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

by Power, Mike

  In everyday terminology, the term ‘analogue’ is often used to describe a substance which has major chemical structures in common with another chemical. To organic chemists, however, the term ‘analogue’ has a more precise meaning. It is also the case that many chemicals that look alike and have similar chemical structures react very differently both in and out of the body. So the issue is not at all clear-cut.22

  John Ramsey also believes that analogue laws would be impossible to enforce in the UK, and that other types of legislation would be equally difficult. Why, I asked him, could we not simply ban every chemical that had a psychoactive effect? ‘The problem is collecting the evidence,’ he said. ‘When you are just appraising one or two compounds a year, that’s achievable. When it’s one a week, it isn’t. Even if you did ban all the known ones, all of the possible substitutions, there would still be something you hadn’t thought of. There are literally millions of organic chemicals. The issue is trying to find out which ones can be used as drugs and which ones can’t. We don’t have that knowledge.’ He went on, ‘The cannabinoid receptor agonists are a good example. They come from a wide variety of chemical groups, or families, so to try and define them chemically is extremely difficult. They all react with the CB1 (cannabinoid) receptor but there are some chemicals that are used in synthetic marijuana mixtures that are also used legitimately – there’s one that is used as a lubricant in the manufacture of plastics, so it would have an impact on industry as well.’

  What’s more, an analogue law would leave people open to prosecution, said Ramsey, since they might believe they are selling a legal compound, only to have that assumption challenged in court, upon which they might face jail. We are only at the beginning of our understanding of how drugs work, he added, so writing laws on the basis of what they do is equally problematic. ‘Not all drugs work because they have activity at a certain receptor site. For example, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, has no known receptor reaction that laws could target. How, then, do we control that under analogue legislation? The science is much more complex than these simplistic models suggest,’ he told me.

  Danny Kushlick of campaigning UK NGO Transform argues that the best way to address the emergence of new drugs is not only to tackle drug laws in the round, but to ensure that law changes are in fact the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. He is pragmatic, and notes that decriminalization of the regular market would not solve the problems of prohibition overnight. ‘These aren’t easy choices. You would have to incrementally introduce reforms and monitor their impact to assess what is working and what isn’t,’ he told me. ‘Keep it open, transparent, democratic and open to science, and to critical review, impact assessment, value-for-money and cost-benefit analyses. If you keep applying those kind of tools and don’t allow industry to run the show, you will put in place policies that are vastly better than the ones we have now and in terms of legal and illegal drugs,’ Kushlick said.

  But without deep change he believes we are doomed to repeat the errors of the past: ‘You just can’t develop sensible policy within the current paradigm. What we need to do is to step back and have a proper conversation among public NGOs, government departments and officials and develop a cohesive new set of policy principles. Then we can begin to form a genuinely coherent approach to managing the production, supply and use of the full range of psychoactive substances. And only then should you start introducing new legislation.’

  Agnetha, the drug user who overdosed twice in a week on mislabelled but legal research chemicals, strikes a more combative note than Kushlick, saying: ‘Oppression and prohibition don’t work, they just drive people to accept ever higher risks by taking ever more dangerous chemicals, substituting each successively for the safer ones that were banned the day before. What we need are risk-aware and educated drug users, who can forego poisonous garbage and are able to satisfy their curiosity with comparatively safe chemicals. If the political elite can’t quit prohibition, they should at least decriminalize all consumption and personal use and go after dealers and manufacturers only, and stop treating drugs indiscriminately.’

  A frontline health worker dealing with heavy mephedrone users says he believes that mephedrone in particular has caused more harm to users since it was banned. ‘It has now been cut with other substances and users are getting more health problems. Use has also grown since the ban. It’s clear from the numbers of new drugs that are coming out that current legislation isn’t having any impact on use at all. It’s not helping clients at all. It isn’t working. They are still using, still facing trouble, and it makes it harder to engage with them as it is now a criminal offence,’ he told me.

