the belief that smoking banana skins got you stoned, or that some LSD contained strychnine – and deconstructed each of them with logical prowess and, more importantly, trustworthy, hyperlinked sources. It also coined now-popular email slang such as IMHO (in my humble opinion) and WRT (with respect to). The community’s view of drug laws as unwelcome intrusions into people’s private lives has now become a much more commonplace belief.

  As a virtual space where identity was shredded into binary code and reassembled as text on the screens of strangers separated by thousands of miles of space, but sharing closely aligned philosophies, the net was well suited to those interested in the psychedelic and psychoactive experiences. No laws seemed to apply there, and the early days of digital interconnection were characterized by behaviours and value systems that would have ended in a jail sentence had they been enacted in reality. To paraphrase Peter Steiner’s famous New Yorker cartoon of 1993, if no one on the internet knew you were a dog, then equally no one on the net knew you took or synthesized designer drugs.

  In 1996 an extraordinary series of threads started by the posters Eleusis and Zwitterion in the alt.drugs.chemistry newsgroup argued out in obsessive detail how best to manufacture MDMA. It was a twisted flame war, a soap opera for a voyeuristic digerati. But before he grappled with Zwitterion, Eleusis had first taken on the underground press classic The Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture by Uncle Fester, a pseudonym for the American clandestine chemist Steve Preisler, the father of modern methamphetamine manufacture.

  Fester’s most famous work was written after the electroplating technician was jailed for three and a half years for possession of methamphetamine in 1984. The DEA said he was guilty of more than possession and pinned him with a synthesis charge after they produced evidence that he had been buying ephedrine tablets, a known precursor to the potent stimulant that has ravaged America’s rural heartlands. While in jail, Preisler, nicknamed Uncle Fester by college friends after a TV character in 1960s comedy show The Addams Family who liked to cause explosions, decided to write the book as an act of defiance – and more importantly, to spread his ideas. ‘My thought at the time was, “You don’t like what I’m doing, huh? Well, how would you like 30,000 more just like me?” I know how to dig through the scientific literature, but I also know how to tell a story. There’s nothing worse than a dull chemistry book, cause it’ll make your teeth hurt,’ he told Fox News in an interview in 2004.