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The Birth of an Online Drugs Culture

The first thing ever bought or sold on the internet was marijuana. The deal was done in 1971.

The history of the internet is bound up with the counterculture, and the counterculture finds some of its richest expression in the use of psychoactive chemicals. Technological protocols and cultural pipedreams aligned and collided. The drug and music countercultures and the early technological innovators informed and inspired each other – and were often the very same people. The acronymic utopias enabled by internet technologies such as TCP/IP aren’t so different from those offered by LSD: equality, connectedness, awareness of life as a sum greater than its parts.

In the early 1960s, American computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, and, later, Britain’s Donald Davies, a physician at the UK’s National Physical Library in Teddington, independently conceived of the same way to send data around a telephone network efficiently by splitting it into chunks and routing it through nodes around the network to later arrive, reassembled, in the right place.

These deliberate first steps towards cyberspace had a greater impact on the history of mankind than the simple stroll on a rock high above our heads two years later. This ‘packet-switching’ concept was to become the central structure in international telecommunications and, later, data networks.

Four months after the moon landing, on 29 October 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the world’s first packet-switching data network, consisting of four computers in separate university sites, jumped into life. The first message ever sent was meant to say ‘login’, but the system crashed, and the first word ever sent from one computer to another was the accidentally portentous ‘Lo’. As an opening line it’s a little more truncated than Samuel Morse’s famous dash-dot message, ‘What hath man wrought’, sent from the Supreme Court chamber in the American Capitol building in Washington DC to Baltimore’s Mount Clare railway station in 1844, but the meaning was essentially – if unintentionally – exactly the same.

ARPANET is often described as the birth of the internet, and is equally often reported to have been designed to survive a thermonuclear strike, meaning that if one node or cell of the network were destroyed, the others would gather the digital slack and reroute the information around the surviving nodes.

However, the aim of ARPANET was not to preserve national security in the event of warfare, but to allow university researchers separated by geography to share information; the net’s roots were indisputably collaborative and altruistic. Its technological cornerstone – the packet-switching network – underpinned all the later digital developments that would enable the reeling madness and quotidian mundanity that comprises a day online today – a day that includes buying groceries, paying bills, sharing photos and ideas, updating the world on your latest hairstyle choices, and, for many more people than is currently acknowledged, talking about and buying drugs.

Few involved in the early days of the internet could ever have imagined how central to billions of people’s lives it was to become, but some of them dreamed of it. A year before the ARPANET came online, on 9 December 1968, Doug Engelbart, the ultimate unsung conceptual, philosophical and practical pioneer of modern computing, addressed a crowd of 1,000 programmers at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. It was an event that was to become known as the Mother of All Demos, and during it Engelbart displayed publicly, in one gargantuan techno-splurge, many of the concepts of computing that are so ubiquitous today: the mouse (‘I don’t know why we call it a mouse. It started that way and we never changed it,’ Engelbart said that day), video conferencing, hypertext, teleconferencing, word processing and collaborative real-time editing. It was the beginning of the modern age.1

Engelbart, in common with many intellectuals and technologists of the era, had attended LSD-assisted creativity sessions in the 1960s at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a California psychedelic research group founded by a friend of Alexander Shulgin’s, Mylon Stolaroff. The Shulgins wrote the preface to Stolaroff’s book Thanatos to Eros (1994) detailing his experiences with LSD, MDMA, mescaline and a number of Shulgin’s creations.2

Author Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase ‘Information wants to be free’ in 1984, was responsible for filming the Mother of All Demos, and that same year he launched the Whole Earth Catalog, the ad-free samizdat techno-hippy bible. Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech. It now reads much like a printed blog; it was a paper website, in the words of blogger and author Kevin Kelly, that was sprinting before the web even took its first shaky steps.3 Its statement of intent in its launch issue reads like a manifesto that has been realized by today’s web users: ‘A realm of intimate personal power is developing – the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.’

Brand, whose collaborations with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters would evolve into the Acid Tests, the 1960s proto-raves fuelled by LSD and documented by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, felt that information technology was the next stage in humans’ evolutionary progress.

Info-anarchists and cyber-utopians not only laid the foundations for the internet, but would act as outriders for the free software movement. The net’s founding mothers and fathers wanted to share their knowledge, and everyone else’s knowledge, all at once, all the time, for free, with no centralized control system. Instead, they preferred – and created – a devolved, leaderless model of equalized authority. It was a computer in Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute that would make the second node of the ARPANET. His dream was a future where workers would sit at personal computers connecting and collaborating.

