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

by Power, Mike

  A poster named Voltech posted a message on Bluelight on 16 October containing the results of lab tests on the compound that had killed and sickened the users so dreadfully. It turned out that the Chinese laboratory had accidentally sent a far more potent drug, bromo-dragonFLY, in place of the more benign 2C-B-FLY. Bromo-dragonFLY had been synthesized originally in the lab of David Nichols in 1998, and was designed to map the topography of the brain’s serotonin receptors. It was not designed for human consumption, but rather for running lab tests using brain tissue. (Even in the petri dish or under the microscope, brain tissue can react to chemical agents allowing data about their action to be gathered, and valuable new medicines to be invented.)

  These superficially very similar images (opposite) of two vastly different drugs show how even the tiniest of differences can change a chemical radically and dangerously, reducing its active dose dramatically, thanks to its greater receptor-binding qualities. Bromo-dragonFLY, so named because images of its winged molecular structure resemble an insect in flight, is active from just 200 μg – one-fifth of one milligram. Haupt, then, had taken ninety times the active dose.

  2C-B-FLY, active at 18 mg

  Bromo-dragonFLY, active at 200 μg

  Nichols’ results were published in a 1998 research paper in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, entitled ‘A novel (benzodifuranyl) aminoalkane with extremely potent activity at the 5-HT2A [serotonin] receptor’.2 In common with all formal, peer-reviewed chemistry texts, it would have included the method of synthesis. The Chinese chemists possibly used this recipe to synthesize the wrong compound, and the young Danish vendor and his customers had failed to carry out adequate safety checks. These might be simple reagent tests, or more complex third-party lab tests such as nuclear magnetic resonance analysis, mass spectrometry, or high-pressure liquid chromatography tests. It may be that the vendor ordered the wrong drug, and the Chinese lab actually got it right. The truth will never be known. The drug that was supposed to have been sent, 2C-B-FLY, was legal at the time in Denmark, and it still is.

  At the time, bromo-dragonFLY was also legal in each of the countries involved in the transaction – China, the UK, the US and Denmark – or at least unscheduled, as long as it was not sold for human consumption. Predicting the ingestion of every possible psychoactive analogue or chemical is impossible, and so the law must at times be reactive. When innovation is running at a drug a week in the EU, the rulebook has to be ripped up and a new, more intelligent approach devised.

  Only Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Romania, Australia and Finland have now banned bromo-dragonFLY. (In Finland, in one of the oddest stories to emerge from the research chemical scene, it was banned after the drug was used in a bizarre murder by a psychopath who stabbed her victim with a syringe full of it.)

  These stories explain the current super-stringency of customs and border control in Scandinavia. But they pose more questions than they answer. If a classical view of drug abuse correlates it with indicators of social deprivation such as unemployment and poor educational opportunities, why, then, are the rich and prosperous Scandinavian countries – above all, Sweden – so over-represented in the online designer drug world? Why have there been far more overdoses and deaths due to the more novel psychoactives in Sweden than in neighbouring countries, such as Germany? The answer might be found in the country’s drug laws, which are today the most stringent in Europe, and have been for decades. In Sweden potential employers can demand your criminal record before interview, and fifty per cent of them choose to do so. To have a drugs conviction in Sweden is to be an instant member of the underclass, with education and employment opportunities denied outright for many. The country’s extremely punitive drug laws are rooted in the work of medic-turned-drug-campaigner Nils Bejerot, a forceful hardliner who was a lone voice in the 1960s, when Sweden was more liberal on drugs, but whose influence endures twenty-four years after his death. In a report for the Swedish Carnegie Institute, drug policy analyst Jonas Hartelius noted:

  Bejerot showed that while the allure of drugs is biological, the level of drug use in a community, in a nation, and in the world as a whole, is largely determined not by brain biology, but by the social reactions to drugs. Tolerate or, even worse, encourage drug use and drug use explodes in a deadly, self-propelling behavioural epidemic. Identify drug users, reject their drug use, and insist on enforced abstinence, and the drug epidemic is quelled. Drug policy really is, Bejerot argued, that simple.3

  In the Swedish context, if you accept the simple but, to some people, unpalatable truth that sometimes humans want to alter their state of mind, the search for legal alternatives becomes more understandable. Bejerot’s view of ‘community’ and ‘social reaction’ were formed in a pre-web age, and any notion of enforcement must acknowledge that dealers and users can now act invisibly. Dannie Haupt’s drugs, which were legal, were sent to him and his customers worldwide in the post.

