by Power, Mike
Phenazepam was banned on 13 June 2012 in the UK9; within a few short weeks, another tranquillizer, etizolam, was on offer online and in headshops across the UK and Europe, sold as plant-feeding ‘pellets’, again to avoid medicine and food laws. The powdered version of etizolam also appeared – and its dosage level at just 1 mg meant that 1 gram costing about £40 contained 1,000 doses – or four pence per dose. Etizolam, like all those in its class, including Valium (diazepam), phenazepam and Xanax (alprazolam), is addictive and its withdrawal symptoms are more harrowing than those of heroin, and actually more dangerous, since a non-tapered, sudden cessation of these drugs in an addict’s body can lead to seizures and fits. It was, as ever, sold marked ‘not for human consumption’.
Etizolam was not illegal under the UK Misuse of Drugs Act, nor was it controlled under the Medicines Act, since at the time the law was written in 1971 it was not sold commercially, but most crucially of all, because at that point the net did not exist and nor did this culture of legal highs or research chemicals sold over it. Etizolam is still legal at the time of writing, and is regularly sold on eBay.co.uk.
4-AcO-DMT, illegal in the UK, but unscheduled in the USA, Spain and some Eastern European countries, started to become more widely available that year, too, and won many devotees who found its action similar in every way to magic mushrooms – and indeed it was, for it had been designed as a substitute for psilocybin in official medical tests, again in the lab of Professor David Nichols. Potent and active from around 5 mg, with a standard dose of around 10–18 mg, it required users to buy specialist milligram scales before taking it. There are very few negative reports about the drug online, and some glowingly mystical experiences have been reported. The origin of the drug was a 1999 paper by Nichols entitled ‘Improvements to the Synthesis of Psilocybin and a Facile Method for Preparing the O-Acetyl Prodrug of Psilocin’, in which he attempted – and succeeded – to find easier, higher-yielding methods of producing psychedelic agents for use in laboratory research into receptor binding properties, structure-activity relationships and the search for new anti-depressant medicines.10
Yet more new drugs appeared. Compounds such as 4-HO-MET, another mushroom-type drug, came on general sale. Users reported that it gave them bright, colourful, cartoon-like visions, and plenty of energy for dancing. Then there were new amphetamines that had a flourine molecule bolted onto the three- or four- position of the carbon ring and which gave users the hit of quality cocaine. They were illegal in the UK since our laws forbid ring substitutions of amphetamines, but they existed in a grey area in the US and other countries. Legality aside, they were online and deliverable anywhere in a business envelope in a matter of days.
More new synthetic cannabinoids appeared, both legal and potent. But the real search, in the UK at least, was for a new mephedrone, a euphoric stimulant active in medium-sized doses. When word of a new, legal analogue of MDA, known as 6-APB, hit the web in 2010, things gathered pace once more. MDA itself is an analogue of MDMA, and is illegal, since its structure had been included specifically in the Misuse of Drugs Act in the 1977 amendment. MDA had appeared briefly in the 1960s in the US when it was known as ‘the hug drug’ or ‘the Mellow Drug of America’. Its effects were much like MDMA, though a little speedier and much trippier.
According to data from the Swiss database Ecstasydata.org and dozens of Dutch testing centres, MDA had hardly been seen for almost two decades on the British and European black markets, since the Snowball phenomenon of the early 1990s, though supplies in the US seemed to remain fairly constant. The reason for the prevailing shortage of MDA are twofold: first, the drug is not as easy to use as MDMA, since it is longer-lasting and more truly psychedelic, with startling hallucinations, as detailed in earlier chapters, frequently reported. Second, chemists making MDMA will get a greater yield of that drug from their expensive and illegal precursors than they would if they aimed for MDA. Therefore, in the web drug subculture – in the new legal highs mainstream – a legal MDA analogue was major news.
