by Power, Mike
It is an indisputable fact that millions of British people spend a good deal of their disposable income – and free time – using illegal drugs. Pick any year and you’ll find that the UK is excelling at some form of drug use in one way or another, and the nation also has a parallel and serious problem with binge-drinking. Working out why the British use intoxicating substances to such excess keeps hundreds of civil servants, politicians and academics busy (and funded), exercises our police force and helps them justify calls for ever-increasing budgets to tackle the issue.
In around 2008, it became clear both from police seizures and from anecdotal evidence among users both online and in real life, that even as use and consumption was rising, the quality of most drugs sold in the UK was declining, especially that of cocaine and Ecstasy. Cocaine quality had been steadily falling for the seven years before the 2011 visit I made to the Forensic Science Service (FSS) labs in Lambeth, south London. As you enter the drug-testing room at FSS, the smells slap you in the face. There’s a jungle reek of high-grade marijuana; a saccharine-sweet solvent odour wafting from sacks of yellow amphetamine; a kerosene tang from large bags of cocaine strewn casually on steel-topped tables. The white-coated scientists who move among the aromas appear oblivious, however and quietly get on with methodically weighing, measuring and documenting their findings. A huge clear bin liner a few benches away is filled with twisted, knotted lumps of base amphetamine, gnarled like melted cinder toffee. A sack of spongy-fresh skunk cannabis overflows, the pounds of tightly trimmed top flowers adding an earthy and pungent fragrance to the olfactory overload.
Many police forces across the UK until recently used the lab to measure the purity – or impurity – of drugs samples seized in raids and arrests. This nondescript room at one end of a bland, municipal 1970s office corridor can tell us much about social, criminal and chemical trends in the UK. ‘We have a lot of work; there’s never any shortage of cocaine. But quality has slipped quite markedly in recent years,’ said Dean Ames, the FSS’s drugs intelligence advisor.
Through the 1970s and 1980s cocaine was synonymous with money and status. Now, though, the drug is to be found in even the smallest towns and villages; cocaine, police say, has penetrated every corner of Britain. As use has increased, so the price and purity of the drug have fallen dramatically, a situation few could have predicted even ten years ago. ‘A typical importation quality at the start of the decade would be around seventy per cent pure, and a police seizure, at distribution or street level, would be around forty to fifty per cent,’ says Ames. ‘We’ve seen a reduction in the quality of import cocaine, which is now at about sixty-five per cent, and the quality of the drug on the street is, at best, down to twenty or thirty per cent. It can be as low as ten or even five per cent. In some cities, such as Liverpool, there is sometimes no cocaine found in samples at all.’ Instead, he said, they will contain a mix of caffeine, benzocaine and paracetamol.
Kelly Burt, a twenty-three-year-old assistant forensic scientist, focuses intently as she weighs out a tiny quantity of what is presumed to be cocaine using a scale that measures to one ten-thousandth of a gram. She has worked here since graduating in forensic science and investigative analysis from Kingston University, and is now a drug analyst and heroin profiler. Can she judge cocaine purity on sight? ‘No, I’m always surprised. I can tell cocaine by the smell of it now; it’s very distinctive,’ she says. ‘But as for purity, no. Sometimes I think it’s really pure and it turns out to be just one per cent. There’s no way of knowing without using the procedures we do here.’ Most cocaine she has seen in the last five years was of very low quality, she said. ‘It’s generally below ten per cent, the street deals. Nine times out of ten. Most supposed grams weigh very little – as low as 200 mg [one-fifth of a gram]. Only rarely, when we get a larger seizure, do we see any samples with higher purity than that.’
This decline in quality in the UK was caused by a number of factors. An interesting one is the pound’s collapse against the dollar and the euro – the cocaine currencies. In May 2007, the dollar was trading at around fifty pence. Today it’s worth about sixty-two pence – meaning it costs around twenty-five per cent more in sterling to buy the same amount of product.