At the same time as many social hierarchies were being challenged, the technical architectures and hardware that would become the internet were taking shape. The links between the 1960s Californian freak scene and the pioneering days of early personal computing are chronicled in John Markoff’s 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book’s title is taken from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track). In it, Markoff revealed that the world’s first online transaction was a drug deal: ‘In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at SAIL engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at MIT. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of ecommerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.’4

In 1979, a worldwide discussion system called Usenet was launched, and became the first step in the creation of the technical and cultural infrastructure that would personally connect humans across the planet, gathering enthusiasts and specialists into one digital conversational space.

Usenet was massively popular with about twenty million users in the early, pre-web 1980s and 1990s, and in many ways it was the first true example of social media, hosting thriving discussions on thousands of topics, known as newsgroups. It resembled a cross between an email and a web forum, similar in style and intent to such contemporary web communities as Mumsnet.

Usenet historians at Giganews.com note: ‘Usenet was not only an important technical development; many social aspects of online communication were introduced, refined, and became de facto standards thanks to Usenet. Emoticons, flame wars, trolls, signatures, and even slang acronyms (BRB, LOL) found their first common usage on Usenet.’5

Users could not access Usenet’s newsgroups unless they knew rudimentary coding skills. The system required knowledge of the Unix command line to set it up – there were no Windows-based computers at that time, so you couldn’t simply type the name of the group you wanted to join or read, or click on an icon to access the software. Information technology and by extension, the internet, was for geeks, by geeks. And those geeks required bottomless oceans of patience, as the information trickled down the copper wires of telephone cables at a rate of bauds rather than megabytes.

As the service became more popular, Usenet groups became more chaotic and information harder to find and categorize. In 1987 a group of users known as the Backbone Cabal reorganized the service into hierarchies of interest, in a process known as the Great Renaming. These top-level hierarchies were: computers, news, scientific subjects, recreational activities, socializing and talk, with ‘miscellaneous’ covering the rest. In time the subsections in newsgroups covered every subject known to woman and man, and in an age before search engines, they were one of the best ways to find information online – or anywhere, since they were populated by the most extraordinarily helpful, altruistic and technologically adept users in the world.

Computer scientist Brian Reid, and John Gilmore (an early internet pioneer, civil libertarian, entrepreneur and techno-renaissance man whose work around cryptography, censorship and drug law reform make him an unsung early hero of the digital age – and who is also, judging by his love of tie-dye and several anecdotes, no stranger to a dose or three of psychedelics) felt the reorganization would limit freedom of speech. Gilmore was refused permission to create a group named rec.drugs, and later, talk.drugs. Reid was unhappy at the renaming of a food group he ran, and so together the two men decided to use technology to achieve their goals. They found a way to create a new, top-level hierarchy that that did not require the permission of the Backbone Cabal and that would be accessible to anyone with a modem and Unix experience. It was called the .alt hierarchy. Not only could users read .alt groups, they could create their own .alt sub-groups. No one could grant or refuse you permission. By creating a new Usenet hierarchy that ironically neither accepted nor required leaders, as other groups did, Gilmore and Reid fostered true freedom of speech in cyberspace. ‘The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,’ Time magazine quoted Gilmore as saying in 1993, predicting twenty years ago changes that would come to affect our legal system and our entire way of life.6 The .alt hierarchy would be a free zone, and it was here that the earliest online drug culture formed.

The groups hosted within this network were some of the most popular digital watering holes for the outré and avant garde. Here, the sacred and the profane met: priests, poets and librarians communicated, perhaps for the first time, with perverts and potheads, and the early online drug scene began to coalesce around the sub-groups alt.drugs, alt.drugs.psychedelic and alt.drugs.chemistry. The author of the FAQ for those wanting to establish an .alt newsgroup wryly nodded at most people’s mistaken assumptions about the new system: ‘“ALT” stands for “Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists”.’7 It was a joke, but the atmosphere in the .alt groups was ludic and countercultural to the point of cyber-anarchy.

One of the main attractions of newsgroups, and what made them so popular and functional, was that they not only enabled social interaction, but also allowed information to be collated in one place. As universities linked up to each of the nets, the main problem people had was how to actually find what they were looking for. Their imagination, and net use, was limited by the size of the data pool, and the lack of any clear directions. There were no indexes or catalogues, and connection speeds were treacle-slow. This was a period before file formats such as the jpeg were widely used, when ASCII was the global lingua franca and attaching large documents to emails was considered an inconsiderate use of global bandwidth.

