by Power, Mike
The most worrying aspect of the recent new growth of the research chemical scene into the mainstream is that many new users are not observing the most basic principles of harm reduction. Expert users have long stressed the importance of knowing and trusting your source, but users are now simply buying from the first, or cheapest, or most convenient source. The only way to know for certain if the correct substance has been sent is to have it tested via expensive chemical means; vital nonetheless, as even an allergy test of 1 mg might be an overdose.
There is a sense of unregulated, late-stage capitalist anarchy in the online research chemical scene at this point, in 2013. For people who had been watching the story develop, the emergence in 2009–10 of public forums with site sponsors using banner ads to offer cut-price research chemicals of every hue was a death knell. In the early days of the online designer drug scene people were barred from forums or listservs (email subscription lists) for asking for sources. Twenty years later, there were links alongside and below forum posts to vendors of chemicals that hadn’t been tasted by any human beings on earth at all. In the past, conversations about newly synthesized chemicals were carried out in what were essentially private members’ clubs, digital speakeasies known only to a few old trippers and radicals. Since 2008 or 2009, there has been an endless real-time stream of conversation, all public, all unmediated, about where to find and buy and sell drugs that did not even exist five years ago.
‘The caution and concern back in the early days was that sharing sources openly and discussing the chemicals explicitly might prompt a bust or, worse, a chemical being specifically named and banned in the US, as plenty were after Operation Web Tryp,’ one user told me. ‘Most of all, the omertà on sourcing was a bulwark against stupidity, a safeguard in a world where no rules applied. The thinking was that if you didn’t put the legwork in, you probably weren’t clued up enough to use these drugs. After mephedrone, it just went silly, mental, there was so much money to be made. The main reason people didn’t give sources back in the day was because a good number of these drugs could kill you – even if you were actually sent the right compound. Who wants that responsibility?’
Mislabelling, then, is not the only danger. Ignorance kills just as fast. There has been a spate of deaths among teenage users in the US in recent years. They may be choosing research chemicals because they have less access to traditional drugs, and they may be more foolhardy, and less knowledgeable about the effects of the drugs. In the small American town of Blaine, Minneapolis, on 17 March 2011 a group of high school students shared the drug 2C-E at a spring break party. The night ended in a mass poisoning and a fatal overdose from this potent, Shulgin-devised psychedelic. Various drug forum users suspected that a mislabelling had occurred as in the Haupt case, or as in Agnetha’s case, and there was a palpable sense of fear. However, forensic tests showed that the drug taken was indeed 2C-E – it had just been dosed wrongly and dangerously.
Trevor Robinson-Davis, the nineteen-year old father of a five-month-old son, was taken to hospital after snorting a large line of the drug. He became instantly agitated and died of a heart attack. The teenagers had not used a scale to weigh the drug out and had instead ‘eyeballed’ it – judging a suitable dose by looking at it – with fatal consequences. 2C-E is active at around 8 mg, and has an extraordinarily high dose-response curve, meaning that 18 mg of the drug will hit you far more strongly than even 14 mg. The young people who survived reported delirium, hallucinations, paranoia, auditory distortions and overheating. Timothy Lamere, a twenty-two-year-old, was charged with third-degree murder for supplying the 2C-E and was jailed in 2012 for nine years and nine months – the longest available term under local sentencing guidelines.
Lamere told the court that he bought the drug online and believed it be legal; at the time, it was not specifically scheduled in the US, and its status as an analogue had never been debated in court. In an unusual move, federal prosecutors intervened in the state case, threatening to escalate the charges if the court did not hand out the maximum sentence possible to Lamere, who had previously been admitted to a psychiatric ward for complications with bipolar disorder.
