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

by Power, Mike

  If you skipped the rather intractable synthesis sections – and if you could overlook the fact that he was propagating information that could end in severe addiction and death – Preisler’s book was a hilarious and extraordinarily individualistic declaration of the cherished American constitutional right of freedom of speech. American publisher Loompanic has had the book in print for decades now, and it is now in its eighth edition. Investigators claim it has been found in many drug manufacturing laboratories around the world.8

  Eleusis felt that Uncle Fester’s book was riddled with technical flaws, and so took it upon himself in 1996 on the alt.drugs. chemistry group to berate the author and destroy his work, chapter by chapter, line by line, with sources proving his case. Under the thread title: ‘A Thorough Thrashing of Uncle Fester’s Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture – No wonder the Feds don’t give a shit!’, he mocked and teased, scorned and shamed the father of modern methamphetamine manufacture.9

  The boisterous Uncle Fester was goaded into defending himself against the allegations, and it made for great sport. It was a marvellous meeting of minds, but more than that it was the meeting of two worlds – the spluttering old guard overthrown by this vocal, technologically adept young chemist. Eleusis was just as defiant as Fester had been in print, but with a much larger audience than the old master. Furthermore, this new audience could replicate and distribute and share the information they received instantly and infinitely and at no cost. ‘This book is an obvious attempt at profiteering,’ concluded Eleusis on 3 March 1996:

  Perhaps Uncle Fester goes by this name in order to escape harassment by the Feds, but I’d say he would have more to worry about from disgruntled hack chemists that attempt to duplicate his ‘work’. As well, it is quite clear that old Fester didn’t do most of what he writes about, because essential details are lacking at every step of the way. This may be intentional omission to reduce liability, but if so, why bother? It is my opinion, then, that this book review is worth far more than the book itself. Enjoy!

  An amused audience worldwide tuned in to this bizarre new entertainment channel. The conversation made little sense to many, but its impact was clear enough. Media was changing, as the means of production and, crucially, distribution were quietly seized. This would change the drug culture, in common with every other area of human experience.

  Eleusis was a fascinating character to anyone interested in the drugs subculture and net culture at this time – his arguments with Zwitterion were technically impenetrable, but full of humour and clever literary and mythological references to ancient Greece and Homer. But Eleusis and Zwitterion were, it turned out, the same character. Floridian Jeffrey Jenkins was an English graduate who had turned his hand to basement chemistry in order to perfect the art of MDMA manufacture. He says he posted under two names to ensure a decent conversation, to increase the sum knowledge of the technical processes and to avoid detection. It may be that his frenetic creativity found expression in creating believably distinct alter egos, or it may be that he was struggling with the multiplicities of identity that self-representation in the virtual space triggered in those pioneer days.

  A text file posted to alt.drugs.chemistry after Jenkins’ arrest for manufacturing MDMA offers a fascinating insight into the mindset of a typical, small-scale underground chemist, who is obsessive, altruistic, individualistic and contrary, but passionate about his work. There is something in both the MDMA experience and the net itself that fosters the innate human desire to share the knowledge we have gained, to scatter the seeds of our experience far and wide. ‘Eleusis, for those of you unfamiliar …’ wrote the chemist after his capture and before his imprisonment,

  … was the name of an ancient Greek city where the Spring Mysteries were held: a city-wide festival where consumption of mind-altering substances was the central activity in a celebration of the return of Spring.

  Organic chemistry intrigued me. It tempted me with its secret language of symbols, its demand for (nearly) blind faith in unseen collisions. MDMA intrigued me as well, with its strangely universal experience, its ability to make even the hardest soul empathic. I had tried neither organic chemistry nor MDMA, so I decided to try both. In the Spring of 1994, appropriately enough, I began my chemical journey and by late winter I was already posting to a.d.c. [alt.drugs.chemistry] It took so much work to learn how to make MDMA that I decided I was going to share what I learned so that others would not have to repeat my labours. However, I had serious misgivings about sharing because my quest was one for knowledge and experience while, I knew, for most others it would be for purely economic reasons. You can see my struggling in practically ever post I made, the schizophrenic vacillations in tone between erudite dissertation and egomaniacal evisceration. Though I knew my posts would be put to use by those less scrupulous, I posted nonetheless for the benefit of those who were.10

  His experiments would ultimately cost Jenkins’ family half their home in legal fees, and the chemist himself a long spell in jail. But in notes written after his arrest, he surprised many when he stated that the police had not questioned him about his activity on the newsgroup, and that his thousand-plus postings there had played no part in his arrest.

