by Power, Mike
2. www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?
pagewanted=all
3. Royal Mail Spokesman response quoted on www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2012/05/
royal_mail_1.html
4. Hidden in the code for the Genesis Block was this sentence, citing a Times of London report: ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks’.
5. www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/
all/1
6. Ibid.
7. http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.co.uk/
2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html
8. www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/
WhyIWrotePGP.html
9. www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/
page4.html
10. US Attorney’s Office press release, 16 April 2012; www.justice. gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2012/045.html
10
Prohibition in the Digital Age
In 1920, the American government banned alcohol sales, urged on by the Church. During the first two years of Prohibition, consumption dropped at first, but then increased enormously – insurance companies said the increase in alcoholism tripled. ‘Speakeasies’ or illegal bars flourished and in New York alone, there were soon 30,000.1
Efforts to stop the smuggling of alcohol from neighbouring countries stepped up, but organized crime syndicates took control of the newly lucrative trade and soon gained the working capital required to finance other schemes, such as casinos. As the borders shut, criminals sought alternatives and stole vast quantities of industrial alcohol used in the chemical industry, redistilling it to rid it of contaminants and make it fit for human consumption. The government, angered that its laws were being flouted, decided to poison the alcohol to scare people out of drinking it. In a largely unreported act of deliberate mass murder, the government added new, more dangerous substances to it. A Slate article in 2010 listed these as ‘kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone, as well as methyl alcohol.’2
In December 1926, twenty-six people died in a matter of days as they celebrated Christmas with the poisoned booze. The government was not legally responsible since it had banned alcohol sales and the use of alcohol, however it was obtained. In its view, people were choosing to poison themselves. ‘The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol,’ New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. ‘Yet it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible.’
Who then is morally responsible for the sickening of the thirty young Alabamians who are today suffering kidney damage after smoking tainted Spice products? Legal responsibility lies with the manufacturers and retailers of the fake pot products that were tainted with herbicide as well as the research chemical that made their customers ill. Personal responsibility lies with each of the young men and women who chose to smoke the tainted herbal blends. But in a country where 850,000 people have been arrested for cannabis use since erstwhile marijuana enthusiast President Obama came to power, where does moral responsibility lie?
It is mainly the young who are suffering the consequences of society’s inability to update our drug laws effectively for the modern age. Almost one third of young people are searching for ways of getting legally high, according to the latest survey commissioned by the Angelus Foundation, a campaign group founded in 2009 by Maryon Stewart, whose twenty-one-year-old daughter Hester, a gifted medical student and keen athlete, died after taking GBL in 2009. (Gamma-butyrolactone, a paint stripper and industrial cleaner, can be used as an intoxicant and is poplar on the club scene. It is active at 1 ml, and causes euphoria and disinhibition, but overdoses, where users fall into a coma-like state, are commonplace since it is so potent. It was legal until late 2009.)
Two-thirds of the 1,011 sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds surveyed by the Angelus Foundation in October 2012 admitted they were not well-informed about the risks associated with the new drugs on the market.3
Festivals since Woodstock have been linked with drug use, whatever message their PR machines might seed in the press, so events there can tell us much about current trends of use and the attendant problems. Dip your head under the canvas at a festival medical tent and you arrive at the intersection of the net, new drugs and young people. Monty Flinsch, who runs Shanti Camp, a non-profit aid organization providing drug crisis intervention at American festivals, says that in recent years instead of dealing with the psychological issues caused by LSD, psilocybin and MDMA, they have seen seizures, delirium, violence and deaths. ‘Even discounting the hyperbolic news coverage of face-eating zombies, the real situation is substantially worse with legal research chemicals than it ever was before. It is now easier for an American teenager to obtain a powerful psychedelic than it is to obtain alcohol. Today’s scene is much more complex with the influx of large numbers of research chemicals ranging from the more common bath salts (MDPV, methylone) to much more obscure chemicals such as 25C-NBOMe and methoxetamine,’ he said.
The reasons the drugs are taken are manifold, but he believes their legality is a major draw, along with cultural influences. ‘Kids feel they are exposing themselves to less risk by taking drugs that are not going to get them arrested, and drug use is highly subject to countercultural trends, and whatever the cool kids are taking quickly becomes popular. In many cases the legal consequences of drug use far outweigh the medical risks. Our drug laws in the US are forcing users to experiment with increasingly dangerous compounds in order to avoid having their lives ruined by a criminal conviction.’
Flinsch says he cannot see any likely improvements in the future. ‘New research chemicals are ubiquitous and the problems associated with them are growing. From the frontlines we see the situation getting worse rather than better. The new compounds are poorly understood and have little or no history of human use, and therefore the problems we see are harder to characterize and therefore treat. It is sad that what is currently legal is substantially more dangerous than what is illegal.’
The entire debate around drugs, which was already philosophically and practically complex, has been made yet more intractable by the emergence of these new drugs and distribution systems. Our insistence on overlaying anachronistic models of drug control onto this digital world might, in future years, be seen as a fatal flaw that we did not address when we had the chance.