  Perhaps the difficulty we actually face in attempting to address the use and abuse of all drugs is in thinking there is actually a problem to solve at all. Humans have always used their wits and the products of their environment to change their states of consciousness. They have sought thrills and danger, adrenaline rushes or the comforting warmth of company and care, while the mystics and the masses have often sought precisely the same ends by different means. If the solution we seek is to eliminate danger, to end addiction, to prevent all negative consequences from drug use, then we are destined to fail as surely as we have done over the last century – especially when the web expands the chemical palette so dramatically.

  We are currently unprepared legislatively, socioculturally, and practically for this, the next phase in the drugs market. Legalization is not the answer, banning drugs is not the answer, leaving things as they are – in complete unregulated anarchy in both the new and old drugs markets – is not the answer.

  After many years observing this chemical underground, I have concluded that the changes the web has occasioned in the drug culture now mean legislators must act: there must be a concerted effort not only of harm reduction, but of urgent damage limitation. In scores of interviews, on thousands of forum posts, in dozens of forums, the explicit and implicit message from the drug users themselves is that no law will ever change nor ever has changed their desire to get high.

  In New Zealand, lawmakers in August 2012 took an unprecedented step when associate health minister Peter Dunne announced innovative moves that would bring some state control over the country’s uncontrolled legal highs industry. Approvals for new legal highs in the country, he said, would be granted once manufacturers had paid for scientific research into the substance’s harm profiles. In New Zealand, the new drugs scene is focused on so-called ‘party pills’ – various piperazine mixes that emulate Ecstasy or amphetamines, and substitute marijuana compounds.

  Those deemed to be low risk in clinical trials using humans and animals, estimated to cost two million New Zealand dollars (about one million pounds) for each new compound, would be allowed for general sale. ‘We will no longer play the cat-and-mouse game of constantly chasing down substances after they are on the market,’ Dunne told reporters.

  What impact this would have on profitability for the firms producing the drugs is unclear, but the party pills industry in New Zealand is estimated to have made US$250 million in unregulated profits in the last decade.

  Briefing papers by the government suggested that ten applications were expected in the first year, with a projection that one or two approvals would be given. This stricter regulatory approach looks likely to seize control of the uncontrolled legal highs and research chemicals market from the Chinese laboratories and profit-driven marketeers and entrepreneurs and hand it instead to the democratically elected government of New Zealand. A proactive and evidence-based harm reduction model such as this should, at a stroke, reduce the number of new drugs coming on the market in New Zealand. Furthermore, it depoliticizes the debate and delivers responsibility for regulating the trade to those best qualified to assess the undoubted harms some drugs can do: expert scientists and experienced doctors. It comes at little to no cost to the government, and users will be safer.

  Acknowledging that these moves would create a legal synthetic drugs market,
the world’s first, Dunne told the New Zealand Herald: ‘That is the absolute intention behind this regime. The problem in the past has been that we had a totally unregulated market with who knows what substances in these products. I am quite unapologetic about leading changes that will make things safer for young New Zealanders.’23

  Professor David Nichols, the creator of some of the drugs that have killed users in this book, is unequivocal in his assertion that international drug laws are no longer fit for purpose. Many of the compounds his lab has produced, including 4-MTA, MDAI, 6-APB, 5-APB, 2C-B-FLY and bromo-dragonFLY, have been hijacked and sold on the international grey market as research chemicals or legal highs. These drugs, developed originally as part of the search for new medicines and to study neuropharmacology, have killed several young people in the last ten years. ‘The first thing [research chemical retailers] do is to search for everything I have published,’ he told me. ‘You can get the papers for thirty or forty dollars. It’s gotten bigger and become more widespread as a result of the internet. People might still have been interested [in the past], but being able to go to the internet and buy things and people communicating online so quickly has facilitated the development of this whole area. And it’s only heading in one direction.’