  For those who might question the ethics of sharing information on drugs manufacturing online, the FAQ for the alt.drugs list – which had a casual approach to international drug laws – ended with a surprisingly idealistic and conventionally moral conclusion, written by Yogi Shan, another Eleusis pseudonym, some claim (the truth may never be known):

  No matter how you rationalize it, there is no way to escape the cruel reality that drugs are about two things: money and power, amassed through the corrupt exploitation of human weakness. Sound public policy is built not through the cynical manipulations of politicians and two-dollar moralists, but through a careful balancing of harm minimization to the individual, _as well as_ society at large. Until society comes to grips with that, the nonmedical use of drugs will remain an intractable scourge that distorts entire economies, corrupts our institutions to the core, and frays the social fabric. However, the base hypocrisy of society cannot and does not provide moral justification for the manufacture and distribution of illicit drugs for personal profit. Sorry.11

  The author of the FAQ also lamented what he saw as an end to the halcyon days of Usenet as a resource for research and community building, as the service became populated by people with little experience:

  Usenet at its best is a network of some of the brightest minds in the civilized world, getting together to discuss whatever strikes their collective fancy. Professors and academics, engineers and scientists, polymaths, and intelligent people everywhere, getting together to kick ideas, information, and scurrilous personal attacks back and forth. A synthesis of great minds and intellects, altruistically donating their time and effort in glorious cosmic synergy. However, it’s sad to say that, as more and more people go online, the Net is beginning to reflect the tawdry conglomeration that is society at large. One mammoth, lowest common denominator, vainglorious, pseudo-intellectual whore-house. To put it simply, Usenet may already have peaked.

  He needn’t have worried, though. The net drug scene was about to mutate once more, and technology was the driver.

  During the Usenet era, the net itself had been changing – morphing into the world wide web, the global graphic interface to the new world of data invented and named by Tim Berners Lee at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), in 1991. With great modesty and foresight, the physicist demonstrated and distributed, for free, a technology that would help his fellow particle physicists to share their findings into the fundamental nature of reality at CERN. Berners Lee’s genius was to write HTML, or hypertext markup language, which allowed the linking of one document to any other that was hosted on the new networks. For the first few years, this new web would be popular only with expert users, but from 1993, with the launch of the Mosaic web browser, the technology caused a serious commercial and cultu
ral buzz beyond academia.

  During the alt.drugs.chemistry scene, one new drugs website called the Hive was also becoming a very busy online gathering point for people interested in the psychedelic experience, and in particular MDMA users and manufacturers. With its friendly buzzing bee logo, it was an early gathering point, from around 1997. Members, or bees, would talk about the synthetic routes to creating MDMA, or ‘honey’, as they would refer to the freebase oil the substance takes before it is salted into a solid crystalline form. At its peak, the Hive had over 6,000 collaborative members, and, as was so often the case in those days, framed its mission in terms of free access to information.

  Instead of being hosted on Usenet, the site was hosted on the web in clear sight of authorities. It had threads – or discussion topics arranged into threaded debates – with hyperlinks, images and references inline in the text. It was a far more user-friendly, media-rich environment than earlier digital communities and users capitalized on the new possibilities immediately.

  The Hive is a discussion board with several moderated forums covering the whole area of the chemistry of mind-altering compounds … Many of these substances are subjected to strong legal restrictions in most countries. It is in your own responsibility to check your local laws and to apply for the proper permissions. Most if not all of the information discussed here can be found in public libraries, patent registers, or free internet sources. The Hive merely provides it as a compact collector’s database.

  Thus states its home page. Or rather, stated, since the site was taken down in 2004 after it became the subject of a ten-month Dateline investigation by American news channel NBC, which culminated in the unmasking of the site’s owner. ‘Strike’ turned out to be the pseudonym for a chemical supply worker, Hobart Huson, who was subsequently imprisoned for eight years in 2003 for supplying drug labs with precursors, reagents and glassware. He was released in 2009.

  The investigation was a toe-curling, voyeuristic affair which made much of young people’s blurry sexual boundaries under the influence of the drug. The chemists were foolish enough to video themselves partying while high, and showing off new deliveries of glassware and lab equipment to the camera, much like teens today incriminating themselves on their Facebook pages.

  In one scene of the documentary exposé, a journalist, agog at the fact that the constitutional guarantee of free speech also applies to those talking about drug synthesis online, has his lament echoed by a portly, moustachioed, cartoon-caricature DEA agent. The contrast between the young net evangelists who believed that information on any topic should be free, no matter what, and the law enforcement authorities could not have been starker.

  Although the Hive was taken offline, an archivist-moderator at the site, Rhodium, had carefully saved thousands of posts that catalogued information about the manufacture of hundreds of drugs, and the archive was widely disseminated across the net. The information lay there quietly on hard drives and file lockers as a .torrent file, waiting for just the right moment, just the right social circumstances and chemical conditions, to reappear.

  Elsewhere on the web, other activists gathered and offered information about banned drugs. In 1996 Nicholas Saunders, the author of E for Ecstasy, established the ecstasy.org website, placing the full text of his book online for free. ‘Ecstasy.org aims to gather and make accessible objective, authoritative, and up-to-date information about the drug Ecstasy (principally MDMA),’ said the site upon its launch, and it soon had three million hits a year from visitors looking for non-biased information. The site also contained pill-testing data, providing chemical analyses of tablets sent in by users. Grainy jpeg and .gif images of pills bought in the UK and beyond were compiled slowly line by line on screens, a major step forward in harm reduction. The data revealed that much of what was sold in Europe and the US as Ecstasy was inert, mislabelled or plain poisonous. It was an ingeniously innovative model that would be followed by many other websites soon after.

  An American counterpart, Ecstasydata.org, was set up in 2001 and is still running today. It started publishing results online in July 2001, providing a valuable service to the drug-using public into what was being sold on the street. Information like this can save lives, since the majority of pills sold as Ecstasy on the street do not contain MDMA, and can sometimes contain deadly drugs that are similar in effect, such as PMA, a drug that has killed dozens of users over the years. Because of DEA restrictions, the site’s administrator explains, most American labs are not allowed to test street drugs submitted anonymously, since possession of a controlled substance without valid prescription or license is a crime in the United States – that is, both the lab and the individual would be acting illegally. Most test labs in the US are limited to screening urine for employment or enforcement purposes and because of the threat of closure, refuse to accept a tablet for analysis.

  Ecstasydata.org’s lab has been given special permission by the DEA to receive submissions of street drugs from across the US and internationally. The site cannot reveal, as Dutch test centres can, the quantity (in milligrams) of a drug found in a sample, because the DEA has an unpublished rule that licensed labs are not allowed to provide quantitative data to the public, as they fear such a level of detail would provide ‘quality control’ information to dealers and users.

  In an email, the manager of the service argues that this is irresponsible:

  It is our opinion, based on long experience, that substantially more detailed information could be made available to the public and to poison control centres through this type of system without increasing risks to the public about encouraging illegal drug use. It is our view that the American government should not only allow, but subsidise street drug analysis to help promote awareness of contaminated and mislabelled drugs among users, parents, teachers, and children; facilitate long-term data collection about street drugs for future retrospective review; and provide a public, reviewable resource for medical professionals and poison control centers to help provide care for those who experience medical emergencies related to street drugs such as Ecstasy.

  The site publicizes the results of tests on potentially deadly pills to users of the site, which now number 700,000 per year, and also carries out work offline at dance events. ‘When we see particularly dangerous pressed tablets, we try to publicize the results to the online communities that might be impacted by the drug,’ says the site’s owner. ‘Also, [sister organization] DanceSafe uses the results to carry out in-person harm reduction work by printing out or having a digital version of the results to show people at large dance or electronic music events.’

  At the same time as Usenet groups were hosting conversations on the synthesis and use of drugs in the mid-to-late 1990s, many sites also sprang up on the newly created web selling plant-based drugs, and users of these plants, known as ethnobotanicals, took to the website Erowid.org to document their experiences. Many of them referred to these and other psychedelic drugs as entheogens, meaning substances used in shamanic or religious contexts, in an attempt to frame their drug use as a spiritual, rather than hedonistic quest.

  These drugs had of course been popular in the pre-net days. The use of natural plant psychedelics grew in popularity after the psychedelic revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, and was an extension of the hippy antediluvian pastoral dream. In the 1990s, lawyer and activist Richard Glen Boire produced The Entheogen Law Reporter, a photocopied, subscriber-only publication distributed from California that declared its intentions as follows:

  Since time immemorial, humans have used entheogenic substances as powerful tools for achieving spiritual insight and understanding. In the twentieth century, however, many of these most powerful of religious and epistemological tools were declared illegal in the United States, and their users decreed criminals. The shaman has been outlawed. It is the purpose of The Entheogen Law Reporter to provide the latest information and commentary on the intersection of entheogenic substances and the law.12

  Twenty-two
issues were printed between 1993 and 1999. They contained learned legal essays on the finer points of American drug law and policy, and laid the foundations for an online drug culture that was inquisitive, sure of itself and fully conscious of the choices it was making. The authors presented drug-taking as a spiritual pastime, and deliberately framed the war on drugs as a war on nature, since banning natural products such as magic mushrooms and peyote was both harder to enforce and more difficult to justify rationally. What’s more, there was precedent for the legal use of natural psychedelics, for the American government graciously permitted, under certain restrictions, Native American churches the right to continue their millennia-long use of peyote in ritual settings.

  Boire, who is now a lawyer working in complex drugs cases, told me by email in 2012 why he had produced the newsletter:

  I was a young lawyer and was fascinated by entheogens. The law surrounding them was and is very convoluted, and at the time many people did not know what was or was not permitted. Accurate information about entheogens was hard to find, sometimes harder than finding the entheogens themselves. I also saw lots of parallels between banned books and banned substances – they both change how you think, yet banning books is considered old-school totalitarian, while banning substances is largely accepted. I wanted to investigate this.