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

by Power, Mike

  With their love of free speech and work as information activists, it was a natural jump for readers of this and similar publications – such as The Entheogen Review – to look online for information about drugs.

  Since its inception in 1995, Erowid.org – the name, meaning ‘Earth Wisdom’, hinting at the site’s hippyish roots – has grown to become the world’s most important repository of information about the ‘complex relationship between humans and psychoactives’, and the single most important resource on the web for information about drugs.

  Its home page is herbal-heavy: poppies, cacti, Egyptian blue lotus leaves, kratom, a Thai leaf used as an opiate-replacement, mushrooms, mystical Mexican sages such as salvia divinorum. Erowid hasn’t evolved much in graphic design terms since it started, but there is little need for it to do so. The form here is user-generated content by the gigabyte, supplied for free by generous souls.

  From its inception the site gathered users’ reports on psychoactive plants and also synthetic drugs, split into sub-categories in its ‘Experience Vaults’: General, First Times, Combinations, Difficult Experiences, Glowing Experiences, Bad Trips, Health Problems, Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters. These trip reports documented the effects of hundreds of drug and plant experiences, and their interactions, synergies and contraindications. It was like a shaman’s hut with a modem. The site was the first port of call for anyone looking to document, share or make sense of their experiences – or to grandstand and stake out the new frontiers of consciousness, for it has to be said that this intensely geeky, mostly male subculture could at times be incredibly self-regarding and pretentious.

  Natural drugs such as nutmeg, mescaline-containing cacti, mushrooms and vines containing psychoactive substances were among the first compounds to have their effects documented online at Erowid. That most of them were ineffective, or unpleasant, did not bother users or readers much, and the so-called ethnobotanical market still has a multimillion-dollar turnover even today, since most of these plants and seeds remain legal.

  Some reports hosted by the site detail acts that make the mind reel at their folly, while others bore to tears with their meticulous data-harvest. The reports by users who have eaten the oddly alluring flowers of Datura stramonium, though, are uniformly astounding. Why anyone would ever willingly take datura, which grows wild across the world and has been used for centuries in shamanistic contexts, is a complete mystery, but perhaps reveals the reckless lengths to which some people will go to experience a different state of consciousness. In the UK datura is known as thorn apple; in the US, limson weed. A member of the Solanaceae family, with spiky horse-chestnut-style seed pods and fluted, trumpet-shaped flowers, it is a fearful-looking plant. And nature hereby warns us that it is indeed poisonous: its seeds and petals contain the tropane alkaloids atropine, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, and render the user – or abuser – delirious for days. That’s no hyperbole; scopolamine-containing plants are not hallucinogens; these-tropane-alkaloid-rich plants are classed as deliriants and send users into psychotically deranged states where their memories are obliterated, to be replaced with the darkest possible imaginings. Known in folklore to herbalists skilled in their preparation for use in treating ailments such as asthma and used worldwide in sacramental settings, in the digital age their consumption has been documented by the brave and foolhardy at Erowid.

  The trip reports’ titles alone are enough to put you off: ‘A brush with death and total confusion’; ‘Eating bugs while my friends convulsed’; ‘I lost my pets and almost burned the house down’; ‘A tale of nudity, arrest and insanity’. Most reports involve a trip to a psychiatric ward or emergency department after indepth conversations with non-present friends, and a curiously universal endless search for imaginary dropped cigarettes.

  Other new natural, powerful, plant-based drugs that became popular at this time included Salvia divinorum, a bizarre member of the sage family that catapults users into phantasmagorical and often unpleasant trips (quite often, they just fall over and hit their heads), morning glory seeds, Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds – all were revealed as natural and legal hallucinogens, and Erowid was instrumental in the widespread dissemination of this information, previously locked in books and journals. Vines containing DMT, as taken by Burroughs in the 1950s, were discussed and kits using them and other herbs to create ayahuasca, a potent DMT-containing jungle brew used by shamans in the rainforests of the Amazon, went on sale in the US and continental Europe, legally.

  There is even a report at Erowid for sapo, a toad venom that is applied onto self-administered burns to the skin. Apparently it makes you feel as if you’re dying for fifteen minutes, then users reportedly become stimulated and energized for a few days after that. Traditionally, it is used by hunters in indigenous communities in the Latin American rainforests, giving them a high resistance to fatigue and immensely sharpened senses, including, allegedly, the ability to see much further and to hear the footfall of prey from miles away. Its active ingredients are the peptides phyllocaerulein, phyllomedusin, phyllokinin, demorphins and deltorphins. Some of these frog venoms have been used as performance-enhancing drugs in racehorses.

  Erowid’s co-owner, known as Fire, told me she set the site up as ‘a bit of an accident’:

  In 1994, Earth [her partner] and I moved to San Francisco after graduating from college and were looking for interesting new jobs. I decided that web design sounded like an interesting and booming business, so I sat down to learn HTML and web page design. We both had an existing interest in psychoactives. We had made some attempts at scholarly research while in college, as well as joining a couple of email lists where related topics were discussed.

