by Power, Mike
The main initial effect of the bilateral agreement was to entrench the MDMA drought. But suddenly in 2011, the quality and quantity of MDMA mysteriously shot up all over Europe. It was obvious that something was happening. Researcher Peter van Dijk of the Trimbos Institute in the Netherlands confirmed the news to the Associated Press: ‘There’s a large amount of pills going around containing a high dosage.’ A full twenty-five per cent of all pills had a higher-than-average dose, at 140 mg. ‘[They] are too potent for many people,’ said Van Dijk.2 Test centres in Amsterdam found pills containing large and potentially dangerous doses of MDMA – whereas normally there might be 80–145 mg in each pill, the quantity in the new Dutch pills was racing up to 200, even 220 mg. There were a number of overdoses, some of them fatal, as users who were accustomed to taking several pills in a night found themselves dangerously overheating.
At an event in London’s Alexandra Palace in late 2011, two young men died over the same weekend: twenty-one-year-old Lloyd Jones of Oswestry, Shropshire, died after midnight on 27 November, and twenty-year-old Richard Baker died at 7.29 a.m. that day. Initial rumours suggesting that they had taken only Ecstasy were met with disbelief. But coroner’s reports in July 2012 confirmed that they had only MDMA in their systems.
Immediately British newspapers claimed that a new, superstrength Chinese variant of MDMA was responsible. They were almost right. The sudden upswing in quality and quantity was actually due to innovative chemists in the Netherlands, who had discovered a novel solution to the international control of precursors for MDMA. The organized crime syndicates behind the drugs’ production had simply shifted from the now more closely controlled precursor liquid PMK to solid PMK-glycidate, a legal analogue of the banned precursor, imported from China.
‘The process is called “masking” and the increasing use of masked precursors presents myriad challenges to drug control authorities’, said Justice Tettey, chief of the Laboratory and Scientific Section of the UNODC. ‘Traffickers can change the appearance of a chemical by “tweaking” the chemistry to circumvent controls, and easily recover the parent compound prior to use in illicit manufacture. The possibilities are almost limitless.’3
PMK-glycidate was seized in an Ecstasy and methamphetamine lab in the Netherlands in 2011 along with instructions for its conversion into PMK. PMK-glycidate remains legal in late 2012. While it does, MDMA supplies will remain abundant and of high quality. If international precursor conventions are again hastily amended, it’s a fair bet that supplies will dwindle and replacements will be found. Whether that will be another analogue of a precursor or a new mephedrone-type drug remains to be seen.
Just as Chinese chemists have been evading the law for some years now by tweaking molecules to produce analogues of drugs, now the Russian, Italian and Israeli criminals who control the world’s synthetic drugs markets are going one step further and producing legal analogues of banned precursor chemicals. It presents legislators with a fresh challenge: for each of the precursors that legislators ban, another will quickly appear. The circle closes like a ring substitution in Shulgin’s laboratory, and this tale of unintended consequences closes with analogous, tail-chasing circularity.