Previously, there was just one report online of an MDA analogue, called 6-APDB, by a poster named fastandbulbous at the Bluelight forum, back in 2006, when the research chemical scene existed as a hidden subculture following the high-profile busts in Operation Web Tryp. Fastandbulbous had access to the very rarest of research chemicals and his reports were clear, Shulgin-esque affairs often tinged with an amusingly eccentric hippyish sensibility – as you might expect for a man whose online name takes its inspiration from a Captain Beefheart track.
6-APDB was illegal, because its chemical formula had been covered in amendments to the Misuse of Drugs Act. Not that fastandbulbous paid heed; his appetite for psychedelic and narcotic novelty was limitless and he didn’t much care about legality. ‘The effects [of 6-APDB] are similar to those of MDMA …’ he wrote. ‘There is increased empathy and profound contentment, and a luxurious sense of tactile enhancement. However, unlike with MDMA, there is no drive towards speech or locomotor activity – even though I would not characterize the compound as sedative in any way.’
Another poster, robatussin, replied portentously: ‘I’m glad there are people out there that know what they’re doing, living with Shulgin’s spirit! The government will have to outlaw basic elements like nitrogen or oxygen soon to keep pace with chemists.’
By 2010, four years later, there were many more people reading Bluelight and looking for drugs online than in previous years, because mephedrone had changed the drug culture so dramatically and so publicly. That summer, someone somewhere read fastandbulbous’ curious narcotic memoirs and arranged for a legal version of 6-APDB – called 6-APB – to be synthesized in a Hungarian laboratory. A tiny modification to the MDA skeleton was made by removing one oxygen molecule and double-bonding part of the secondary carbon ring, as can be seen in these diagrams:
MDA
6-APB
This small tweak had changed the drug’s chemical categorization; it now had a benzofuran ring, and therefore belonged to an entirely distinct chemical class, making 6-APB slip through the law’s loopholes in most countries in the world, including the UK. A new, completely legal drug had appeared. A poster named GZero wrote a trip report on this new drug on 7 May 2010: ‘This is an absolutely beautiful drug … It’s like MDMA but less sweating fiendishness. Cocktail party MDMA. Very similar to MDA actually, but gently and colourfully visual. This is insane, I never expected this to be this nice.’
In the past, drugs like MDMA took years, if not decades, to become popular. With 6-APB, it happened in a matter of weeks. A group of five UK-based vendors claimed to have the exclusive distribution rights to the material, which was sold initially at eighty pounds per gram – making each dose cost around twelve pounds. They posted YouTube videos, now deleted, of the pill-pressing and packing processes, attempting to brand the drugs exclusively. They also posted videos showing the correct reaction for the drug using widely available pill-testing kits.
Most brazenly of all, the drug was branded Benzo Fury by the vendors. It was an odd choice of name because ‘Benzo’ is usually a slang term for tranquillizers, taken from the first syllable of ‘benzodiazepines’, the class of drugs to which diazepam (Valium) belongs, whereas this new drug was nothing of the sort; it was a psychedelic stimulant. But there was a chemical connection: a benzofuran is a benzene ring – a circular structure made up of six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms – that is connected to a furan ring, which is made up of four carbon molecules and one oxygen molecule. And in the same way that 3,4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine only really took off when it became known as Ecstasy, and just as 4-methylmethcathinone became much more popular once it was called Meow, so too did 6-(2-aminopropyl)benzofuran, aka 6-APB, gain many more fans when it became branded as Benzo Fury. It was sold from that summer of 2010 right up until this book was going to press, in professionally printed orange plastic pouches, complete with a barcode. (Official though it looked, however, the barcode on many packets actually correspon
ded to the 1986 Genesis album Invisible Touch.)
With their branding exercise, the vendors had also chanced upon a singularly effective web marketing strategy. When people entered the two search terms BENZO and FURY into Google, the sites owned by those selling this new drug appeared first in the search results, since it was such a strange and unusual phrase. They also tagged their sites’ and pages’ metadata – information which Google’s robots crawl, document and then index – with the chemical and brand name of the drug. It was the finest bit of designer-drug-related rogue search engine optimization that had ever been seen. That was, admittedly, a very small field – at the time. It has grown since.