The town’s local newspaper, the Star Tribune, hosted videos of the survivors of the night. Katrina Loomis told journalist Pam Louwagie: ‘I think about it all the time, every day. Constantly probably. I will never touch another drug. If we’d just been smarter and thought about what we were doing before we did it, we would still have our friend here. And Timmy was our friend. So we lost two friends that day.’11
Elsewhere in the US, the research chemical scene has spilled into headshops from its online roots, just as it has in the UK. ‘Bath salts’ are the American iteration of the ‘plant food’ craze seen during the UK mephedrone craze, whereby vendors dodged the law by marketing new and potent drugs with a nod and a wink and a fake label. A thriving market for bath salts and fake pot started up in the US in 2010, and until 2011 both were sold legally by some tobacconists and other shops. The products contained a very wide range of substances. Bath salts contained stimulants such as MDPV or 2-DPMP, flephedrone or mephedrone, none of which was scheduled in the US at that time. The shops also sold ‘incense blends’ that actually contained the then-legal JWH-series of cannabinoid receptor agonists.
Some of the brand names for bath salts – surely the greatest misnomer ever for drugs that caused palpitations rather than relaxation – included Bliss, Blizzard, Blue Silk, Charge+, Hurricane Charlie, Ivory Snow, Ivory Wave, Ocean Burst, Pure Ivory, Purple Wave, Red Dove, Snow Leopard, Star Dust, Vanilla Sky, White Dove, White Knight, White Rush and White Lightning.
Branded synthetic marijuana products also started to sell to millions of users in the US, via gas stations, convenience stores and skater shops, with names like Blaze, Dream, Aroma, Mr Smiley, Red X Dawn, Kush, K2 and Abama (perhaps a pun on the famously pot-puffing president’s name); they cost ten to twenty-five dollars a bag and contained JWH-series drugs, just as the Spice branded legal highs had in the EU.
By mid-2012 in the US, media reports about users behaving in violent or bizarre ways after taking bath salts took on a surreal, filmic quality. Perhaps the most famous case reportedly involving bath salts was that of thirty-one-year-old Rudy Eugene, who will be grimly remembered as the man killed by police after biting off the face of fellow homeless man, sixty-five-year-old Ronald Poppo, in Miami in May 2012. Stories flashed around the world instantly, with police who were not present at the scene of the crime saying it was likely that the attacker was under the influence of a bath salts type drug. Eugene was impervious to gunshot, police said, and took several bullets from marksmen before he died.
The American Center for Disease Control and Prevention lost its mind that week too, and responded, in all apparent seriousness, to online rumours of a zombie apocalypse following a rash of other reports involving cannibalism in the US and elsewhere. ‘CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),’ agency spokesperson David Daigle told The Huffington Post.12
There is no doubt that Rudy Eugene was mentally ill and it is possible that he took drugs on the day of the attack that made his condition worse. But at the time of initial reports, there was no confirmed evidence that Eugene had actually taken bath salts. Some undigested and as-yet unidentified tablets were found in his stomach, but the branded legal highs sold in the US are typically powdered and are snorted. No human flesh was found in his stomach, meaning initial reports of cannibalism were also inaccurate. Local TV station CBS4 blamed an ‘LSD-type drug’ for the man’s attack. Leaving aside the fact that no toxicology reports were available at the time of that report, and that no bath salts type drugs are anything remotely like LSD, the source for these allegations was flimsy at best – neither the doctor nor the policeman quoted in the early stories had first-hand knowledge of the case, reported Reuters’ Jack Shafer.13
It is complex enough untangling the facts in news stories tha
t involve novel psychoactive substances without media hype confusing the picture so completely that it seems almost wilful.
Each generation has its drugs moral panic, whether it comes in the guise of LSD users jumping from buildings in the 1960s, PCP-crazies in the 1980s, superhuman crackheads in the 1990s, or Meow-frenzied and entirely fictional schoolkids taunting their teachers with their bags of legal highs in the early twenty-first century. As Alasdair Forsyth, of Glasgow Caledonian University’s Institute for Society and Social Justice Research, told me, ‘There was a cartoon in Punch a few years back depicting two farmers looking at a huge scarecrow with the caption: “To have any effect I find I have to make it more scary every year”.’