The indexing systems that we take so much for granted – search engines – are central to all web users’ daily experiences now. But in the early days of the web, finding information was a complex task carried out only by the skilled and the professional. Systems such as Gopher, ARCHIE, VERONICA and JUGHEAD were as unattractive and mystifying as their capitalized acronyms.

The domain name system, which uses words instead of numbers to request net pages from servers, was created in 1984. The curiously human Macintosh, by Apple Computer, was also launched that year, its use of icons and an onscreen cursor suddenly bridging the gap between person and machine, and bringing Engelbart’s mouse to the masses. Revealing the Macintosh to the world for the first time in 1984, in a presentation that was to become the archetype for the company’s hype-heavy launches, Apple boss Steve Jobs shocked the audience as he showed that the computer could speak, its rudimentary voice-emulation software ringing around the hall, sounding for all the world like a disembodied, time-travelling Stephen Hawking. For those who had seen Engelbart’s demo, though, Jobs’ entire presentational schtick looked more than a little familiar.

In the early 1990s, Stuart Brand set up The Well, a legendary bulletin board that was an early gathering point for intellectuals and cyberutopians. The Well, or Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, was a virtual community that hosted conversations between some of the web’s earliest champions including John Gilmore. It was also an important meeting point for fans of the Grateful Dead, confirming for ever the association between high-tech geekery and psychedelics that would result in the virtualization of the illegal drugs market in the twenty-first century.

Newsgroups disseminated the solid information on drugs that had been so lacking earlier. The Usenet newsgroup alt.drugs generated about 130 posts a day, its online FAQ said in 1995, and had about 120,000 daily readers. Alt.drugs.chemistry, a related group, began in 1994, and its sole topic was the covert manufacture of illicit drugs. It seemed unbelievable at the time that all across the world drugs policy was toughening in response to the new wave of designer drugs, such as crystal meth and Ecstasy, yet 120,000 inboxes each day received a series of innocent-looking text files that documented in meticulous detail how best to manufacture or take illegal compounds.

Where once drug manufacture was a completely hidden science, the preserve of motorcycle gangs, hippy renegades and organized crime syndicates, now this arcane information took its place comfortably among the reading matter of a technically literate avant garde. The net democratized criminality – or information that would enable criminality – on an unprecedented scale. Both the quantity of illicit information, and illegal acts inspired by that knowledge, were set to grow.

The FAQ to alt.drugs lined up the tattered and tie-dyed 1960s and 1970s drug myths – like the belief that smoking banana skins got you stoned, or that some LSD contained strychnine – and deconstructed each of them with logical prowess and, more importantly, trustworthy, hyperlinked sources. It also coined now-popular email slang such as IMHO (in my humble opinion) and WRT (with respect to). The community’s view of drug laws as unwelcome intrusions into people’s private lives has now become a much more commonplace belief.

As a virtual space where identity was shredded into binary code and reassembled as text on the screens of strangers separated by thousands of miles of space, but sharing closely aligned philosophies, the net was well suited to those interested in the psychedelic and psychoactive experiences. No laws seemed to apply there, and the early days of digital interconnection were characterized by behaviours and value systems that would have ended in a jail sentence had they been enacted in reality. To paraphrase Peter Steiner’s famous New Yorker cartoon of 1993, if no one on the internet knew you were a dog, then equally no one on the net knew you took or synthesized designer drugs.

In 1996 an extraordinary series of threads started by the posters Eleusis and Zwitterion in the alt.drugs.chemistry newsgroup argued out in obsessive detail how best to manufacture MDMA. It was a twisted flame war, a soap opera for a voyeuristic digerati. But before he grappled with Zwitterion, Eleusis had first taken on the underground press classic The Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture by Uncle Fester, a pseudonym for the American clandestine chemist Steve Preisler, the father of modern methamphetamine manufacture.