Matthew Atha, director of the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit, which acts as an expert witness in British drug court cases, told me in 2011 that most cocaine in the UK was, by then, ineffective. ‘It’s pretty pointless trying to use street cocaine as a stimulant. The amount you need to take is so large, people would be better off with a cappuccino these days, to be honest. It’s much better value for money.’
The import and sale of benzocaine, a numbing agent used legitimately as a topical anesthetic, also contributed to the decline in quality. It is used covertly to cut down the powder and bulk it out, since users think numb gums mean a high-quality product. Snorting it will make your nostrils and then your teeth numb, but the drug does not trigger the same flood of dopamine that true cocaine does. Likewise, it prompts no alertness, so often dealers simply sell benzocaine mixed with caffeine.
David John Wain, from Hayes in London, imported more than seventeen tonnes of cutting agents, including 7,000 kg of benzocaine, from China. This was almost as much benzocaine as the whole legitimate UK market used in a year. He was jailed in 2010 for twelve years, as part of a new Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) strategy called Operation Kitley, which targets those supplying chemicals to the cocaine trade. SOCA senior investigator Trevor Symes told the BBC: ‘Even after we warned him, he [brought] in more tonnes of chemicals. He felt the law did not apply to him. He knew, and he knew full well, that he was importing chemicals for drugs on a massive scale.’6 Wain was prosecuted under the Serious Crime Act 2007, which targets those who help gangs but may not be involved in the end offence.
The British Crime Survey in 2008 put the number of cocaine users in the UK at 974,0007 – more than any other country in Europe. By 2011, Britain had been Europe’s top cocaine-consuming nation for the previous six years. So there was, in 2008 in the UK, a huge and generally unsatisfied market for an affordable and effective stimulant.
A similar thing happened to the MDMA markets in 2007–8. After years of high-quality MDMA, the British and European market suddenly dried up. Britain’s supply was among the world’s worst, thanks to its geographic isolation as an island. But Europe, too, was suffering a mysterious MDMA drought.
In the 1990s, when Ecstasy quality first dropped briefly, news spread slowly. In 2007–8, however, Web 2.0 technologies such as forums, together with the online sale of Ecstasy pill-testing kits, meant that people were forewarned and able to communicate the dangers publicly, and instantly.
Pillreports.com is an unofficial barometer of the Ecstasy trade, especially in Europe. In common with many other online drugs communities, the site hosts user reports and images of pills bought as Ecstasy, with dates and test centre reports, if the buyer is lucky enough to live in a country such as the Netherlands with free testing of pills. Otherwise users will test the pills themselves, using pill-testing kits containing a chemical known as the Marquis reagent. To use them you simply crumble a chip of a pill onto a plate and add a drop of the liquid; if it goes black the pill contains a primary amine, likely an MDMA-like substance. A colour-coded chart offers users some way of telling if the pills are poisonous or safe.
The site, which was set up in 2000, offers a fascinating window into a hidden culture, and plots geographically and publicly the quality of drugs across Europe in real time, while most official reports lag by at least a year. The site’s servers are located in the Netherlands, thanks to the country’s lenient and liberal drug laws. It has 29,345 user-generated reports on pills sold as Ecstasy, and gets around 15,000 unique visitors each day. It is a self-managing community, with moderators keeping an eye on threads to ensure that dealers do not use the service to advertise their products. ‘Like any site that crowdsources user reviews there is always the danger of people gaming the system, but we find
that good information always drives out bad,’ the site’s administrator told me by email. To those who argue that the site encourages drug use, he offers the baldly factual response: ‘Studies on the influence of drug information, and particularly pill testing, have shown that the more information people have about what is in pills the less likely they are to take them.’
Pillreports proved its worth most significantly in late 2008 and throughout 2009, when its pages were covered in pink reports – highlighted in that colour to show that the drugs bought contained no MDMA. There was evidently a worldwide drought of the substance; its crystal form had not been seen in months, and considering the size of the UK market, which consumed millions of pills per year, something was clearly amiss. Nobody could understand why this was happening. All over the net people were reporting that they were sick and tired of buying tablets that made them ill, and in clubs across the UK users were reporting headaches, fever-like symptoms, unpleasant comedowns and bizarre hallucinations.