Notes
1. euchinawto.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view &id=347 &Itemid=33&lang=eeu
2. ‘Veel xtc-pillen bevatten hoge dosis’, Associated Press, 31 January 2011; Document PZEEUC0020110131e71v0005n
3. www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2012/March/
limitless-ways-to-disguise-ways-to-manufacture-party-pills-unodc-expert.html
Notes
Notes
1. www.urban75.net/forums/threads/6-apb-powder-some-mxe-blimey-this-interesting.294934/
Notes
1. C. F. Gorman, ‘Excavations at Spirit Cave, North Thailand: Some Interim Interpretations’, Asian Perspectives, Vol. 13, 1970, pp. 79–108
2. www.antiquecannabisbook.com/chap2B/China/Pen-Tsao.htm
3. www.shipman-inquiry.org.uk/4r_page.asp?id=3107
4. Quoted in J. C. Poggendorff, Annalen der Physik und Chemie (Wiley VCH, 1828), Vol. 88, pp. 253–256; www.chem.yale.edu/~chem125/125/history99/
4RadicalsTypes/UreaPaper1828.html
5. Frank J. Ayd, Jr. and Barry Blackwell, eds., Discoveries in Biological Psychiatry (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1970); www.psychedelic-library.org/hofmann.htm
6. William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, The Yage Letters: Redux (Penguin Modern Classics, 2008), p. 24
7. R. Gordon Wasson, ‘Seeking The Magic Mushroom’, Life, 13 May 1957
8. Havelock Ellis, ‘Mescal, a New Artificial Paradise’, The Contemporary Review, January 1898
9. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/revealed-dentist-who-introduced-beatles-to-lsd-415230.html
10. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1966/
aug/04/drugs-prevention-of-misuse-act-1964
11. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3047
12. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1977/
jun/20/misuse-of-drugs-act-1971-modification#S5LV038 4P0_19770620_HOL_148
Notes
1. Werner Herzog’s 1974 documentary Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner) details the life and times of a champion ski-jumper who has so perfected his art he continually out-jumps the landing ramp; www.imdb.com/title/tt0070136/
2. Roland W. Freudenmann, Florian Öxler and Sabine Bernschneider-Reif, ‘The Origin of MDMA (Ecstasy) Revisited: The True Story Reconstructed from the Original Documents’, Addiction, Vol. 101, Issue 9, pp. 1241–1245; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/
j.1360-0443.2006.01511.x/abstract
3. www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/magazine/
30ECSTASY. html?_r=1
4. Julian Palacios, Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe (Plexus Publishing Ltd, 2010), p. 298
5. Dennis Romero, ‘Sasha Shulgin, Psychedelic Chemist’, Los Angeles Times, 5 September 1995
6. Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Transform Press, 1991), p. 860
7. Ibid., p. xvi
8. Ibid., p. xviii
9. www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/
shulgin_rating_scale.shtml
10. Shulgin, PIHKAL, pp. 876–877
11. Ibid., p. 733; see also www.erowid.org/library/books_online/
PIHKAL109.shtml
12. www.maps.org/media/kleiman040204.html
13. Hugh Milne, ‘Bhagwan, the God that Failed’, cited in Matthew Collin, Altered State (Serpent’s Tail, 1998), p. 33
14. Anthony D’Andrea, ‘Ibiza: The Real Story of a Global Utopia’, Cultura, Ibiza, Summer 2001, pp. 46–47; www3.ul.ie/sociology/index.php?pagid=23&memid=18
15. Peter Nasmyth, ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’, The Face, October 1986, Issue 78, pp. 52–55
16. Nicholas Saunders, E for Ecstasy (Octavo, May 1993); http://ecstasy.org/books/e4x/e4x.ch.02.html
17. The Face, August 1990; http://testpressing.org/2010/07/the-face-europe-a-ravers-guide-august-1990/
18. www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health3/deaths-related-to-drug-poisoning/2010/stb-deaths-related-to-drug-poisoning-2010.html
19. Simon Reynolds, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (Faber and Faber, 2006), p. xvi
Notes
1. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin, 2005), p. 109
2. Mylon Stolaroff, Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration: Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness (Thaneros Pr, 1994)
3. http://kk.org/ct2/2008/09/the-whole-earth-blogalog.php
4. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, p. 109
5. www.giganews.com/usenet-history/index.html
6. Philip Elmer-Dewitt, ‘First Nation in Cyberspace’, Time, December 1993; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/
0,9171,979768,00.html
7. www.net.berkeley.edu/dcns/usenet/alt-creation-guide.html
8. Steve Preisler, Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture (Loompanics, 1994)
9. www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/
eleusis/eleusis. vs.fester.html#Eleusis1
10. www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/
eleusis/memoirs.html
11. www.erowid.org/psychoactives/faqs/faq
_clandestine_chemistry.shtml
12. www.erowid.org/library/periodicals/
journals/journals_telr.shtml
Notes
1. Shulgin, PIHKAL, p. x
