by Power, Mike
But those figures only provide part of the picture. In conversations with laboratories serving the UK, I have established that several hundred kilograms of methoxetamine were imported into the UK between 2010 and 2012. Each gram can deliver 100 doses, each kilo 100,000 doses, though it’s not always used at such low levels – some people take very large amounts as tolerance builds. Research into the drug has been limited and evidence is at best anecdotal, but between 2010 and 2012 it was undoubtedly extremely popular with young people short of cash and contacts, who found the potency and legality of the drug a major draw. Tales from users, like those from all users of dissociatives, were suitably bizarre – those in the MixMag feature reported imagining themselves as snowmen in Kate Bush videos, or thinking they were on board canal narrowboats when they were in fact in the Shacklewell Arms, a grubby hipster pub in east London.
At 10 a.m. on 28 March 2012, the government announced that methoxetamine was about to be placed under temporary control order in the UK. The ACMD had become aware of the drug, and had alerted the government to its emergence and use. The drug had not captured the imaginations of newspaper editors quite as mephedrone had, mainly since it was never as popular. But there were a number of deaths from the drug, details of which follow in the next chapter. Sites started selling off stock at £4,500 per kilogram – a £64,500 per kilo discount from the profits made in the early days, but still a decent profit, as wholesale prices had dropped to around £3,000 per kilo. By 11 a.m. that day, sites had removed the chemical from their menus.
But legislators again failed to look at the drug’s chemical structure and fully understand the family that this new compound belonged to. When methoxetamine was temporarily banned none of the more than fifty possible psychoactive variants to the arylcyclohexylamine skeleton were included. The day of the ban, sites selling tiletamine and 4-MeO-PCP, two other ketamine analogues belonging to the PCP family, started to jostle their way up the Google rankings by including the meta-tags ‘methoxetamine’ in their page descriptions and optimizing their pages for search. By late 2012, another dissociative ketamine substitute, N-Ethyl Ketamine, was on sale at dozens of sites.
When the ACMD returned its final findings on methoxetamine in October 2012, it advised the government to outlaw the drug outright, since it bore such a close resemblance to ketamine in its harm profile. It recommended that many other – but not all – named derivatives of ketamine be outlawed, too. Ketamine and its derivatives, including methoxetamine, are all addictive, or at least habit- and tolerance-forming, meaning larger quantities are needed to get the same effect if the drug is used regularly. They also cause short-term memory loss, and, as mentioned above, ketamine’s metabolite, norketamine, can cause severe damage to the urinary tract. One of Karl’s aims when inventing methoxetamine was to reduce the physical dangers of the drug; the reports from the ACMD suggest he failed.
Around the time mephedrone first appeared in 2008, I started to investigate the chemical underworld in more detail. One site in particular seemed emblematic of the way new drugs were being bought and sold. Right up until September 2010, this site was the subject of constant online chatter, with customers raving about the compounds available, the variety, the innovation and the market-beating customer service. It closed suddenly and without warning in September 2010, and its absence left a large and lucrative gap in the market that many other operators rushed to fill over the following years. It had been the biggest retail supplier of research chemicals the web had ever seen. The size of this one business – which had a turnover of around ten million dollars a year for the previous two years – is a good indicator of the size of the market, which has only grown since.
In 2011, I spotted a new site whose name bore a certain resemblance to that of the closed store, and guessed, correctly, that the old site’s owner had moved out of the retail business into the wholesale market. His name, for the purposes of this book, is Matthew. We exchanged several emails, long, thoughtful affairs rich with detail and insights into the business.
Matthew says his business was, at its peak, shipping around a hundred orders worldwide daily, from his fulfilment centre in Taiwan. The compounds were sent in standard envelopes often decorated with Hello Kitty stickers and logos to make them look like birthday cards or love letters. Inside were research chemicals such as 2C-P, 2C-E, 2C-I (Shulgin’s psychedelic phenethylamines from PIHKAL), and 4-AcO-DMT (a drug identical in many ways to magic mushrooms, from TIHKAL), and dozens of others. His store was so well stocked and well managed that it became known as ‘Wal-Mart’.
‘I had staff [in Taiwan] working nine to five weighing and bagging the product, and others stuffing envelopes. All manual labour. We had in place a pretty rigid set of QC checks to prevent any errors. In the back-end, I built a custom secured database for maintaining inventory and customer records,’ he said.
Matthew was an early entrant in the massive market for mephedrone. From the outset, he was concerned with quality. ‘Early on, all available mephedrone was very poorly synthesized, and had a terrible shellfish odour due to the fact that the demand was so high and the Chinese labs were producing it so quickly that they were not completing every step, or not letting it dry completely before packing and shipping out. I had many heated words with my labs about that, and I went to several labs before finding one that could produce a quality and consistent product. By that time, however, it had been banned in the UK and the trade volume was winding down.’
He says he speaks reasonable Mandarin Chinese, having lived and worked there for over ten years previously, and he used labs in China, although many of them did not have the required pharmaceutical expertise to produce the drugs he and his customers wanted. ‘If you’re usually making melamine or some other industrial chemical you don’t need to know, let alone meet, pharmaceutical standards. Of course people were not actually feeding their plants with this stuff, so there was a lot of concern on my part about these labs. I visited one lab which stank so bad and was so dirty I wanted to puke when I stepped inside. I immediately stopped working with that lab after seeing the actual premises.’