  For him, the nightmare scenario would be if some of the drugs he has manufactured escape the lab and are commercialized on an even larger scale than they have been hitherto. ‘Say someone finds something with a psychostimulant and a hallucinogenic effect, and people try it and like it so they go and buy a few kilograms from China and buy a tableting machine – they’re on eBay for a thousand dollars. Then imagine someone makes 50,000 tablets and distributes them, and people take them every weekend at raves and the cardiotoxicity is cumulative. What if the harm it does to your heart does not manifest on the first time you take it? People could take it, keep doing it, and all of a sudden after taking this for a month or two or thinking it’s great stuff, they might find themselves going into hospital with heart problems, arrythmia, whatever.’

  This, almost to the letter, is what happened with 4-MTA, though the health issue was more acute; 6-APB has similarly been commercialized for the research chemical market, though without such disastrous results – for the time being. Nichols says the solution to the serial tweaking of molecules and raiding of his work could be solved pretty easily. But it’s a position that will win him no friends in high places. ‘Legalize the safe ones. Mushrooms, mescaline and peyote, all have been used for thousands of years and have been shown to be safe. And marijuana, the most widely used drug in the US.’ Nichols blames prohibition for the greater variety and strength of drugs available today. ‘It is silly what they did with marijuana. We wouldn’t have any of these synthetics, which are far more dangerous, if they had just said: “Marijuana has been used for thousands of years, it’s an intoxicant, put it in the stores like alcohol, and make it so you have to be twenty-one to buy it.” Regulate it in some way. We have beer, wine and liquor, and we could have different grades of marijuana like that. I had a grad student once and he said, and this may be axiomatic: “Make one drug illegal and another, more dangerous one will take its place.”’

  We must now allow drug users to make safer choices, and that means a gradual, tested, evaluated but concerted roll-back of all existing drug laws; particularly those concerning MDMA, marijuana, magic mushrooms and mescaline, for these are the drugs that most research chemicals seek to emulate. Only then will dangerous innovation end. Simultaneously, drug awareness classes should be compulsory at all schools with credible, evidenced and honest discussions of each drug’s effects, good and bad, including alcohol and tobacco. This will not end the debate, or addiction, or reduce drug use. But it will mean those who choose to take drugs in the future will be better informed and safer, and the costs to society lower. Governments must now seize control of the market in new and old drugs from amateurs, criminals and gangsters.

  Perhaps the web’s final and most dramatic effect will be to strip drug culture of its mystique, its cachet of countercultural cool, to reveal that behind the magic and madness, there lie only molecules. At the end of it all, drugs are just carbon, hydrogen and a few other elements. They have their meaning projected onto them by users and the culture more widely. Remove the thrill of social transgression that acting illegally provides and reframe drug use in a clinical context, as a health issue, and that might change. We know in detail what the route we have taken for the last century results in: greater and more dangerous use. We now need a new approach and new data to analyse. It is not this book’s argument that any drug is entirely safe; they demonstrably are not. But to persist in the digital age with this failed and arbitrary strategy of prohibition in the face of all the evidence that it increases harm is irresponsibly dangerous.

  However, although some politicians are able to admit grudgingly to youthful experimentation with drugs, it seems few are willing to experiment even moderately with new approaches in policy now they have the power to effect positive change – even at a time when the people who vote for them are demanding exactly that, and when it is more urgent than ever before.