Any retelling of the Rudy Eugene story is incomplete without a wider analysis of the sociocultural and economic climate in which it occurred. It is certainly not as grimly compelling as the possible news of a zombie cannibal apocalypse, but no mention was made of the fact that Florida has the second-worst funding of mental health services in the US. There are 325,000 adults with severe and persistent mental health problems in Florida, and only forty-two per cent of them receive state support, found the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy in a 2009 report. That means over 190,000 seriously mentally ill people do not receive the help they need.14 In March 2011, Senator Joe Negron of the Appropriations Committee proposed a further two-thirds cut to the mental health budget in the state. Banning a drug allows politicians to appear in control, but the problems that led Rudy Eugene to almost kill Ronald Poppo can’t be solved that easily.
Edward Huntingdon Williams MD wrote in the New York Times of 8 February 1914 about the dangerous new cocaine craze sweeping through the ‘shiftless’ black working-class communities of the south.15 The piece displays all the casual racism so common at the time, but leaving aside that easy target, it’s interesting to note how the central meme – that of a terrifyingly violent black man made superhuman by drugs and impervious to gunshot – prevails a century later. Bigger guns were needed to control these negroes, it was decided in 1914. While the so-called Miami zombie cannibal case inspires both pity and a sheer visceral terror, the reports conflated ethnicity, drugs and violence just as other racists had done a decade before.
Bath salts were involved in other bizarre news stories in the US in 2012. The flesh-eating virus had taken hold more quietly earlier that year when the American medical journal Orthopedics reported that a woman had suffered a bout of necrotizing fascitis contracted after injecting a dose of bath salts into her arm. Medics reported that the flesh-eating disease crept through her body even as they watched, and moved so rapidly that they had to amputate her arm, collarbone and shoulder and then perform a radical mastectomy.16 But the disease had nothing to do with the drug in question, more the route of administration – an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection – and the patient’s existing health conditions. Most casual drug users do not inject themselves, and it is a fair assumption that habitual injecting drug users have worse health and correspondingly weaker immune systems than other drug takers.
A measure of the drugs’ popularity and the dangers associated with their use was seen when the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported that it took almost 6,000 calls related to bath salts, and 7,000 related to fake pot in 2011. In 2009, there had been none at all. Louisiana Poison Control Center Director Dr Mark Ryan told ABC news, ‘It doesn’t matter which socioeconomic strata you’re from, we’re seeing these drugs being used across the board – all ages, all economic groups. We’ve had some people show up who are complaining of chest pains so severe that they think they’re having a heart attack. They think they’re dying … They have extreme paranoia. They’re having hallucinations. They see things, they hear things, monsters, demons, aliens.’17
In the southern state of Alabama in May 2012, thirty young people were admitted to hospital wards with kidney failure after smoking the herbal blends that had been sprayed by accident with a pesticide as well as the synthetic cannabinoids. Some of those afflicted will be on dialysis for life, doctors said.
The sheer range of branded legal highs in the US shows the popularity of the drugs, and the prevalence of their use, while the profitability of the drugs when sold in branded sachets is extraordinary. One single gram of MDPV bought in bulk for three dollars in Shanghai can be made into forty packets of a branded high sold at US$25 in American convenience stores – a profit of US$997 before packaging and distribution. The profit margins for the drugs in the JWH-series and other cannabinoid chemicals is just as high.
It is clear that the US has taken to bath salts, synthetic pot, and other research chemicals. Why it has done so is a thornier and much harder issue to identify. The country is the world’s number one consumer of regular drugs, with the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health revealing that twenty-two million citizens – nine per cent of the country – use illegal drugs. In those aged eighteen to twenty-five, that proportion more than doubles, to 21.5 per cent. It is noteworthy that this report – published in 2011 – contains no mention of the new drugs that have become so widely used in the US, although the internet and TV channels are alive with social chatter and news reports of their use.