Business was brisk. The firm was shipping 700 orders a week, usually containing three different products on average – that is, it was fulfilling over 100,000 individual drug orders annually, and it operated for more than three years. Many of the drugs Matthew sold, if not the majority, are active in the single-digit milligram range – meaning his shop alone shipped tens of millions of doses of drugs each year. The research chemicals market was now mainstream and globalized, and the profits were even more mindblowing than the drugs: ‘We shipped pretty much everywhere. The usual mark-up at retail was 3,000–4,000 per cent. The company netted several million dollars per year, right off the bat. It took off real quick. The website was closed to new customers most of the time because we couldn’t handle any more volume. The bulk of the business was from our return customers. If we’d been able to open to new customers we could easily have doubled those figures.’
A web professional, Matthew says his company was successful because he had previous professional experience in mail-order customer service, internet marketing and web programming. Before his site, vendors had used email only or had only rudimentary ‘free’ websites. ‘I introduced the “shopping cart” to retail research chemical sales,’ he says. ‘Starting with some open-source shopping cart software, I personally wrote the payment API modules and many other custom functions for the website. Now you could complete your order, and pay for it (using AlertPay) within minutes, and you would get automated emails updating you with the status,’ he says. Matthew’s site set the technical standard for those that would follow.
The web enabled Matthew’s business to operate remotely, and he took a hands-off role much of the time. ‘I built an offshore fulfilment center as soon as I could not handle the load by myself (which was quite quickly). We had the fulfilment center in Taiwan, labs in two or three other countries, I was in yet another country, and often travelin
g the globe for various reasons, yet everyone was interconnected and you could often complete your order and see it ship within two hours,’ he explained.
He also sold to other retailers worldwide as he built up a large and varied stock very rapidly. At one point, he was selling over twenty different products, most of which would be unknown to most governments and customs forces worldwide – but which were the subject of hundreds of threads on drugs forums. Just ten years previously, most drug users could choose from heroin, cocaine, LSD, marijuana and hashish, and amphetamines or Ecstasy. Matthew sold five different kinds of synthetic marijuana, a heroin analogue, several hallucinogens, three or four versions of drugs that were like cocaine and many more.
He was an early adopter of Twitter, using the microblogging site to inform customers of sales and offers and promotions, and was one of the first people in any trade to use QR codes – the scannable, almost bitmapped black-and-white icons that, when scanned and decrypted, would send customers to secret URLs on his site that had special deals. He remained sober while working, and ensured that all of his staff did too. His own drug habits while not working are a topic he chooses not to discuss.
The real enabler in the whole trade, he says, was the willingness of Canadian e-wallet firm AlertPay to process credit card payments for these drugs. ‘If you want to know what enabled the RC revolution from 2008 to present, it was AlertPay,’ says Matthew. ‘They’ve basically chosen to look the other way regarding these transactions. AlertPay had a banned product list, and still maintains one, but it was a random mess and did not relate to any laws, and as there is no global treaty on these compounds, it wouldn’t have made any difference in any case. Without AlertPay, the RC business absolutely could never have taken off like it did. [AlertPay] made millions in profit directly from the RC business.’
After a question was raised about the firm in the House of Commons in 2009, AlertPay shut its dealings with some sites. The family of Max Llewellyn, an eighteen-year-old Welshman who hanged himself after becoming depressed following a mephedrone binge, spoke to AlertPay in March 2010, asking them to stop processing payments for mephedrone vendors. Its business operations director at the time, Elsworth Weekes, insisted the company did not endorse the misuse of mephedrone, which was legal at the time. ‘Should the government of the United Kingdom render a decision that should affect the legal status of mephedrone, AlertPay will take appropriate initiatives to make sure that its services remain in total adherence to trade laws,’ she told a local Welsh newspaper.13
AlertPay shapeshifted in May 2012 to become Payza, and now says it will not take payments for ‘Drugs and related paraphernalia (including but not limited to research chemicals and illicit herbal incense)’. Today, the Natwest processes bank transfers for the biggest online research chemical company in the UK, whereas PayPal, the net’s most favoured online payment processor, does not allow the sale of research chemicals via its service, and seizes funds without release if vendors are found to be breaking the rules. Some sites today get around the problem by simply using multiple accounts. But the fact that PayPal can adequately manage to prevent the sale of these chemicals through its services shows that it is possible, with will and vigilance.
Matthew says he manned the site remotely round the clock. ‘I ran the business like a professional, not like a shady criminal. I was also principled and honest, perhaps the very opposite of what people had dealt with up to that point. Anyone could have done what I did, I just happened to be the first and I guess I benefited from that to some extent.’ Money was never a motivation; rather he claims he was a chemical evangelist: ‘I just wanted to share this stuff with the world, but then it quickly got out of hand. This was really just a hobby that I eventually got bored with. So maybe that helps you understand a little bit why I abruptly shut it all down, right at the peak of our business, without any apparent concern. As it turned out, I think I quit at the right time, as the RC industry took a turn for the worse soon after we were gone.’