  Notes

  1. www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/

  medical_examiner/2010/02/the_chemists_war.html

  2. Ibid.

  3. www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tell-your-children-they-can-get-naturally-high-177905211.html

  4. www.healthland.time.com/2012/07/25/after-the-ban-on-bath-salts-many-legal-highs-remain/#ixzz244z27e4z

  5. www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/11/21-year-old_dies_after_one_dro.html

  6. www.erowid.org/chemicals/2ci_nbome/2ci_

  nbome_death. shtml

  7. ‘New Drugs Detected in the EU at the Rate of Around One Per Week, Say Agencies’; www.emcdda.europa.eu/news/2012/2

  8. Ibid.

  9. www.kentonline.co.uk/kentonline/news/2012/

  february/9/cat_and_mouse.aspx

  10. www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/

  newsarticles/2012/february/36-drugs-guilty

  11. www.soca.gov.uk/about-soca/library/doc_download/317-sars-annual-report-2011.pdf

  12. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/alcohol-drugs/drugs/annual-review-drug-strategy-2010/acmd-letter-to-prof-les-iversen

  13. Shulgin had a stroke in 2010. His stepdaughter, Wendy, emailed as this book was going to press with news that her stepfather’s health had much improved. ‘Sasha is doing well. He’s had a wonderful sort of comeback from the severity of the dementia, due in part we believe to a medication that he’s taking now which is ergotamine, or hydergine [a precursor for LSD]. That has really helped him. He doesn’t sundown much anymore, he’s clearer and catches all conversation around him, following it, commenting on it, cracking jokes (we know he’s well when he does that!). Between a good change in diet, more exercise, and that medication, he’s really doing well.’ A year before, I had asked Shulgin’s wife Ann if her husband’s illness might have been caused by his lifelong use of drugs. She was adamant it had not. ‘Considering the hundreds of thousands of people who have experimented with psychoactive drugs and visionary plants, many of them using them as spiritual tools, there is no medical evidence whatsoever that that would be the case. It’s simply not true,’ she said.

  14. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/alcohol-drugs/drugs/annual-review-drug-strategy-2010/acmd-letter-to-prof-les-iversen

  15. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/07/latin-america-drugs-nightmare

  16. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/13/colombia-juan-santos-war-on-drugs

  17. www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/smoking.htm

  18. Sheryl Garrett, Adventures in Wonderland: Decade of Club Culture (Headline, 1999)

  19. Matthew Collin, Altered State (Serpent’s Tail, 1998)

  20. ‘New drugs detected in the EU at the rate of around one per week, say agencies’; www.emcdda.europa.eu/news/2012/2; see also ‘Drug Policy Profiles: Portugal’, Publications Office of the European Union (2011); and
www.emcdda.europa.eu/

  attachements.cfm/att_137215_EN_PolicyProfile_Portugal_WEB

  _Final.pdf, p. 24

  21. ‘Portugal drug law show results ten years on, experts say’, AFP, 1 July 2011; www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/

  ALeqM5g9C6x99EnFVdFuXw_B8pvDRzLqcA

  22. Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, 2012: ‘Analogue controls: An imperfect law’; www.ukdpc.org.uk/publication/analogue-controls-an-imperfect-law/

  23. David Fisher, ‘“Revolutionary” legal high law means state regulated drug market’, www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article. cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10822749

  Epilogue

  On 30 January 2009, the year following the safrole burn that caused the quality and quantity of MDMA to plummet globally, there was a minor meeting in the margins of larger trade talks in Brussels between the EU Commission and the Chinese government. Commission President José Manuel Barroso, a staunch prohibitionist, and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao signed an agreement on drug precursors and other chemicals used in the illicit drugs manufacturing industry. The objective of the 2009 bilateral agreement between China and the EU was to monitor the trafficking of precursors and to prevent their diversion from legitimate trades. The agreement became active on 11 July 2009, and was the first time that China and the EU established a system of monitoring the legal movements of precursors.1

  From the banned chemical para-methyl-ketone or PMK, there lie only a short series of reactions to MDMA, just as there are from safrole. Chemicals such as these cost mere dollars per kilo and produce drugs that are worth tens of thousands; a move at which any medieval alchemist would surely marvel. Even the production of naturally derived drugs such as cocaine demands potassium permanganate, while a key reactant in the conversion of opium to heroin is acetic anhydride. But all these chemicals have legitimate uses in various industrial sectors from perfumery and flavouring to medicines and water treatment, so cannot simply be banned.