The popularization of research chemicals presents legislators, policymakers and police with an almost existential dilemma. They are charged with protecting the health of populations and reducing crimes, and these new drugs pose health risks, but are legal. The Chinese factories that produce them operate with none of the quality control typical in most pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, but customer uptake is enthusiastic. Each new ban brings a newer, possibly more dangerous drug to the market, and it is impossible to predict what the next moves might be.
Legal responses seem not only not to work, but to exacerbate the issue. The American Analog Act did nothing to prevent the arrival in 2009–11 of the JWH chemicals, the cathinones found in bath salts, and the other synthetic cannabinoids that had hit the UK and Europe in 2008. And where the early vendors of synthetic cannabis substitutes had sold the drugs online, the US did it bigger and better, and even more publicly and commercially.
In the US, in October 2011 the DEA responded by adding several of the new drugs to the controlled-substances schedule, making them formally and specifically illegal. The Synthetic Drug Control Act of 2011 was finally signed into law in July 2012, banning dozens of research chemicals at a stroke. Soon after the bill was passed, Time magazi
ne quoted a Tennessee medic, Dr Sullivan Smith, who said the state had been engulfed by the new drugs. ‘The problem is these drugs are changing and I’m sure they’re going to find some that are a little bit different chemically so they don’t fall under the law,’ he said. ‘Is it adequate to name five or ten or even twenty? The answer is no, they’re changing too fast.’4
Within weeks of these laws being passed, there were dozens more new drugs available in the US. One category, known as the NBOME-series of chemicals, is composed of unscheduled analogues of the banned Shulgin psychedelics 2C-I, 2C-B, 2C-D, and so on. Where Shulgin’s chemicals were generally active between 10 mg and 20 mg, these new compounds, created in legitimate medical settings for experimental purposes, are more potent by a large order of magnitude, active at around 200 μg. Each gram of these new, unresearched drugs contains around 5,000 doses, and they cost fractions of a penny per dose. The compounds existed before the most recent bans, but it was the new laws that inspired their wider use; use that will only grow as talk of their effects is amplified online. They have already claimed victims. At the Voodoo Fest in New Orleans in October 2012, twenty-one-year-old Clayton Otwell died after taking one drop of an NBOME drug. The New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper spoke to festival goers who said many dealers were selling the drug 25I-NBOME as artificial LSD or mescaline at the event. ‘This weekend, it was everywhere,’ festivalgoer Jarod Brignac, who also was with Otwell at the festival, told the paper. ‘People had bottles and bottles of it; they were walking through the crowd, trying to make a dime off people at the festival.’5
There have been at least six other fatalities in the US from 25I-NBOME, Erowid reported in late 2012.6 There are dozens of other NBOME-drugs, and their use is growing. The Bluelight bulletin board has three threads on 25I-NBOME, running to over seventy-five pages with more than 100,000 views. Search Google for it and there are suppliers on the first page. A kilo of it can be bought for a few thousand dollars from China.
Britain’s current response to the emergence of research chemicals as legal highs in the UK is to ban each product as it appears via TCDOs, but this is unsustainable in the European context, firstly because the law is not European-wide; that is to say, the chemicals it bans are easily available from some neighbouring countries and since distribution is carried out via ecommerce and home delivery, without a nationwide domestic policy of opening or examining via X-ray or sniffer dog each envelope that arrives in the UK, the drugs will continue to enter, even at retail quantities. Let us not forget that Britain consumes a couple of tonnes a year of cocaine, and that has been banned for over a century.
Secondly, the law is unfit for purpose as it sets governments and police and forensic staff an impossible monitoring and enforcement task: at the last count, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) found there were 690 webshops selling at least one synthetic drug each in Europe, not to mention bricks and mortar outlets on high streets.7
Consultant addictions psychiatrist Dr Adam Winstock says he doubts the efficacy of TCDOs longer term. ‘TCDOs are a good idea in principle, but will the government invest adequately in the harm and risk assessments required? I think not. And if they did [and the new drugs the TCDOs had temporarily banned were harmless] would they then license a new psychoactive drug?’
The problem is not going away, no matter how much legislators might wish it. ‘New drugs have become a global phenomenon which is developing at an unprecedented pace,’ said an EMCDDA report in April 2012.8 Director Wolfgang Götz wrote: ‘We now see new drugs marketed in attractive packages on the Internet or sold in nightclubs and on street corners. Whatever the source, the simple fact is that a dangerous game of roulette is being played by those who consume an ever-growing variety of powders, pills and mixtures, without accurate knowledge of what substances they contain and the potential health risks they may pose.’ He added, ‘We must continue to enhance Europe’s ability to detect and respond quickly and appropriately to these developments. This requires networking and the sharing of information and it requires greater investment in forensic analysis and research.’