*
In the years following the ban on mephedrone, for every forum that started, another closed or rebranded following in-fights or buy-outs, in a process that reflected the ever-warping world of new drugs. One site, Legalhighguides, was populated mainly by American teenagers, judging by the content and tone and linguistic patterns. It was very busy, with thousands of users posting hundreds of threads every day. The site had a popular ‘swap-meet’ section, where users could offer each other trades or sales of drugs. It was quickly filled with vendors and Chinese laboratories and others selling new designer drugs. The conversation was global and public, and soon dealers sponsored it, handing out free samples of drugs in exchange for adverts. Everything from Shulgin’s chemicals to synthetic cannabinoids and a wide array of other chemicals were available, and no one cared about legality.
The site shut down not long after one dealer duped dozens of users out of many thousands of dollars, and shortly a competing site launched, The Euphoric Knowledge. Its server was hosted in Holland, and soon enough dozens more group buys and swaps and sales kicked off. The site was mainly populated by young men who bought and sold designer drugs to each other with an enthusiasm and blatancy that was matched only by their carelessness. This Facebook generation, so accustomed to sharing information openly and indiscriminately in a frictionless world where an acquaintance or an adserver alike are trusted with access to your most private information, was lulled into a false sense of security by the lack of action in the US in the years following Operation Web Tryp – in the unlikely event that they had ever heard of it.
Quite how anyone believed that a site such as The Euphoric Knowledge could continue to run is anyone’s guess, but for a while, it was one of the busiest spots for the research, purchase and sale of some extraordinarily rare and potent compounds that, just a few years before, were known perhaps to a few thousand people worldwide. The users of the site offered hundreds of different chemicals for sale, with an almost unquenchable appetite for novelty. They believed they would not be prosecuted under the American Analog Act for chemicals that had not yet been listed specifically as illegal, pinning their hopes on the ‘not for human consumption’ defence. They created thousands of threads in which they discussed openly the price for bulk import and export of chemicals that most American judges would, in a heartbeat, class as illegal analogues of banned substances. It was only a matter of time before the axe fell.
The site’s founder, Justin Steven Scroggins, known as w00t, was arrested on 10 April 2012. Undercover federal agents had infiltrated his site – not a hard task, since registration was open – and had eavesdropped on his Skype calls with a laboratory in the Jiangsu province of China that is still operating today. At the time of the investigation, this laboratory sold only seventeen products, all of them considered analogues of banned Schedule 1 substances in the US, according to the indictment. Scroggins was charged with the importation of just over two kilos of cathinones, none of which was specifically illegal at the time, but all were considered analogues of methcathinone and other banned substances. He pleaded guilty and was awaiting trial in late 2012.
The research chemical market is now in the hands of thousands of sites that sell hundreds of chemicals to unknown numbers of users. The sites’ owners run the gamut from paranoid American teenagers, to idealistic Spaniards, or Chinese labs that have now opened retail sites and are happy to send potent white powders out to anyone with a Western Union payment slip. The blurring of the lines between legal highs, research chemicals and illegal drugs complicates an already labyrinthine legal and chemical picture, and poses a dilemma for legislators, users and law enforcement agencies.
How easy is it to circumvent British and other drug laws as they currently stand? ‘It’s simple, laughably so,’ Karl, the inventor of methoxetamine said when I met with him. Can he think of a cocaine analogue that might be outside the law? Instantly he replies with a chemical name and formula. ‘It’s active at the same potency as regular cocaine. It
has the same receptor binding affinities and reuptake inhibition as cocaine.’ Has he tried it? A nod. ‘The only trouble with this compound is that it requires ecgonine as a precursor, and that’s a controlled substance. But someone could find a synthetic route to making that, there’s no reason why not,’ he says.
How about a legal heroin analogue? ‘There are dozens.’
Karl has also read the works of Alexander Shulgin, and has conceived of ways to take those now-banned compounds and make them legal. He then reels off an unintelligible string of multisyllabic chemical terms that only chemistry graduates would understand. ‘There are some in there where you could replace the methylenedioxy ring with a straight three-carbon bridge – rather than an oxygen-carbon-oxygen array, you could have three carbons. By replacing the methylenedioxy group on some of the PIHKAL entries with a trimethylene they would be taken outside the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, and they would be active,’ he says.
Karl’s story, though perhaps one of the most extreme in this emerging underground, is instructive. There are dozens of Karls posting online now. Some specialize in heroin and opiates, others in stimulants. Every class of drug has a few experts debating ways to make a legal version of an outlawed compound. All of them are bright and well educated, with the knowledge and contacts to produce new drugs in a matter of months, and anyone can read their comments. It’s not so much that they have no respect for the law, it’s more that domestically, there’s no easy way to write a law that can control their innovation yet still allow legitimate industrial and medical research to continue.
Pull the focus wider to bring the largely unregulated Chinese chemical industries into the shot, and then zoom in on that country’s drug laws that limp decades behind the developed world’s, and the situation becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to manage.