Fester’s most famous work was written after the electro-plating technician was jailed for three and a half years for possession of methamphetamine in 1984. The DEA said he was guilty of more than possession and pinned him with a synthesis charge after they produced evidence that he had been buying ephedrine tablets, a known precursor to the potent stimulant that has ravaged America’s rural heartlands. While in jail, Preisler, nicknamed Uncle Fester by college friends after a TV character in 1960s comedy show The Addams Family who liked to cause explosions, decided to write the book as an act of defiance – and more importantly, to spread his ideas. ‘My thought at the time was, “You don’t like what I’m doing, huh? Well, how would you like 30,000 more just like me?” I know how to dig through the scientific literature, but I also know how to tell a story. There’s nothing worse than a dull chemistry book, cause it’ll make your teeth hurt,’ he told Fox News in an interview in 2004.

If you skipped the rather intractable synthesis sections – and if you could overlook the fact that he was propagating information that could end in severe addiction and death – Preisler’s book was a hilarious and extraordinarily individualistic declaration of the cherished American constitutional right of freedom of speech. American publisher Loompanic has had the book in print for decades now, and it is now in its eighth edition. Investigators claim it has been found in many drug manufacturing laboratories around the world.8

Eleusis felt that Uncle Fester’s book was riddled with technical flaws, and so took it upon himself in 1996 on the alt.drugs.chemistry group to berate the author and destroy his work, chapter by chapter, line by line, with sources proving his case. Under the thread title: ‘A Thorough Thrashing of Uncle Fester’s Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture – No wonder the Feds don’t give a shit!’, he mocked and teased, scorned and shamed the father of modern methamphetamine manufacture.9

The boisterous Uncle Fester was goaded into defending himself against the allegations, and it made for great sport. It was a marvellous meeting of minds, but more than that it was the meeting of two worlds – the spluttering old guard overthrown by this vocal, technologically adept young chemist. Eleusis was just as defiant as Fester had been in print, but with a much larger audience than the old master. Furthermore, this new audience could replicate and distribute and share the information they received instantly and infinitely and at no cost. ‘This book is an obvious attempt at profiteering,’ concluded Eleusis on 3 March 1996:

Perhaps Uncle Fester goes by this name in order to escape harassment by the Feds, but I’d say he would have more to worry about from disgruntled hack chemists that attempt to duplicate his ‘work’. As well, it is quite clear that old Fester didn’t do most of what he writes about, because essential details are lacking at every step of the way. This may be intentional omission to reduce liability, but if so, why bother? It is my opinion, then, that this book review is worth far more than the book itself. Enjoy!

An amused audience worldwide tuned in to this bizarre new entertainment channel. The conversation made little sense to many, but its impact was clear enough. Media was changing, as the means of production and, crucially, distribution were quietly seized. This would change the drug culture, in common with every other area of human experience.

Eleusis was a fascinating character to anyone interested in the drugs subculture and net culture at this time – his arguments with Zwitterion were technically impenetrable, but full of humour and clever literary and mythological references to ancient Greece and Homer. But Eleusis and Zwitterion were, it turned out, the same character. Floridian Jeffrey Jenkins was an English graduate who had turned his hand to basement chemistry in order to perfect the art of MDMA manufacture. He says he posted under two names to ensure a decent conversation, to increase the sum knowledge of the technical processes and to avoid detection. It may be that his frenetic creativity found expression in creating believably distinct alter egos, or it may be that he was struggling with the multiplicities of identity that self-representation in the virtual space triggered in those pioneer days.

A text file posted to alt.drugs.chemistry after Jenkins’ arrest for manufacturing MDMA offers a fascinating insight into the mindset of a typical, small-scale underground chemist, who is obsessive, altruistic, individualistic and contrary, but passionate about his work. There is something in both the MDMA experience and the net itself that fosters the innate human desire to share the knowledge we have gained, to scatter the seeds of our experience far and wide. ‘Eleusis, for those of you unfamiliar…’ wrote the chemist after his capture and before his imprisonment,

… was the name of an ancient Greek city where the Spring Mysteries were held: a city-wide festival where consumption of mind-altering substances was the central activity in a celebration of the return of Spring.

Organic chemistry intrigued me. It tempted me with its secret language of symbols, its demand for (nearly) blind faith in unseen collisions. MDMA intrigued me as well, with its strangely universal experience, its ability to make even the hardest soul empathic. I had tried neither organic chemistry nor MDMA, so I decided to try both. In the Spring of 1994, appropriately enough, I began my chemical journey and by late winter I was already posting to a.d.c. [alt.drugs.chemistry] It took so much work to learn how to make MDMA that I decided I was going to share what I learned so that others would not have to repeat my labours. However, I had serious misgivings about sharing because my quest was one for knowledge and experience while, I knew, for most others it would be for purely economic reasons. You can see my struggling in practically ever post I made, the schizophrenic vacillations in tone between erudite dissertation and egomaniacal evisceration. Though I knew my posts would be put to use by those less scrupulous, I posted nonetheless for the benefit of those who were.10

His experiments would ultimately cost Jenkins’ family half their home in legal fees, and the chemist himself a long spell in jail. But in notes written after his arrest, he surprised many when he stated that the police had not questioned him about his activity on the newsgroup, and that his thousand-plus postings there had played no part in his arrest.