Health professionals and toxicologists worked out that users were actually eating a class of drug known as piperazines. These were legal compounds that had never been abused recreationally, which had seldom been seized at borders or on the streets, and which had never been considered by the ACMD as being dangerous. To the uninitiated, piperazines might have passed for a dose of MDMA, but most users rejected them, even though they were being sold in some cases for just a couple of pounds each, because they offered a brief, mind-mangling high.
Some piperazines are used as anti-worming agents in dogs, and some in medical research centres in tests for the migraine headache industry, to induce migraines in test patients. A side-effect of these piperazines was nausea, and analysis of pills from 2008 showed that some criminal chemists had even included a small dose of domperidone, an anti-emetic drug used to manage vomiting in pregnant women suffering morning sickness, to mask it. Why were the crime syndicates using these foul concoctions? Surely no dealer would want to kill or sicken his customers, or worse, deter them from spending more money? The Ecstasy market started to collapse.
Unbeknown to European users, in Cambodia between 2007 and 2008, a series of events had occurred that link together every strand of this story. This was the fulcrum on which the events of the next few years would tip.
Notes
1. www.erowid.org/library/books_online/PIHKAL033
.shtml
2. http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. The concept of ‘Web 2.0’ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having ‘crashed’, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. See also www.web2summit.com/web2011/public/content/about
3. www.imrg.org/ImrgWebsite/User/Pages/B2C
_Global
_e-Commerce_Overview_2011.aspx
4. Charlotte Walsh, ‘Magic Mushrooms: From sacred entheogen to class A drug’, Entertainment and Sports Law Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2006; go.warwick.ac.uk/eslj/issues/volume4/number1/
walsh/. Walsh writes, ‘The situation was further complicated by the conflicting interpretations of the law that emanated from government. Many of those who sold magic mushrooms used to display in their windows a photocopy of a letter, written by Home Office official Ian Breadmore in 2003, that clearly stated: “It is not illegal to sell or give away a freshly picked mushroom provided that it has not been prepared in any way.”’
5. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/
netherlands/3441105/Magic-mushrooms-banned-in-Netherlands.html
6. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11816071
7. www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/
cmselect/cmhaff/74/7408.htm
Mephedrone Madness: the Underground Hits the High Street
In the pristine and remote Cardamom mountains in southwestern Cambodia in 2008, local forest rangers and conservationists from Flora and Fauna International, a British NGO, came upon a smoking, abandoned campsite. The scene was a bizarre mix of charnel house and war movie, but instead of piled corpses and bones, there lay scattered the husks of a tree beside a vast cauldron over the embers of a large fire. Clothes, books, food and mobile phones were strewn around and a roasting animal still cooking on the spit of a camp fire spoke of recent occupation, and flight. An AK-47 bullet casing lay on the ground near screw-cap plastic gallon containers of a sweet-smelling oil.
The oil was safrole, distilled from recently felled trees that had stood for several hundred years before the arrival of the poachers who had set up the camp. They had cut a savage path into the heart of this, the longest contiguous tract of virgin rainforest in South-east Asia, in search of the mreah prew phnom tree, whose bark and roots contain unusually high concentrations of the oil.
In this and other ramshackle safrole factories, the essential oil is distilled from the tree’s bark and roots by first shredding them with mechanical strimmers and grinders, and then suspending the stripped material over heated water in a vast iron cauldron, which has an outlet pipe in its top that directs the now safrole-rich steam into a condensing chamber. In this form – in which it has no psychoactive effects – it has long been used in traditional Khmer medicines. But the oil, if it had been taken to the capital, could have been sold for fifty dollars a litre. One litre of this oil can make anything up to 1,000 Ecstasy pills.