Perhaps a driver in this market is the far wider use of drug testing in American firms, and the use by some American parents of testing kits on their children. College sports scholarships demand regular drug testing; fail and you’re not just off the team, you’ve lost your scholarship and you’re out of college. Many of these new chemicals will return a negative test result.
Consider, too, that in 2011 three dozen states proposed drug testing for people receiving welfare, job training, food stamps, public housing and unemployment assistance. The state of Georgia was the most recent to pass the law in April 2012 and now compels ‘some’ benefits recipients – it’s not clarified which criteria are used – to submit to drug testing before essential benefits are paid. Not satisfied with targeting the welfare payments of some of the poorest and most needy in society – penniless addicts and drug users – the state also demands that those targeted pay seventeen dollars to urinate into a testing vessel that will decide their fate. The New York Times reported that in Florida ‘people receiving cash assistance through welfare have had to pay for their own drug tests since July, and enrolment has shrunk to its lowest levels since the start of the recession.’18
But when drugs active at just a few milligrams are sold to anyone with thirty dollars to spare, the blame lies not only on the labs in China who make them knowing full well that they will be sold as drugs, and on the shops and websites in the US that sell the drugs, but most of all on a legal system that has made the sale of these compounds profitable and their use attractive. The reason these drugs are causing deaths, overdoses and delusion is because they are being sold under false pretences as cheap and legal alternatives to drugs like MDMA or cocaine or marijuana.
While official responses are failing to effectively address the situation, grassroots voluntary organizations are taking direct action to ensure the health of festival-goers. The Bunk Police is a US-based group that produces test kits that use a simple set of reagents to identify – or at least test for the presence and absence of – certain chemicals. Small samples of drugs are placed in a small plastic tube and each reagent is added to the mix. The colour changes depending on what chemical is present, and this is then compared to a printed chart. Bunk Police also conducts more complex lab tests on substances that have hospitalized users. The group checks drug quality at raves and festivals, and also distributes test kits to drug users so they can perform these basic tests themselves.
‘We started in June 2011,’ the group’s spokesman, who remains anonymous, told me by email. He went on:
When we were doing live testing it would depend on the venue and amount of traffic we had. Now that we distribute test kits, the number has increased dramatically but still depends on those factors. We’ve distributed well over 1,000 kits at a single
four-day event. We operate at music festivals and other rave type events that offer camping [operating among the tents and speaking privately with users]. We also distribute portable test kits that can be concealed and used in a crowd at smaller events.
Our objective is to put an end to the dishonesty that goes on in the black market. In most cases, those who choose to take illegal substances have no way to tell if what they are taking is real. Some of the substituted chemicals can be much more dangerous than what the user intended to take. We find poor-quality drugs more often than not, but it really depends on the event – some are much worse than others.
Individuals in the US are now buying research chemicals by the kilo from China and substituting them for regular drugs more often than they are actually selling the regular drug itself, he explained:
The best example is that synthetic cathinones and other stimulants are sold as “molly” (American slang for powdered or crystal MDMA) more often than MDMA. There are only a handful of substances being offered (LSD, MDMA, cocaine, mescaline, etc.) but in fact these substances could be any of over fifty research chemicals. The dangers with RCs are in the unknowns. There is very little formal research on these substances, which means that there could be any number of hidden dangers associated with them. The dangers associated with taking an unknown substance or a mixture of unknown substances is also very substantial.
In this book’s final chapter I will attempt to untangle the legal and social complexities the increase in new drugs have brought about, and suggest ways that might reduce the likelihood of further tragedies in the future.
In this celebrity-obsessed age, a tipping point whereby these drugs entered into the national consciousness, at least in the US, occurred when actor Demi Moore’s friends’ called 911 as she suffered a terrifying reaction to a synthetic cannabis compound she had taken. In a call posted to YouTube in December 2011, Moore’s friend says to the operator as the star suffers fits next door, ‘It’s not marijuana but it’s similar to – it’s similar to incense. And she seems to be having convulsions of some sort.’19