2. Xuemei Huang, Danuta Marona-Lewicka and David E. Nichols, ‘p-Methylthioamphetamine is a Potent New Non-Neurotoxic Serotonin-Releasing Agent’, European Journal of Pharmacology, Vol. 229, Issue 1, December 1992, pp. 31–38; www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
0014299992902829
3. www.erowid.org/chemicals/4mta/4mta_info1.shtml
4. jimmywoo, ‘Flatlined Beyond Comprehension: experience with 4-MTA (ID 83154)’, 30 April 2010, erowid.org/exp/83154
5. www.erowid.org/psychoactives/law/countries/uk/
uk_misuse_phen_2.shtml
6. www.erowid.org/psychoactives/law/cases/federal/
federal_analog1.shtml
7. www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/
pihkal043.shtml
8. www.vice.com/read/criminal-chlorination-0000350-v19n9
9. http://everything2.com/title/JLF+Poisonous+Non-Consumables
10. www.erowid.org/chemicals/2ct7/2ct7
.shtml#deaths
11. ‘Operation Pipe Dreams Puts 55 Illegal Drug Paraphernalia Sellers out of Business’; www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2003/February/03_crm
_106.htm
12. www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/
pr072204.html
13. www.erowid.org/psychoactives/research_chems
/research_chems_info1.shtml#dea_announcement
14. www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/
tihkal37.shtml
15. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4111625.stm
Notes
1. www.erowid.org/library/books_online/PIHKAL033
.shtml
2. http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. The concept of ‘Web 2.0’ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having ‘crashed’, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. See also www.web2summit.com/web2011/public/content/about
3. www.imrg.org/ImrgWebsite/User/Pages/B2C
_Global
_e-Commerce_Overview_2011.aspx
4. Charlotte Walsh, ‘Magic Mushrooms: From sacred entheogen to class A drug’, Entertainment and Sports Law Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2006; go.warwick.ac.uk/eslj/issues/volume4/number1/
walsh/. Walsh writes, ‘The situation was further complicated by the conflicting interpretations of the law that emanated from government. Many of those who sold magic mushrooms used to display in their windows a photocopy of a letter, written by Home Office official Ian Breadmore in 2003, that clearly stated: “It is not illegal to sell or give away a freshly picked mushroom provided that it has not been prepared in any way.”’
5. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/
netherlands/3441105/Magic-mushrooms-banned-in-Netherlands.html
6. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11816071
7. www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/
cmselect/cmhaff/74/7408.htm
Notes
1. Fauna & Flora International, press release, 2009: ‘Destruction of “Ecstasy Oil Factories” deals severe blow to criminals in Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary’; www.flora-fauna.org. See also Adam Yamaguchi’s video ‘Forest of Ecstasy’; http://current. com/shows/vanguard/91315580_forest-of-ecstasy.htm
2. www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/WDR2011/World_Drug_Report_2011
_ebook.pdf; data collated from pp. 33–40
3. Posting to the Hive bulletin board, found in archives of the site that now no longer exists. No live URL available
4. ‘Gefährlicher Kick mit “Spice”’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 12 December 2008; www.fr-online.de/rhein-main/frankfurt-gefaehrlicher-kick-mit--spice-,1472796,3375090.html
5. www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/272660-Spice-Gold-Unbelievable/page5
6. http://ericcarlin.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/my-acmd-resignation-letter-to-the-home-secretary/
7. ‘A Collapse in Integrity of Scientific Advice in the UK’, The Lancet, Vol. 375, Issue 9723, 17 April 2010, p. 1319; www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140
-6736(10)60556-9/fulltext
Notes
1. www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7945058/
Ivory-Wave-is-new-Miaow-Miaow.html
2. ‘2011 Annual Report on the State of the Drugs Problem in Europe: New Drugs and Emerging Trends’; www.emcdda.europa.eu/online/annual-report/2011/new-drugs-and-trends/2
3. Simon D. Brandt, ‘What Should Be Done about Mephedrone?’, British Medical Journal, 16 June 2010; www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/11/02/analyses-second-generation-legal-highs-uk-confusing-case-nrg-1
4. www.cambridge-news.co.uk/News/New-legal-high-to-hit-city-streets.htm
5. www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/
article-1267582/The-Chinese-laboratories-scientists-work-new-meow-meow.html
6. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/drugs/drug-law/temporary-class-drug-orders/
7. The 1977 amendment to the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act outlawed ‘any compound (not being a compound for the time being specified in sub-paragraph (a) above) structurally derived from tryptamine or from a ring-hydroxy tryptamine by substitution at the nitrogen atom of the sidechain with one or more alkyl substituents but no other substituent.’ AMT did not fit that precise definition, so was legal.
8. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-14064996
9. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/corporate-publications-strategy/home-office-circulars/circulars-2012/014-2012/
10. David E. Nichols and Stewart Frescas, ‘Improvements to the Synthesis of Psilocybin and a Facile Method for Preparing the O-Acetyl Prodrug of Psilocin’, Synthesis, No. 6, pp. 935–938 (1999); www.erowid.org/references/texts/show/
6535docid6064
11. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb1011/hosb1011?view=Binary
12. www.mixmag.net/drugssurvey
13. www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/03/27/company-will-not-stop-handling-meow-meow-drug-payments-91466-26119009/
14. www.mixmag.net/drugssurvey
Notes
1. Joan Miro, ‘Thankful that I’m alive: experience with Bromo-dragonFLY (sold as 2C-B-Fly) (ID 81677)’, 12 October 2009, erowid.org/exp/81677
2. Matthew A. Parker, Danuta Marona-Lewicka, Virginia L. Lucaites, David L. Nelson and David E. Nichols, ‘A Novel (Benzodifuranyl)aminoalkane with Extremely Potent Activity at the 5-HT2A Receptor’, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Vol. 41, 1998, pp. 5148–5149; www.unc.edu/~dlinz/Papers/A%20 Novel%20(Benzodifuranyl)aminoalkane.pdf
3. http://media.carnegieinst.se/2012/04/NilsBejerot
_inlaga_OK.pdf
4. http://ewsd.wiv-isp.be/Main/5-IT%20deaths%20in%20Sweden.aspx
5. www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/274696-Describe-your-worst-psychedelic-experience(s)!?p=8658607#post8658607
6. www.flashback.org/sp27563892
7. www.kentonline.co.uk/kentonline/home/2012/
march/15/hugo_wenn.aspx
8. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-17007766
9. http://metro.co.uk/2012/03/14/body-found-in-chingford-canal-believed-to-be-missing-partygoer-andrew-cooke-29-357437/
10. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2121565/Will-learn-Mrs-Speaker-sparks-ANOTHER-storm-claiming-shes-tempted-try-Mexxy-drug-outlawed.html
11. www.startribune.com/local/north/135800088
.html
12. www.huffi
ngtonpost.com/2012/06/01/cdc-denies-zombies-existence_n_1562141.html?ref=tw
13. blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2012/05/31/drug-panics-bath-salts-and-face-eating-zombies/
14. www.huffingtonpost.com/subhash-kateel/its-bigger-than-bath-salts_b_1562014.html
15. Edward Huntington Williams MD, ‘Negro cocaine fiends are a new southern menace’, New York Times, 8 February 1914
16. Russell Russo, Noah Marks, Katy Morris, Heather King, Angelle Gelvin and Ronald Rooney, ‘Life-threatening Necrotizing Fasciitis Due to “Bath Salts” Injection’, Orthopedics, Vol. 35,·Issue 1, January 2012
17. http://abcnewsradioonline.com/health-news/tag/bath-salts
18. www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/us/states-adding-drug-test-as-hurdle-for-welfare.html?pagewanted=all
19. www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QgX4ICh1wQc
Notes
1. Nicolas Christin, ‘Traveling the Silk Road: A Measurement Analysis of a Large Anonymous Online Marketplace’, Carnegie Mellon INI/CyLab, July 2012; http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139
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/