  Bejerot’s intentions were doubtless good. But to persist with his drugs policy in this very different, globalized internet age, is, in my view, ill-considered and ignorant of the basic realities of twenty-first-century life.

  In July 2012 Swedish coroners reported that 5-IT, yet another new research chemical, a stimulant that had escaped British legislation, had been found in fourteen post-mortems.4 Information was patchy at the time of reporting, but the drug disappeared from research chemical vendors’ sites within days of the news emerging. The usual cause of death in these cases is from serotonin syndrome, where the brain becomes overloaded with an excess of the neurotransmitter and the unfortunate victims overheat, then convulse until they die.

  At least Sweden is consistent in its hardline approach to intoxication: alcohol over 3.5 per cent proof can only be bought in government-approved shops, known as Systembolaget, or the System Company. On the other hand, headshops and websites there are selling potent research chemicals with impunity.

  Another case of mislabelled research chemicals was reported online in August 2010. Agnetha, a Bluelight poster, was an expert user, and had spent years refining her knowledge of her sources, the drugs and their effects. She knew the dosage of each of the chemicals she took, and approached them with an almost scholastic vigour; she was a curiously puritanical hedonist. She had read all of Shulgin’s work, and had methodically set about trying dozens of the compounds in the books. But when she found herself hallucinating on a stimulant, she knew something was wrong.

  The scene’s biggest supplier at that time, with fulfilment centres in Taiwan, had sent her a package containing 2C-P – a Shulgin psychedelic active at 8–12 mg. But the bag was mislabelled as buphedrone, a mephedrone variant with a standard dose of around 80–100 mg. Agnetha overdosed twice in a week. She described the experience in a post on Bluelight:

  The chemical took five hours to come up. It started with sweating profusely and uncontrollable muscle spasms and got worse from there. The trip lasted over 30 hours … The night was chaotic and apocalyptic, no sleep, heavily disorientated. No music, no light, the visual and auditory distortions were too heavy anyway to comprehend any external input. Psychotic and delirious would be an accurate descriptions of my mindset in those hours.5

  A week later, she overdosed again, having assumed that the error the first time was hers – she thought that she had confused two of the many bags in her drug collection. But she had not got her chemicals mixed up; the vendor had. She wrote:

  The second incident was one week later when I finally came around to test the stimulant as I originally intended. There was no mistake this time. The RC vendor had mislabelled the bags. He sent me a very potent unknown psychedelic – most probably of the 2C family – and packaged it with the label ‘Buphedrone’. I overdosed again on 80 mg. Very frightening prospect. It was one of the more respected vendors. I was reminded of the bromo-dragonFLY fuck-up that had cost several people’s lives a while back.

  I loved the moment the sun came up. I spent dawn naked on my terrace. The world around me looked li
ke a churning and swirling Van Gogh painting – only much sharper, more precise. A naked animal, poisoned and exhausted … I knew I would survive this, there was a way out … I called in sick … but had to type some emails, make a couple of phone calls and review some texts. In hindsight I actually produced high-quality work that day, enhanced by crystal clear, super-precise psychedelic thinking.

  Agnetha survived, no thanks to the vendor. These kinds of labelling mix-ups are mercifully rare in the online drugs market, but the dangers are real and the consequences can be deadly, no matter how statistically improbable.

  There were nine other users poisoned in this incident. Agnetha traced most of them. ‘The owner of the site didn’t mention the incident with so much as a single word on his site in the eight weeks or so it endured after my accident. He somehow found time to announce a couple of very appetizing sales within that timespan, though,’ she told me by email.