For those who might question the ethics of sharing information on drugs manufacturing online, the FAQ for the alt.drugs list – which had a casual approach to international drug laws – ended with a surprisingly idealistic and conventionally moral conclusion, written by Yogi Shan, another Eleusis pseudonym, some claim (the truth may never be known):

No matter how you rationalize it, there is no way to escape the cruel reality that drugs are about two things: money and power, amassed through the corrupt exploitation of human weakness. Sound public policy is built not through the cynical manipulations of politicians and two-dollar moralists, but through a careful balancing of harm minimization to the individual, _as well as_ society at large. Until society comes to grips with that, the non-medical use of drugs will remain an intractable scourge that distorts entire economies, corrupts our institutions to the core, and frays the social fabric. However, the base hypocrisy of society cannot and does not provide moral justification for the manufacture and distribution of illicit drugs for personal profit. Sorry.11

The author of the FAQ also lamented what he saw as an end to the halcyon days of Usenet as a resource for research and community building, as the service became populated by people with little experience:

Usenet at its best is a network of some of the brightest minds in the civilized world, getting together to discuss whatever strikes their collective fancy. Professors and academics, engineers and scientists, polymaths, and intelligent people everywhere, getting together to kick ideas, information, and scurrilous personal attacks back and forth. A synthesis of great minds and intellects, altruistically donating their time and effort in glorious cosmic synergy. However, it’s sad to say that, as more and more people go online, the Net is beginning to reflect the tawdry conglomeration that is society at large. One mammoth, lowest common denominator, vainglorious, pseudo-intellectual whore-house. To put it simply, Usenet may already have peaked.

He needn’t have worried, though. The net drug scene was about to mutate once more, and technology was the driver.

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During the Usenet era, the net itself had been changing – morphing into the world wide web, the global graphic interface to the new world of data invented and named by Tim Berners Lee at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), in 1991. With great modesty and foresight, the physicist demonstrated and distributed, for free, a technology that would help his fellow particle physicists to share their findings into the fundamental nature of reality at CERN. Berners Lee’s genius was to write HTML, or hypertext markup language, which allowed the linking of one document to any other that was hosted on the new networks. For the first few years, this new web would be popular only with expert users, but from 1993, with the launch of the Mosaic web browser, the technology caused a serious commercial and cultural buzz beyond academia.

During the alt.drugs.chemistry scene, one new drugs website called the Hive was also becoming a very busy online gathering point for people interested in the psychedelic experience, and in particular MDMA users and manufacturers. With its friendly buzzing bee logo, it was an early gathering point, from around 1997. Members, or bees, would talk about the synthetic routes to creating MDMA, or ‘honey’, as they would refer to the freebase oil the substance takes before it is salted into a solid crystalline form. At its peak, the Hive had over 6,000 collaborative members, and, as was so often the case in those days, framed its mission in terms of free access to information.

Instead of being hosted on Usenet, the site was hosted on the web in clear sight of authorities. It had threads – or discussion topics arranged into threaded debates – with hyperlinks, images and references inline in the text. It was a far more user-friendly, media-rich environment than earlier digital communities and users capitalized on the new possibilities immediately.

The Hive is a discussion board with several moderated forums covering the whole area of the chemistry of mind-altering compounds … Many of these substances are subjected to strong legal restrictions in most countries. It is in your own responsibility to check your local laws and to apply for the proper permissions. Most if not all of the information discussed here can be found in public libraries, patent registers, or free internet sources. The Hive merely provides it as a compact collector’s database.

Thus states its home page. Or rather, stated, since the site was taken down in 2004 after it became the subject of a ten-month Dateline investigation by American news channel NBC, which culminated in the unmasking of the site’s owner. ‘Strike’ turned out to be the pseudonym for a chemical supply worker, Hobart Huson, who was subsequently imprisoned for eight years in 2003 for supplying drug labs with precursors, reagents and glassware. He was released in 2009.