Almost as soon as the trip reports by GZero were published, dozens of European and British outfits claimed to have produced the compound. Some Chinese manufacturers immediately claimed they too had produced it, circulating fake documentation, and then sending dozens of kilos of fake chemicals to vendors all over Europe. Vendors sent these compounds out without testing them; dozens of people fell sick and at least one man suffered a seizure. But within months, a large number of vendors had started selling pure 6-APB to happy customers. It was popular and legal in the US and most of Europe – or more exactly, it was not specifically scheduled, and remains so even today. Nor has it been targeted under the UK’s TCDO law.
With breathtaking speed over the next two years, hundreds of new compounds came onto the market, mainly sold by UK-based websites that had started out in the mephedrone trade. The research chemical and legal highs market, already a confusing cornucopia, became even more atomized as vendors clamoured for products that would satisfy the search for novelty, legality and profit. Now, instead of selling one or two compounds, sites were selling, or claiming to sell, dozens. All of the banned drugs that were swept out in the cathinones and JWH-series ban of 2010 were swiftly replaced. In place of JWH-018, the synthetic marijuana replacement, there came AM-2201 and AM-2203 – both untested, and stronger than the drug they replaced. It was like a game of chemical musical chairs. Camfetamine, a legal analogue of banned appetite suppressant fencamfamine came that year, followed swiftly by methiopropamine, a crystal methamphetamine analogue. Ethylphenidate, a legal analogue of ADHD medicine Ritalin, was next. And the vaults of Shulgin were plumbed once more as vendors found one or two oddities from PIHKAL and TIHKAL that had not yet been banned. Dissociatives, drugs in the family of ketamine and PCP, or angel dust, came online soon after, and the next break-out legal drug – methoxetamine – was born, with the first trip report posted online in 2010.
Ketamine (also known as K) is used in medicine as a general anaesthetic. It is favoured for its ability to keep patients’ airways open, unlike other anaesthetics, so tends to be used in accident scenes such as car crashes and battlefield amputations where there is no oxygen available. Ketamine is also the only anaesthetic available that is pain-relieving and sleep-producing. Inquisitive drug users took it, perhaps inspired by American neuroscientist and polymath John Lilly’s experiments with the compound in the 1960s. He often took it in sensory-deprivation flotation tanks in a bid to explore the outer limits of human consciousness – and to treat his lifelong affliction with migraine headaches. (Lilly was also fascinated by dolphin-human communication and the study of extra-terrestrials, and he later psychotically claimed that he could communicate with alien intelligences representing good and evil, and constructed a personal cosmology he called ECCO, Earth Coincidence Control Office.)
Ketamine is tailor-made for those on a mission of complete personal oblivion. Its import in the mid-1990s when it first appeared on the drug scene, was often carried out on a small scale by hippy travellers smuggling it from India – where it was legal and widely available at the time – inside one-litre bottles of rosewater laced with an average of 50 g of the drug. It sold for between £200 and £600 per litre, extending by many months the gap-year rupee-whoopee of those who sent it home. Between the mid 1990s and 2010 ketamine was available in great abundance in the UK and mainland Europe, and very cheaply, at ten to twenty pounds per gram. At first it was popular at squat parties and warehouse gatherings, and it was associated with the seamier end of the rave scene. Some clubbers derided its use, a stance easy to sympathize with once you have seen a user staggering clumsily in an anaesthetized haze around a dancefloor.
The 2010–11 British Crime Survey, published by the Home Office, found that 714,000 people are estimated to have taken ketamine in their lifetime, with 207,000 using the drug in the last year.11 In 2006, the drug was made Class C in the UK, but the government’s scientists did not look ahead and ban all of the possible variants of the drug – that is, they did not impose controls around ring substitutions on the basic skeleton. This was not neglect on their part; rather, there was simply no precedent at that time. And because there was plenty of ketamine, nobody bothered to innovate. But at the start of 2011, Indian authorities put in place new rules banning the drug, and what had been a dry patch became the UK’s first full-scale, year-long ketamine drought with prices tripling from ten to thirty pounds a gram.