  Disturbingly, as we move out of the post-mephedrone era many more powerful drugs are available now to many more people than ever before, and the culture and practice of buying drugs online in this way is becoming more prevalent. As more drugs appeared in the UK after the mephedrone ban in 2010, the number of deaths also increased. Drugs such as methoxetamine gained great popularity worldwide in 2010 and onwards. Some found it numbed chronic pain or helped lessen their neuroses, thousands more enjoyed the semi-alien buzz the drug gave and ramped up their doses until they slipped into a space outside time, geography and human interaction, lying inert on their sofas and floors, but travelling thousands of miles inside their minds. Some users, perhaps not knowing anything more than that it was a legal white powder that got you high, were merely overwhelmed by the drug; the unluckiest died.

  Reports of methoxetamine addictions and patterns of problematic use surfaced within months of the chemical’s release, with users bingeing until they were delusional or psychotic. The first methoxetamine death was in December 2010, when a user in Sweden intravenously injected the drug along with a massive dose of the Nichols-designed serotonin agonist, MDAI. Intravenous drug use is ill-advised even for chemicals such as heroin and cocaine, drugs that have been used in this way for decades, albeit perilously. Injecting drugs means they are not metabolized by the liver, or digested by the stomach, bringing an extreme rush into the bloodstream, and the brain, seconds after the injection. This intense hit is sought by users who either want to conserve their drugs – making them go further, since less is required – or by those hellbent on the most extreme high at any cost. To use research chemicals this way is extraordinarily dangerous, and indicative of a serious drug problem. The death was reported on the Swedish drugs forum, Flashback, by a poster named Miss Tranquil. ‘His heart started beating about a million beats per second and then *bang*. Dead. On my couch. So take it reeeeal easy.’6

  Fred, an author and musician in London, took methoxetamine on his forty-fifth birthday in a London pub in early 2012. He was unprepared for what happened next, he told me by email:

  It was a Sunday afternoon pub birthday. All very civilized and middle-aged. As evening turned to night and the kids went home with the babysitter, someone came back from the bar with a round of shots, which was only thirty seconds behind the round of shots we’d just sunk. With this sudden bolt of hedonism, my thoughts turned to a line of coke, or anything else that might put an adventurous shape on the night. Most people there were no strangers to class As and a quizzical muttering went round the room, only to come up flat. ‘I’ve got this,’ said a mate unenthusiastically, passing me a wrap. ‘We got it off the net, and we did it in Berlin. It’s horrible but you might like it.’

  Hardly a recommendation. But I’m a curious type. I’ve taken my fair share of pills and powders in two decades of drug-taking, with Ecstasy, cocaine and ketamine regularly on the menu, as well as the occasional acid or mushroom trip. I even did DMT once, and rattled around Burning Man 2005 guzzling the postcode drugs (2C-B, 2C-E and their chums). I asked my mate more. Turns out it was something synthetic. ‘One of those new ones, off the net,’ he said. The important thing was to only do a tiny amount. He stressed this: ‘Just half what you’d do if it was K.’ I knew about the new synthetics and I knew dosage was a serious thing: overdo it even a little and you’d be cabbaged or worse.

  All I wanted was some casual dislocation, so as I went in the cubicle foremost on my mind was to take a tiny amount, to be really careful. But as the door closed, the alcohol ambushed my brain, rational thought evaporated and I fell into autopilot – just a drunk in a pub doing what I’d done so many times before: taking a bump in a toilet. The only notion in my head was the automatic ‘Do what fits on a door key … twice’.

  Had it been one of the old familiars, that animal rule of thumb would have worked fine. I was ready for the bendiness of ketamine, followed by its reasonably swift return to normality, or the sharpening effects of coke. But instead I had overdosed on methoxetamine. Everything in my experience said my little hit should have just dented the edges of reality for a while. Nothing I couldn’t handle. My instincts told me the night would continue fairly unchanged. I’d carry on chatting to my friends, just with a slight twist.