The EMCDDA admitted that these new drugs posed health risks to individuals and the general public, and acknowledged that legal moves to ban the drugs could simply see the cycle repeat: ‘Legislative procedures to bring a substance under the control of the specific drug law can take over a year in some countries. And controlling a substance may have unintended consequences, such as the emergence of a more harmful, non-controlled replacement.’ Yet even while identifying the risks to thousands of drug users across Europe, and acknowledging that its strategy could lead to greater harms, it did not propose any solution to the issue other than the prohibition that the organization itself argues actually created the trade in substitute drugs.
Europol director Rob Wainwright, quoted in the EMCDDA report, said: ‘The selling of illicit drugs and new psychoactive substances is yet another area where the Internet is abused by organized criminals. We must ensure that law enforcement agencies have the modern operational and legislative tools to combat such cases effectively.’
British police have different views, however. The Association of Chief Police Officers’ national lead on drugs, Tim Hollis – one of Britain’s most senior policemen, with a thirty-five-year career in the force – confirmed that the emergence of research chemicals and other para-legal recreational drugs is not a policing priority, and even pursuing prosecutions for possession of standard drugs isn’t at times. He insisted that changing behaviours and attitudes is the best way to prevent drug use: ‘Street cops recognize that if kids have drugs in their possession and you haul them before magistrates, it’s a good box-ticking exercise, but does it change their behaviour? Frankly, no. The service is pragmatic about how we can change the choices young people make. I’d like to think we could have a better-informed debate on how to use scientific and health evidence to help young people make good choices, and how to help those who make choices that are inherently unhealthy for them and society.’
Hollis, who laments the inability of both sides of the drug debate to come to a consensus rather than taking up polarized and politicized positions, argues convincingly that for the majority of people who do not take drugs, decriminalization is not a viable option. ‘The decriminalization and legalization approach worries a lot of the overwhelming law-abiding majority who do not use drugs. The Home Office statistics show that the reality is the vast majority don’t take drugs. It’s also an emotive issue: if you tell the parents of a child whose kid has died that the drug that killed them is safe, it’s not going to work.’
However, this realism works both ways for Hollis, one of the UK’s most senior drugs officials, who says he believes the public expect police to tackle crimes that affect communities more than targeting internet dealers. ‘Are there squads of officers sitting on computers monitoring this?’ he asked. ‘No. The public wants visibility, police on the street – not a police member sitting in an office monitoring the internet trying to spot people [selling drugs]. This is planet earth!’ he told me. ‘As police, we deal with all aspects of harms, from terrorism to organized crime, to road traffic accidents, where we talk to the parents of the dead and tell them what’s happened. We talk to victims of violent assault and of sexual assault in hospital. From a police perspective, how excited are we about some young people buying a white powder from a headshop, which may or may not be what it is claims to be? Is there a risk? Of course, it’s a risky world. Can we [monitor] it all the time? No, it’s not realistic.’
Even as the flow of chemicals continues unabated, the UK Border Agency believes jailing dealers is a deterrent. In February 2012, its investigations were instrumental in the conviction of a twenty-six-year-old Kent man, Jeremy Detheridge, for the supply of drugs sourced from China that he believed were legal to sell with the no-consumption caveat. Detheridge chose to disguise them as lawn feed. It was one of the first such cases that resulted in a conviction.
&
nbsp; Paul Tapsell, prosecuting, said that in April 2010 two packages from Shanghai Yiyi Maoyi Co, China, were intercepted at Stansted airport. They were addressed to an alias, David Saunders in Botany Road, Broadstairs. Upon testing at the airport, the packages were found to contain lignocaine, a topical anaesthetic, and MBZP, a recently banned Class C drug of the piperazine class. Judge Adele Williams said Detheridge did not know what was in the powders he was buying – and nor would his customers, who bought the powders from the sites happykat.co.uk and perfectpowder.co.uk. Detheridge was jailed for three years, admitting he had been playing a cat-and-mouse game, trying to bring in legal drugs.
‘He didn’t know what effect they could have on the people he was supplying them to. They could have been substances which turned out to be lethal. He didn’t know,’ said Judge Adele Williams.9
Malcolm Bragg, criminal and financial investigation assistant director at the UK Border Agency, argues for stricter controls and more prohibition. ‘Drugs devastate lives and communities and officers at the UK Border Agency, are determined to stop them reaching our streets.’10 But a person with close links to the UK Border Agency said on condition of anonymity that the agency is overworked and under-resourced and that most single-kilo packages sent through UK airports by express courier service were more likely to pass through unimpeded than not.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency, responsible for targeting narcotraffickers, said in its 2012 report that it ‘continued to disrupt the trade in new psychoactive substances. Work in conjunction with the Home Office and forensic providers is building a better picture of the range of psychoactive substances, both controlled and non-controlled, which are traded in the UK and this picture is continuously refreshed as new substances become available.’
It said that it had ‘worked closely with the competent authorities in source countries such as China to seek to influence their response to the trade, including by encouraging them to tighten the legislation surrounding the substances. This produced some good results: China, for example, increased the controls of online sales and made mephedrone a controlled substance.’11