  While learning web design, our relatively meagre archives of information became an obvious source of data to practice making web pages out of. We put a few articles and pieces of data on a web page and then someone would ask a question in a discussion group that was answered on one of those pages. We’d point them to the page. A few more pages would go up and the URLs would get passed around. And it really was kind of just like that that Erowid was born. Then it snowballed.

  To those who have criticized the site for providing information to drug users, Fire offers a calm rejection:

  It became obvious and is still clear that humans are not going to go back to a time where interested people don’t have access to information about psychoactive drugs and technologies. The question must then shift to how to head from a dark age where prohibitionist policies intentionally tried to suppress information and pollute facts with political messages, into an age where we can collectively be building a reliable wisdom base from which parents, teachers, and people of all ages can make informed decisions.

  Daily, the site now gets 90,000 unique visits, and serves 4.1 million files. It contains over 60,000 public documents detailing case law and precedent in complex legal cases, and thousands of first-hand reports of psychoactive drug experiences. ‘All reports go through a rigorous review process,’ says Fire. ‘So far we have published 22,000, rejected another 22,000, have 36,000 rated and ready for review, and another 13,000 yet to be looked at.’ She adds that she receives at least a couple of messages a week from people who explicitly say that information they found at Erowid has saved their lives. Even today, the site is an invaluable resource for people taking new drugs that they have sourced from the internet, and its contribution to harm reduction is inestimable. It is also a valuable first reference point for parents, teachers and poison control toxicologists.

  Just as TIHKAL and PIHKAL became required reading for many in the counterculture in the 1990s, Erowid became a resource for any early web user interested in drugs. In 1996, with the Shulgins’ permission, the second half of PIHKAL was published online by Lamont Granquist, an early net advocate, who had created the Hyperreal Drug Archives, an early collection of files and information about psychoactive drugs. In 1999, Erowid moved on to the Hyperreal server and incorporated the archives there into Erowid, including PIHK
AL and TIHKAL. While this was no real surprise to any informed observer, it still felt like a revolutionary act in an information war, which, in some respects, the war on drugs had become. To see Shulgin’s complex psychedelic drug recipes published to the entire world, for free, was extraordinary. Now, not only could you read the information Shulgin had preserved so presciently, you could forward it to anyone with a few keystrokes.

  Shulgin himself joined the online party in 2001, when his Ask Dr Shulgin site launched at American campaign group Cognitive Liberty’s site. The Doctor took questions from members of the public in a weekly email Q&A and seemed to relish the contact with this new audience. The site ran for around three years and placed the counterculture’s most articulate and learned chemist-hero at the heart of the online drug debate, with discussions focusing not just on complex technical matters, but also on the ethical and moral dimensions of the war on drugs.

  Shulgin’s influence and experience bridges the gaps between the early 1950s intellectual explorers and psychiatric treatment pioneers, the 1960s hippy counterculture, 1970s and 1980s underground psychiatry, the 1980s explosion of Ecstasy as a recreational drug, the early internet drug scene of the 1990s and early 2000s – right into the chaotic twenty-first-century situation.

  What was to complicate the picture was a development that, on reflection, was entirely predictable. As the twentieth century ended, the web wasn’t just a place where you could talk about drugs – it was about to become a place where you could buy them.

  Notes

  1. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin, 2005), p. 109

  2. Mylon Stolaroff, Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration: Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness (Thaneros Pr, 1994)

  3. http://kk.org/ct2/2008/09/the-whole-earth-blogalog.php

  4. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, p. 109

  5. www.giganews.com/usenet-history/index.html

  6. Philip Elmer-Dewitt, ‘First Nation in Cyberspace’, Time, December 1993; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/

  0,9171,979768,00.html

  7. www.net.berkeley.edu/dcns/usenet/alt-creation-guide.html

  8. Steve Preisler, Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture (Loompanics, 1994)

  9. www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/

  eleusis/eleusis. vs.fester.html#Eleusis1

  10. www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/

  eleusis/memoirs.html

  11. www.erowid.org/psychoactives/faqs/faq

  _clandestine_chemistry.shtml

  12. www.erowid.org/library/periodicals/

  journals/journals_telr.shtml

  The Rise and Fall of the Research Chemical Scene

  Soon after PIHKAL appeared on Erowid, in around 1999, the ring-substituted phenethylamine and tryptamine analogues that Shulgin had made and tested on himself and his friends started to appear for sale on rudimentary websites in the US. Users online, where there was a rising wave of chatter about their effects, referred to the new drugs Shulgin had invented as ‘research chemicals’. Research chemicals are nothing more than designer drugs – but drugs that until recently very few people had ever taken. They are broadly either hallucinogens, or empathogens (drugs which bring emotional insight), or stimulants; there are hundreds of them, and they produce almost as many and varying effects as grapes produce wine or milk produces cheese. To fully describe the subjective effects of each of them in turn would fill several volumes.

  At this early stage these drugs were used by a few thousand self-defined ‘psychonauts’, or explorers of inner space, who researched their effects by browsing scientific literature and discussing them online. The internet facilitated the supply and distribution of these new drugs, whose names are a baffling alphabet soup of numbers and letters, but most critically it helped people find out which of them were fun, terrifying, transcendentally visionary, a waste of time or money, or fatal. This was as much an information revolution as a chemical uprising.