In late 2008, in Pursat, 170 km west of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, UN anti-drug officers destroyed 33 tonnes of safrole oil, which had been earmarked for use by drug gangs in the Netherlands to make Ecstasy following Shulgin’s recipe. The oil, confiscated over the preceding weeks and months, had been produced in illegal safrole labs like the one in the Cardamom Mountains, that made an average of sixty litres a day. If the thirty-three tonnes of oil had got to Holland, it would have translated into as much Ecstasy as all the users in Britain alone combined would have normally taken in five years. Instead, it was burnt.1
There are many ways to make MDMA, but safrole is the simplest synthetic route; the chemistry of the two molecules is not very different, as can been seen in these diagrams:
Safrole
MDMA
More importantly, the steps from safrole to MDMA are fewer than by most other methods and the yield is often higher. The impact of the events in Cambodia was therefore profound and lasting – and it inadvertently caused the appearance of the drug that came to be known as mephedrone.
An analysis of the data published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in the World Drug Report 2011 stated that in 2004, global seizures of what the UN calls ‘Ecstasy group’ substances were 12.7 tonnes.2 That figure dropped to 9.7 tonnes in 2005, stayed steady for 2006, and then in 2007, almost doubled, to 16.5 tonnes. But seizures then dropped vertiginously to 6 tonnes in 2008 and 5.4 tonnes in 2009. These were the two years of the global MDMA drought and include the year of the 33-tonne Pursat oil burn that took out the precursor required to synthesize 260 million pills. If we calculate 245 million pills at a rather generous 125 mg each tablet, that would add up to around 29 tonnes of MDMA – enough to starve the world market for all of 2007, 2008 and part of 2009.
Not only were the precursors getting harder to find, but in June 2007 the world’s biggest Ecstasy bust had taken place in Australia. The global MDMA market is mainly controlled by Russian and Israeli organized crime groups, Dutch-born chemists and Israeli and Italian smugglers. An alliance of Italian crime bosses and motorcycle gangs in Australia arranged the import of fifteen million pills in tomato cans from Naples to Melbourne in 2008. They were caught after 100,000 telephone intercepts and thousands of hours of surveillance in an investigation that involved 800 police. In May 2012, Pasquale Barbaro, a fifty-year-old farmer from New South Wales, and a member of the powerful Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate, was jailed for life for the offence. His accomplice, fifty-five-year-old Saverio Zirilli, was jailed
for twenty-six years.
In late 2008 and early 2009, then, users were crying out for either MDMA or some new replacement. There was a huge untapped and unsatisfied market, filled only with piperazines. A person with close links to those involved in the top-levels of global MDMA manufacture revealed to me what prompted the emergence of piperazines and other adulterants as a response to the increase in prices for safrole and other precursors between 2006–2009: ‘Precursor prices [for compounds such as safrole] had gone up considerably from 2006 onwards. The steadily increasing security in European ports was making it harder to bring bulk quantities of precursors in, even when you could find them. This was sending the price of manufacture up, not by a huge amount yet but it was concerning manufacturers,’ he explained. ‘A number of international syndicates took a vote on whether or not to raise the wholesale prices on pills or look for cheaper substitutions. Apparently the vote came down on the side of substitutions and it was after this that we started seeing more and more pills with what we would consider adulterants, but which the industry was trying to promote as substitutions.’
But the strategy backfired, when users became wary to the point that many of them stopped purchasing the new pills that sickened them so badly.
Around five years earlier, an underground chemist known as Kinetic had posted the web’s first synthesis of a new drug to the Hive. ‘I’ve been bored over the last couple of days,’ he wrote in 2003, ‘and had a few fun reagents lying around, so I thought I’d try and make some 1-(4-methylphenyl)-2-methylaminopro-panone hydrochloride, or 4-methylmethcathinone as I suppose it would be commonly called.’3 He went on to document how he had synthesized 4.8 g of the drug in forty-eight hours using toluene, a simple solvent, as the precursor. He then, like Shulgin before him, tried the drug he had made, and reported back to a fascinated audience of fellow renegade chemists. But this drug was nowhere to be found in PIHKAL or TIHKAL – it was almost entirely unheard of, and certainly never seen before on the mainstream drugs markets. Kinetic had used his knowledge as a chemist to devise mephedrone, a new analogue of methcathinone – a powerful and illegal stimulant drug related to methamphetamine, or crystal meth. These diagrams show the similarity between the three compounds:
