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 magazine 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.

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 on-line sales and made mephedrone a controlled substance.’11

However, since mephedrone was banned in the UK and China in 2010, use has increased by twenty per cent and prices have doubled, and a torrent of new, legal drugs has emerged, each new ban prompting innovation from manufacturers keen to cash in on the legal highs craze. Banning a drug does not eliminate it from dealers’ repertoires – instead, the range of drugs they offer simply expands. And in a classic piece of geographical displacement, whereby pressure to limit production in one country merely sees the trade shift to another nation, India now produces much of the UK’s illegally imported mephedrone.

SOCA did, though, close down over 120 UK-based websites that continued to advertise controlled drugs,12 but many of them simply reopened under different names, selling legal compounds.

It’s highly likely that the flood of new chemicals will continue unabated. Alexander Shulgin has published a new book, The Shulgin Index, Volume 1: Psychedelic Phenethylamines and Related Compounds. It is the culmination of his life’s work, and behind its sober, leather-bound cover lies more chemical data than most people could read in a lifetime. It covers over 1,300 compounds. It is, says its American publisher, ‘an invaluable resource for researchers, physicians, chemists, and law enforcement’. It costs US$150, but its pages are available for free online, where volunteers are participating in a group edit and annotation. Volume 2, covering hundreds of new tryptamines, will be published within the next few years.13

British drug strategy was reviewed in May 2012, bringing together figures from the political establishment, harm reduction workers, scientists, teachers, frontline staff in hospital rehab units, celebrities, media commentators, entrepreneurs and some of the most senior police officers in the country. Members of the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC), which is is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the policy, administration and expenditure of the Department of Health and its associated bodies, visited drug-producing countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia, and investigated the links between drugs and crime and disorder. It represented the highest-level mainstream political debate on drugs that has been seen in the UK for over a decade.

The home secretary, Theresa May, in a letter to the ACMD’s Professor Les Iversen, acknowledged the thorniness of the problem:

With the pace with which we are seeing new substances becoming available in the UK and, in addition to the more traditional routes of supply, with the internet playing a critical role by increasing the ways in which it is possible to buy NPS [novel psychoactive substances], the challenges to the Government, law enforcement and the forensic community are considerable.14

The announcement of the HASC’s intention to open a debate around drugs policy was made at the same time that a series of influential international figures went public for the first time with their belief that the war on traditional drugs was not working, and that a new approach was needed. These included the presidents of Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia, all of whom have experienced events that, if replicated on the streets of Europe and the US, would be deemed unacceptable. Some 100,000 Mexicans have died in the last nine years as the country’s criminal gangs supplied the US – the world’s richest and greediest consumer of drugs – with cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine.

Guatemala’s president wrote in the Guardian that it was time for his country, as a key trans-shipment point for the drugs trade, to consider legalization. ‘Guatemala will not fail to honour any of its international commitments to fighting drug trafficking. But nor are we willing to continue as dumb witnesses to a global self-deceit,’ he wrote.15

Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, similarly called for new thinking on the drugs trade in 2011: ‘The world needs to discuss new approaches … we are basically still thinking within the same framework as we have done for the last forty years.’ He went further, and said his country, the world’s biggest producer of cocaine, would consider full legalization: ‘If that means legalizing, and the world thinks that’s the solution, I will welcome it. I’m not against it,’ he told journalist John Mulholland.16

Public opinion has, in recent years, softened towards the idea of decriminalization of drugs – whose legal status I would contend has encouraged a growth in often-dangerous legal alternatives – or is at least more open to a debate around the topic. A few hardliners remain. I emailed Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies, who contributed to the HASC debate, to ask what her response to the increasingly dangerous legal highs market might be. She equated those buying and selling legal drugs on the internet with those who sexually abuse children. ‘We do not stop pursuing crime or enforcing the law because crime persists or because the technology they use changes, whether the internet or not. If you took that view you might give up on tracking down paedophiles who have come to operate, as many criminals do, through the internet,’ she said. However, the market in legal highs is currently, and rather self-evidently, legal in the UK, Europe and the US, and much of the rest of world. The sexual abuse of children by adults is not.

Gyngell offered commentary to the HASC together with boisterous right-wing media commentator Peter Hitchens. He cast the use of drugs, as the churchmen in 1920s America once did, in a moral light. ‘I think that taking drugs is a wrong thing to do. I think there is a good reason for there being a law against it, and if people do it they should be punished according to the law. If we had held to that, then we would still have the levels of drug use which we had before the 1971 Act, which were minimal,’ he said, citing no evidence whatsoever.

Hitchens declared that the rule of law, if properly and zealously applied, was in itself enough to dissuade young people from taking drugs: ‘I think if you have a properly enforced law, where cannabis possession, which is illegal, is punished when detected, then one of the most important things you will do is you will armour people, who are under strong peer pressure from their school fellows to take drugs, against that … They can turn around and say, “No, I will not do that. I don’t want to risk having a criminal record. I don’t want to risk never being able to travel to the United States for the rest of my life. I don’t think it’s worth it.”’

However, the hundreds of legal chemicals now available as replacements for cannabis are far more harmful than the illegal drug itself, as was noted by the drugs’ inventor, John William Huffman. They may be smoked by any young person without fear of prosecution, or a criminal record, or the loss of travel rights, but they bring far more serious health consequences than marijuana. If what Hitchens and other prohibitionists say about peer pressure is true – that it can be dismissed with arguments around legality – then the smoking of these substances becomes infinitely more attractive to young first-time users.

Moderate commentators who sound a note of caution over the availability of new drugs do exist. Oxford-educated consultant Kevin Sabet, who advocates more drug control, has advised three American presidents – Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama – on drug policy, and is a leading voice in the US on the topic. He was one of three main writers of President Obama’s first National Drug Control Strategy, and he led the office’s efforts on marijuana policy, legalization issues and emerging synthetic drug policy. Sabet agrees that legal highs present a major dilemma for law enforcement and legislators worldwide, but he says that simply outlawing these substances one by one is not a sustainable long-term strategy, and will not stop these drugs from being imported, produced or consumed. ‘What needs to happen is the passing of legislation and laws that prohibit the sales, manufacture and consumption of whole classes of drugs – with the exception of drugs manufactured for medical or scientific purposes,’ he told me.

He went on, ‘I don’t think legalization is the answer, since we know that making any drug legal lowers its price and increases its consumption and availability. We already have legal alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs, and they are used at a much higher rate than illegal ones. Decriminalizing or legalizing these drugs would also increase their social acceptability. What we need is education combined with interventions that work to get users to stop using.’

How, though, can we explain from this perspective the drop in cigarette smoking witnessed in the US in the last sixty years? Today, 19.3 per cent of Americans smoke, but in the 1940s, it was around triple that figure.17 Nicotine, as any smoker will tell you, is highly addictive and ruinously unhealthy. Yet public health information campaigns have massively reduced the prevalence of smoking in a generation, even in private spaces.

Frontline drug worker Mark Dunn works at the UK’s first dedicated Club Drugs Clinic, part of the London Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. His branch of medicine treats what it terms ‘problematic’ users of club drugs, legal highs and other chemicals, whereas most drugs services focus on crack and heroin users. The clinic has been open eighteen months and staff have treated 250 patients, the majority of them gay men. Mephedrone is a major cause of concern for the clients Dunn sees, with some users now injecting the drug obsessively, chasing its short-lived and intensely euphoric high. ‘Mephedrone is way, way up there; people are bingeing and having horrific comedowns and paranoia. They have to reinject and this causes serious damage to veins, along with abscesses. They become psychotic and unwell, some have been sectioned. Then they use again and they become unwell again very quickly. One patient had no previous psychiatric history, and he has been sectioned four times in the last year. It has destroyed his life,’ he told me.

The last equally significant turning point in British drug culture, the rise of Ecstasy from 1988 onwards, was documented by journalist Sheryl Garrett in her 1999 book Adventures in Wonderland.18 At the time, Garrett was the editor of the style, music and design magazine The Face and was an early adopter of MDMA. She now has mixed feelings about the way the drugs market has changed in recent years, and she cites bingeing as a phenomenon that has challenged her long-held beliefs over drug use. ‘I was very pro-legalization and decriminalization, and used to cite arguments around historical prohibition. You know, “Banning drugs doesn’t stop anyone taking them or making them and we’re just funding organized crime, etc.” Legalization would mean you would be able to buy pure drugs and that would be accompanied by a huge health information campaign. But the risk is that we are bingers in Britain. The first time I went to Ibiza the atmosphere was really relaxed, and people were taking one or two pills a night – not twenty. But that binge culture has also now spread worldwide. I see it everywhere I go now, and that scares me a bit.’

The binge culture also concerns Dr Adam Winstock, who as well as working as a consultant in addictions, is also the creator and managing director of the Global Drug Survey, the world’s largest research project involving users. ‘Any discussion of decriminalization, or even legalization, where products are sold with accurate labelling and dosage information sounds like a good idea, but proponents presume an adult population making informed decisions. I’m not sure the UK could handle that, as users here tend not to be restrained. Holland has a moderate and informed adult population. The UK does not do moderation,’ he said.

Of course, it would be naïve to imagine that any moves towards a more liberal worldwide drug regime would be ushered in without complaint, however logical they might be. Matthew Collin, author of the 1998 book Altered State, the definitive history of Acid House and Ecstasy use in the UK and beyond,19 says the debate around decriminalization demands political context. He believes realpolitik dictates that the legal situation in most countries is unlikely to be greatly transformed by developments in the research chemical market. ‘A politician running for office is still open to attack from electoral enemies if he or she is seen to be “soft on drugs”, while for a government in power, the rhetoric of the War on Drugs is still more easily comprehensible and reassuring, despite its cost, than a step into the unknown whose outcome might appear unpredictable and potentially frightening,’ he said. ‘Prohibition may not have worked, but in countries like the US in particular it’s hard to see any political leader running on a legalization platform and having any chance of getting elected; the candidate would be ripped to pieces by attack advertisements during the campaign. And even if he or she made it into office, getting such a policy into the statute book would appear impossible. Look at the fierce resistance to Barack Obama’s attempt to reform the American healthcare system – and then imagine if he was trying to convince Congress and the House of Representatives to legalize cocaine and heroin.’

Dealers who profit from the sale of banned drugs can have a clearer view of the problems of legalization than many other commentators. I conducted an in-depth interview with one of the most popular vendors of MDMA on the Silk Road, discussing the legalization of drugs across an encrypted email connection. ‘The biggest issue I have with legalization is quantifying the pros and cons, what information do you base your decision on? Which metric is most important? Is it addiction rates, acute risk, economic cost, family breakdown, crime rates? It’s easy to look at the gruesome prohibition-fueled civil war in Mexico, the private prison industry in the US, the gang-fighting over drugs that goes on in every city and draw the conclusion that legalization is the only humane and reasonable alternative, because all of those injustices are blatant and gruesome. It’s harder to weigh the less apparent consequences, the subtle personal issues that easy access to drugs brings,’ he said.

‘As a dealer/vendor I get to see a much closer view of these problems, both in myself and others, and frankly it often upsets me. Many times I’ve had to stop selling to clients because they developed serious addiction issues. I know people who use MDMA every week and suffer serious memory and cognitive problems because of it; people who can’t stop using coke despite not even enjoying it any more, people who have to pop Oxycodone just to make it through the day. Seeing it really wears me down. How many more people would there be like that if they could pop down to the convenience store and pick up an eight-ball of cocaine? Would they ultimately be better off if given access to whatever they wanted along with subsidized harm reduction and treatment programmes if needed? It’s not an easy question to answer at all. I used to think that people should ultimately have agency over their own bodies and what they put in them, that the world was overwhelmingly worse off with prohibition than without it. I still feel that way, but over the past few years my view has become much more conflicted.’

In Europe, only Portugal has dared to experiment with radical moves towards decriminalization – of drugs far more harmful and addictive than the most popular recreational drugs whose effects many research chemicals and legal highs seek to emulate. Before 2001, heroin use in Portugal was rife. There were over 100,000 intravenous drug addicts in the country, and open-air drugs markets were commonplace. In 2001, the government decriminalized the possession and personal use of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and compelled users caught with banned substances to appear in front of special addiction panels, making drug use a health matter, rather than a crime.

‘The changes that were made in Portugal provide an interesting before-and-after study on the possible effects of decriminalization,’ the EMCDDA said.20

And indeed they do. In 2011, Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction told journalists that the number of problem drug users had halved.21 The rate of injectors also halved to about half a per cent of the population, below the levels seen in Britain and Italy. New HIV cases also dropped; in 2002, half of all new cases of the disease were injectors; today, that figure is 17.5 per cent.

Dr Adam Winstock says the UK missed a chance to institute a fresh approach to drugs policy when it banned mephedrone. ‘The appearance of research chemicals like mephedrone in mainstream markets gave governments an opportunity to do something different. It’s difficult for governments to retrospectively amend laws around existing substances, and mephedrone did offer a chance to use consumer or medicinal product regulations rather than the Misuse of Drugs Act. We missed that opportunity. Widespread use was initially reduced, but the drug migrated to street dealers, the price went up and many users thought that purity fell,’ he told me.

Toxicologist John Ramsey says doing nothing is not an option. ‘In terms of control, we have to do something in case some horrendous compound comes along. It’s almost inevitable, just a matter of time. There is the potential for someone to drop dead the first time they take it. When you’re tinkering with molecules you can get things wrong and there are surprises,’ he warns.

But Ramsey is, like many since the legal high and research chemical market ballooned, conflicted over what to do now. Most feel legalization is also not an option, since many of the drugs are harmful, while leaving the industry unregulated is equally unsatisfactory. ‘Why tolerate a lower standard of safety for recreational drugs than you do for pharmaceuticals?’ Ramsey asked. ‘The pharmaceutical argument is a risk/benefit one. If you have a tablet for headaches, you won’t put up with one that has many side effects; it’s easier to put up with the headache. If you have cancer, the chemotherapy will make you sick, impotent and will make your hair drop out, but you take it because if you don’t, you’ll die. The difficulty with recreational drugs is how do you make that call? The only positive effect of taking recreational drugs is pleasure, so how many side effects should we tolerate for a pleasurable drug?’

Other legal measures that may be considered in the UK are generic or analogue controls to update the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. These kinds of laws seek to ban entire categories of drugs and have been in place in the US since 1986, to little effect. While the government’s chief advisors have recommended further study in this area, experts at the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) and the UK Drug Policy Commission argue that the courts could become filled with judicial claims against such a complex area of law. The ISCD said in a report citing recent admissions by the US that its own analogue laws were flawed:

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.