  Consider the dilemma of a research chemical user who could find no accurate information on dosage or the interaction between the new chemicals she has found or manufactured or had made. The safest and most rational solution would be to ask people who had done it before, and with the web that kind of communication became not only possible, but simple. Research chemical users took to Erowid in their droves, filing thousands of reports about the new drugs. Some were lengthy, Shulgin-inspired accounts, detailing their doses and their ‘set and setting’ – that is, describing the users’ states of mind and their physical environments before they took the drugs, since both can impact hugely upon the psychedelic experience. From these inconsequential and underground beginnings, whose effect was felt solely by a tiny minority of reckless or fearless explorers, the virtualization of a part of the international drugs market began.

  Research chemicals in 2000 were made in clandestine laboratories on a very small scale in the US, sometimes in Eastern Europe, and, more commonly, in China. The situation is broadly similar today, with China the world leader in their production. At the turn of the century, most of these drugs were legal to produce and export almost all over the world, as although many of them had exactly the same kinds of effects as banned substances such as LSD and certain amphetamines, they were so novel that they did not feature in international drug legislation such as the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, or the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971, and nor did they feature in many countries’ national drug laws. They were not specifically named in the American drug schedules, but they could arguably have fallen foul of the American Analog Act of 1986, of which more shortly.

  British law in 1999, though, was rather more advanced than that of many other countries in chemical terms, and certainly far tighter than that of America. Whereas the US attempted to control the appearance of new drugs on the basis of their activity and chemical similarity to banned substances, the UK had crafted tightly written laws specifying exact molecular structures and ring substitutions that would make little to no sense to anyone but expert chemists. And those laws were about to get even tighter.

  Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who was born in Råshult, Småland, in 1707, is the father of modern plant and animal classification. On an expedition to Lapland in 1732, Linnaeus travelled 4,600 miles across Scandinavia and then, on foot, across the Arctic Ocean, discovering 100 botanical species. In 1788, the Linnaean Society of London, the oldest biological society in the world, was formed. Its HQ, in Burlington House, Piccadilly, is home to one of the world’s most extraordinary animal and plant collections, and its walls are lined with books and prints; it is a repository of knowledge and selfless exploration and investigation. On 12 February 1999, the London Toxicology Group (LTG), specialists who study the effects of poisons and drugs on the human body, met there to discuss research that would help ban many discoveries made by Alexander Shulgin, whose interior expeditions into unknown realms were now considered a danger to society.

  In 1998, there had been a number of acute poisonings and fatalities at raves around the UK, due to a potent amphetamine derivative, 4-MTA. The drugs were being sold under false pretences by dishonest dealers as super-strength Ecstasy pills, and they were known as ‘flatliners’ because their dramatic and unpleasant effects most closely represented a coma – users would simply pass out after taking them, lying inert in corners of nightclubs or raves, a disturbing exercise in deliberate narcotic nihilism. The LTG discussed a number of cases from a recent rave in Shepton Mallet, called Dreamscape. The deaths sounded uniformly gruesome, with one man, twenty-one-year-old psychology student Rene Saunders, dying by the roadside alone, writhing in agony.

  4-MTA was actually invented by another American academic, a chemist named Professor David E. Nichols, in his search for medicinal, non-toxic serotonin-releasing agents for use in therapy and as anti-depressants. Nichols is both an experimental medicinal chemist and a friend of Shulgin’s
and is, in many ways, Shulgin’s heir. The foreword to PIHKAL, which Nichols wrote, ends with the line: ‘Some day in the future, when it may again be acceptable to use chemical tools to explore the mind, this book will be a treasure house, a sort of sorcerer’s book of spells, to delight and to enchant the psychiatrist/shaman of tomorrow.’1 He has since claimed that line was hyperbole, praise for a much-loved friend’s work, distancing himself slightly from the maverick’s methods.

  While the wild-haired Shulgin laboured in his squirrel-infested shack, the only rodents anywhere near Dr Dave, as he is known to many people, were test subjects in cages a few blocks away from his office at the campus on Purdue University, Indiana, where he occupies the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology.

  His work, like Shulgin’s, has been adopted by drug users and dealers and synthesized worldwide for recreational use. Nichols, though, is the straight man to Shulgin’s outlaw; and while Shulgin might be faster on the draw, Nichols might just be the sharper shooter. Where Shulgin confronted the law, questioned it, and ultimately encouraged millions of people to ignore it, Nichols works from within the established medical system and does not proselytize as Shulgin did for people’s right to use drugs. His aims are in some ways similar to Shulgin’s, but his methods are altogether different.

  With his full but neat beard and easy demeanour, this learned chemist is also a keen gardener and plays a mean blues harp. He admits he moves in circles that would like to see the legalization of psychedelics for psychotherapeutic purposes, but his approach to the disciplines in which he has specialized for decades – medicinal and bio-organic chemistry, molecular pharmacology and toxicology – is meticulously and conventionally rigorous.