The investigation was a toe-curling, voyeuristic affair which made much of young people’s blurry sexual boundaries under the influence of the drug. The chemists were foolish enough to video themselves partying while high, and showing off new deliveries of glassware and lab equipment to the camera, much like teens today incriminating themselves on their Facebook pages.

In one scene of the documentary exposé, a journalist, agog at the fact that the constitutional guarantee of free speech also applies to those talking about drug synthesis online, has his lament echoed by a portly, moustachioed, cartoon-caricature DEA agent. The contrast between the young net evangelists who believed that information on any topic should be free, no matter what, and the law enforcement authorities could not have been starker.

Although the Hive was taken offline, an archivist-moderator at the site, Rhodium, had carefully saved thousands of posts that catalogued information about the manufacture of hundreds of drugs, and the archive was widely disseminated across the net. The information lay there quietly on hard drives and file lockers as a .torrent file, waiting for just the right moment, just the right social circumstances and chemical conditions, to reappear.

Elsewhere on the web, other activists gathered and offered information about banned drugs. In 1996 Nicholas Saunders, the author of E for Ecstasy, established the ecstasy.org website, placing the full text of his book online for free. ‘Ecstasy.org aims to gather and make accessible objective, authoritative, and up-to-date information about the drug Ecstasy (principally MDMA),’ said the site upon its launch, and it soon had three million hits a year from visitors looking for non-biased information. The site also contained pill-testing data, providing chemical analyses of tablets sent in by users. Grainy jpeg and .gif images of pills bought in the UK and beyond were compiled slowly line by line on screens, a major step forward in harm reduction. The data revealed that much of what was sold in Europe and the US as Ecstasy was inert, mislabelled or plain poisonous. It was an ingeniously innovative model that would be followed by many other websites soon after.

An American counterpart, Ecstasydata.org, was set up in 2001 and is still running today. It started publishing results online in July 2001, providing a valuable service to the drug-using public into what was being sold on the street. Information like this can save lives, since the majority of pills sold as Ecstasy on the street do not contain MDMA, and can sometimes contain deadly drugs that are similar in effect, such as PMA, a drug that has killed dozens of users over the years. Because of DEA restrictions, the site’s administrator explains, most American labs are not allowed to test street drugs submitted anonymously, since possession of a controlled substance without valid prescription or license is a crime in the United States – that is, both the lab and the individual would be acting illegally. Most test labs in the US are limited to screening urine for employment or enforcement purposes and because of the threat of closure, refuse to accept a tablet for analysis.

Ecstasydata.org’s lab has been given special permission by the DEA to receive submissions of street drugs from across the US and internationally. The site cannot reveal, as Dutch test centres can, the quantity (in milligrams) of a drug found in a sample, because the DEA has an unpublished rule that licensed labs are not allowed to provide quantitative data to the public, as they fear such a level of detail would provide ‘quality control’ information to dealers and users.

In an email, the manager of the service argues that this is irresponsible:

It is our opinion, based on long experience, that substantially more detailed information could be made available to the public and to poison control centres through this type of system without increasing risks to the public about encouraging illegal drug use. It is our view that the American government should not only allow, but subsidise street drug analysis to help promote awareness of contaminated and mislabelled drugs among users, parents, teachers, and children; facilitate long-term data collection about street drugs for future retrospective review; and provide a public, reviewable resource for medical professionals and poison control centers to help provide care for those who experience medical emergencies related to street drugs such as Ecstasy.

The site publicizes the results of tests on potentially deadly pills to users of the site, which now number 700,000 per year, and also carries out work offline at dance events. ‘When we see particularly dangerous pressed tablets, we try to publicize the results to the online communities that might be impacted by the drug,’ says the site’s owner. ‘Also, [sister organization] DanceSafe uses the results to carry out in-person harm reduction work by printing out or having a digital version of the results to show people at large dance or electronic music events.’

*   *   *

At the same time as Usenet groups were hosting conversations on the synthesis and use of drugs in the mid-to-late 1990s, many sites also sprang up on the newly created web selling plant-based drugs, and users of these plants, known as ethnobotanicals, took to the website Erowid.org to document their experiences. Many of them referred to these and other psychedelic drugs as entheogens, meaning substances used in shamanic or religious contexts, in an attempt to frame their drug use as a spiritual, rather than hedonistic quest.