News of a legal ketamine analogue had first surfaced in May 2010. The drug was invented by Karl, a clandestine theoretical chemist, to whom the tangled drug laws pose an intellectual challenge. I met him on 18 April 2012 in a grim pub in a town in the north of England. Karl is an obsessive genius who knows more about drugs than most paid experts, though he doesn’t work. He has a degree in biochemistry and a parallel, lifelong fascination with altered states, and has unearthed, designed or conceived of – and consumed – more drugs than most politicians even know exist. He is personally responsible for the emergence of two of the most popular drugs that followed mephedrone, 6-APB and methoxetamine. He knows of dozens more, all of them sitting outside most drug laws in most countries. For now, he’s keeping most of their structures secret.
Diffident and mild-mannered, he’s not a dealer, and he’s not a chemist, and he doesn’t make money from the trade, nor does he want to. His work is theoretical, an intellectual endeavour located at the edges of science and hedonism, and the law doesn’t interest him, except insofar as it guides his investigations. Karl says the UK ban on mephedrone and other ring-substituted cathinones actually missed plenty of alternatives. ‘They think they banned all the viable structures,’ he says, ‘but they haven’t.’ Each of the sentences he said next listed structures that, if commercialized, would be worth several hundred thousand pounds – if not more – and many of them already have been.
Karl has suffered from phantom limb pain since blowing his hand off in a teenage accident, and he knew from researching medical literature that ketamine could help. But he found certain aspects of the ketamine experience traumatic. Such as? ‘Alien abduction,’ he says, deadpan. There were other problems, too: the drug is addictive, and its metabolite, norketamine, causes damage to the urinary tract so severe that some sufferers have had to have their bladders removed. Around 2009, Karl set about a trawl of the scientific literature and designed methoxetamine. ‘I read research papers and found that changing the substitutions of the molecule would take away the more bizarre elements of a K experience,’ he said. ‘I wanted something less deranged. So I invented methoxetamine. It’s basically ketamine, but instead of having a 2-chloro group on the phenyl ring it has a 3-methoxy,’ he said. The new drug Karl invented can be seen opposite, along with the ketamine molecule it was based on.
Ketamine
Methoxetamine
Methoxetamine was legal, and dislocated the mind and body just as well as its parent compound. It was initially sold online at around seventy pounds a gram, but it was active at far lower doses than ketamine. One gram of ketamine could get two or three people high. One gram of methoxetamine could get up to 100 people high. The price dropped within a few months, making it even better value for money. Response online was immediate and positive.
Soon, there were dozens of sites selling the compound – some of them blatant enough to call it ‘K’s Sister’ – and it
was possible to email chemical factories in China and have a kilogram of the drug made for around £7,000. Some sites selling methoxetamine, in common with the previous mephedrone traders, paid for Google’s AdWords programme and so searches for ‘legal highs’, ‘methoxetamine’ or the name of the chemical compound yielded paid-for links to their sites, and Google once more profited financially from the trade in semi-legal drugs.
Methoxetamine was selling quickly and winning thousands of users, some of whom had been drawn only by its legality, some of whom were interested in trying any new drug experience simply for the buzz, while others yet were looking for a ketamine replacement. The MixMag survey in 2011 found that almost five per cent of its 7,000 respondents had tried methoxetamine, and the magazine ran a feature in its January edition outlining the dangers – and pleasures – of the drug.12 Three hundred and fifty users may not sound like a great number, but consider the number of people first arrested in Operation Ismene – the British counterpart to Operation Web Tryp: just twenty-two. And Mixmag’s question applied to just one drug, and a strange and unusual one at that – dissociatives are already a fairly niche interest within the drug culture. Within a decade, the market in incredibly obscure research chemicals had grown, by this measure, by a magnitude of fifteen.