  Instead, within minutes I was slumped on a sofa unable to move or talk. I fought it valiantly, but I was poleaxed. Most of the next three hours is gone, the only real memory is the awful reality of puking in public. Not exactly the urbane sophisticated drug-taker I’d been for the last decade. As for the drug itself, it felt like a really pointless version of ketamine: no psychedelic effects, no pleasant slide into rubbery nonsense, just a sudden drop off the cliff of wrongness. The alcohol mix no doubt made it doubly unpleasant. Hours afterwards it still felt like the switch was in the wrong position. I was doped and wired at the same time; I couldn’t even sleep it off.

  For me, that was the day it changed. Never again will I bumble my way into an unfamiliar powder trusting to instinct and experience. The care you need to take with these new drugs isn’t compatible with a feral night out. My generation is ingrained with a set of rules for safe and sociable drug-taking, rules that have served us well for a long time. Well, the old rules no longer apply.

  This is a message that bears repeating: the rules of chemical engagement have changed.

  On 30 January 2012, two men under the influence of methoxetamine died in Canterbury. Popular and talented busker Daniel Lloyd, aged twenty-five, and his beat-boxing friend Hugo Wenn, aged seventeen, were both found drowned in Reed Pond, near an army barracks in the town. Hugo’s mother Fiona told the Kentish Gazette about her son’s rural upbringing, and how she had hoped this might have offered her son protection from the dangers of drugs: ‘We often talked to all our children very bluntly about the dangers of drug-taking but Hugo grew up in the village in the countryside and none of his friends were into that sort of scene. It was so far removed from our lives. There was never any sign or suggestion in the past that Hugo was taking drugs. It just wasn’t him.’7

  In February 2012 a fifty-nine-year-old woman and a thirty-two-year-old man were found dead at their homes in Leicestershire, after taking a methoxetamine overdose.8 That same month Andrew Cooke, a twenty-nine-year-old drummer from Crystal Palace, went missing in east London and it is thought he may have consumed methoxetamine – knowingly or unknowingly – in the hours before his disappearance. ‘He was last seen between 3–4 pm Sunday afternoon (February 12) at a free/squat party located on 1 Lea Valley Road near Chingford,’ his friends wrote on Facebook. His body was found in a nearby canal on 14 March.9

  After the government ban was announced in late March that year, Sally Bercow, the wife of John Bercow, speaker of the House of Commons, tweeted, ‘Mexxy is a legal high that is, er, no longer legal. And now we’ve all heard of it, demand will rocket.’ And with that, the research chemical scene was at the heart of British political life, reported upon in Middle England’s tabloid of choice, the Daily Mail, and tweeted about by the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons.10 In every major city
in the UK and many small towns there were people buying new, untested and powerfully psychoactive chemicals marketed as legal highs, with no indication of what the drug was, what it did, or how it should be taken.

  The most obvious response to these tales is to preach a message of personal responsibility, but when the new drugs are this powerful it’s highly unlikely that people will be able to dose correctly, even if the fault ultimately lies with the user rather than the drug. Many of the new families of drugs are too potent to use in any casual setting by either experienced or uninformed users. They are not party drugs.

  We need a more nuanced, insightful approach than banning new drugs as they appear, as simply expecting people to stop buying, selling and using them is unrealistic. The knowledge exists, the drugs exist and the market exists – what is lacking is education and a new legislative approach.

  Dr Adam Winstock agrees that wider society is not ready for the greater availability and more novel research chemicals that have followed since mephedrone. He told me, ‘The internet parachuted these new drugs into user groups, and that meant there was no way for people to accurately discuss correct and safer use around things like dosage and onset of action. So with methoxetamine, the information that it was active at just 10 mg, with a slower onset of action than ketamine was lost, and people redosed dangerously. Government action and blurring of legislation means we can’t tell people that effectively. It should be on the label!’