These drugs had of course been popular in the pre-net days. The use of natural plant psychedelics grew in popularity after the psychedelic revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, and was an extension of the hippy antediluvian pastoral dream. In the 1990s, lawyer and activist Richard Glen Boire produced The Entheogen Law Reporter, a photocopied, subscriber-only publication distributed from California that declared its intentions as follows:

Since time immemorial, humans have used entheogenic substances as powerful tools for achieving spiritual insight and understanding. In the twentieth century, however, many of these most powerful of religious and epistemological tools were declared illegal in the United States, and their users decreed criminals. The shaman has been outlawed. It is the purpose of The Entheogen Law Reporter to provide the latest information and commentary on the intersection of entheogenic substances and the law.12

Twenty-two issues were printed between 1993 and 1999. They contained learned legal essays on the finer points of American drug law and policy, and laid the foundations for an online drug culture that was inquisitive, sure of itself and fully conscious of the choices it was making. The authors presented drug-taking as a spiritual pastime, and deliberately framed the war on drugs as a war on nature, since banning natural products such as magic mushrooms and peyote was both harder to enforce and more difficult to justify rationally. What’s more, there was precedent for the legal use of natural psychedelics, for the American government graciously permitted, under certain restrictions, Native American churches the right to continue their millennia-long use of peyote in ritual settings.

Boire, who is now a lawyer working in complex drugs cases, told me by email in 2012 why he had produced the newsletter:

I was a young lawyer and was fascinated by entheogens. The law surrounding them was and is very convoluted, and at the time many people did not know what was or was not permitted. Accurate information about entheogens was hard to find, sometimes harder than finding the entheogens themselves. I also saw lots of parallels between banned books and banned substances – they both change how you think, yet banning books is considered old-school totalitarian, while banning substances is largely accepted. I wanted to investigate this.

With their love of free speech and work as information activists, it was a natural jump for readers of this and similar publications – such as The Entheogen Review – to look online for information about drugs.

Since its inception in 1995, Erowid.org – the name, meaning ‘Earth Wisdom’, hinting at the site’s hippyish roots – has grown to become the world’s most important repository of information about the ‘complex relationship between humans and psychoactives’, and the single most important resource on the web for information about drugs.

Its home page is herbal-heavy: poppies, cacti, Egyptian blue lotus leaves, kratom, a Thai leaf used as an opiate-replacement, mushrooms, mystical Mexican sages such as salvia divinorum. Erowid hasn’t evolved much in graphic design terms since it started, but there is little need for it to do so. The form here is user-generated content by the gigabyte, supplied for free by generous souls.

From its inception the site gathered users’ reports on psychoactive plants and also synthetic drugs, split into sub-categories in its ‘Experience Vaults’: General, First Times, Combinations, Difficult Experiences, Glowing Experiences, Bad Trips, Health Problems, Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters. These trip reports documented the effects of hundreds of drug and plant experiences, and their interactions, synergies and contraindications. It was like a shaman’s hut with a modem. The site was the first port of call for anyone looking to document, share or make sense of their experiences – or to grandstand and stake out the new frontiers of consciousness, for it has to be said that this intensely geeky, mostly male subculture could at times be incredibly self-regarding and pretentious.

Natural drugs such as nutmeg, mescaline-containing cacti, mushrooms and vines containing psychoactive substances were among the first compounds to have their effects documented online at Erowid. That most of them were ineffective, or unpleasant, did not bother users or readers much, and the so-called ethnobotanical market still has a multimillion-dollar turnover even today, since most of these plants and seeds remain legal.

Some reports hosted by the site detail acts that make the mind reel at their folly, while others bore to tears with their meticulous data-harvest. The reports by users who have eaten the oddly alluring flowers of Datura stramonium, though, are uniformly astounding. Why anyone would ever willingly take datura, which grows wild across the world and has been used for centuries in shamanistic contexts, is a complete mystery, but perhaps reveals the reckless lengths to which some people will go to experience a different state of consciousness. In the UK datura is known as thorn apple; in the US, limson weed. A member of the Solanaceae family, with spiky horse-chestnut-style seed pods and fluted, trumpet-shaped flowers, it is a fearful-looking plant. And nature hereby warns us that it is indeed poisonous: its seeds and petals contain the tropane alkaloids atropine, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, and render the user – or abuser – delirious for days. That’s no hyperbole; scopolamine-containing plants are not hallucinogens; these-tropane-alkaloid-rich plants are classed as deliriants and send users into psychotically deranged states where their memories are obliterated, to be replaced with the darkest possible imaginings. Known in folklore to herbalists skilled in their preparation for use in treating ailments such as asthma and used worldwide in sacramental settings, in the digital age their consumption has been documented by the brave and foolhardy at Erowid.

The trip reports’ titles alone are enough to put you off: ‘A brush with death and total confusion’; ‘Eating bugs while my friends convulsed’; ‘I lost my pets and almost burned the house down’; ‘A tale of nudity, arrest and insanity’. Most reports involve a trip to a psychiatric ward or emergency department after in-depth conversations with non-present friends, and a curiously universal endless search for imaginary dropped cigarettes.

Other new natural, powerful, plant-based drugs that became popular at this time included Salvia divinorum, a bizarre member of the sage family that catapults users into phantasmagorical and often unpleasant trips (quite often, they just fall over and hit their heads), morning glory seeds, Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds – all were revealed as natural and legal hallucinogens, and Erowid was instrumental in the widespread dissemination of this information, previously locked in books and journals. Vines containing DMT, as taken by Burroughs in the 1950s, were discussed and kits using them and other herbs to create ayahuasca, a potent DMT-containing jungle brew used by shamans in the rainforests of the Amazon, went on sale in the US and continental Europe, legally.

There is even a report at Erowid for sapo, a toad venom that is applied onto self-administered burns to the skin. Apparently it makes you feel as if you’re dying for fifteen minutes, then users reportedly become stimulated and energized for a few days after that. Traditionally, it is used by hunters in indigenous communities in the Latin American rainforests, giving them a high resistance to fatigue and immensely sharpened senses, including, allegedly, the ability to see much further and to hear the footfall of prey from miles away. Its active ingredients are the peptides phyllocaerulein, phyllomedusin, phyllokinin, demorphins and deltorphins. Some of these frog venoms have been used as performance-enhancing drugs in racehorses.

Erowid’s co-owner, known as Fire, told me she set the site up as ‘a bit of an accident’:

In 1994, Earth [her partner] and I moved to San Francisco after graduating from college and were looking for interesting new jobs. I decided that web design sounded like an interesting and booming business, so I sat down to learn HTML and web page design. We both had an existing interest in psychoactives. We had made some attempts at scholarly research while in college, as well as joining a couple of email lists where related topics were discussed.

While learning web design, our relatively meagre archives of information became an obvious source of data to practice making web pages out of. We put a few articles and pieces of data on a web page and then someone would ask a question in a discussion group that was answered on one of those pages. We’d point them to the page. A few more pages would go up and the URLs would get passed around. And it really was kind of just like that that Erowid was born. Then it snowballed.

To those who have criticized the site for providing information to drug users, Fire offers a calm rejection:

It became obvious and is still clear that humans are not going to go back to a time where interested people don’t have access to information about psychoactive drugs and technologies. The question must then shift to how to head from a dark age where prohibitionist policies intentionally tried to suppress information and pollute facts with political messages, into an age where we can collectively be building a reliable wisdom base from which parents, teachers, and people of all ages can make informed decisions.

Daily, the site now gets 90,000 unique visits, and serves 4.1 million files. It contains over 60,000 public documents detailing case law and precedent in complex legal cases, and thousands of first-hand reports of psychoactive drug experiences. ‘All reports go through a rigorous review process,’ says Fire. ‘So far we have published 22,000, rejected another 22,000, have 36,000 rated and ready for review, and another 13,000 yet to be looked at.’ She adds that she receives at least a couple of messages a week from people who explicitly say that information they found at Erowid has saved their lives. Even today, the site is an invaluable resource for people taking new drugs that they have sourced from the internet, and its contribution to harm reduction is inestimable. It is also a valuable first reference point for parents, teachers and poison control toxicologists.

Just as TIHKAL and PIHKAL became required reading for many in the counterculture in the 1990s, Erowid became a resource for any early web user interested in drugs. In 1996, with the Shulgins’ permission, the second half of PIHKAL was published online by Lamont Granquist, an early net advocate, who had created the Hyperreal Drug Archives, an early collection of files and information about psychoactive drugs. In 1999, Erowid moved on to the Hyperreal server and incorporated the archives there into Erowid, including PIHKAL and TIHKAL. While this was no real surprise to any informed observer, it still felt like a revolutionary act in an information war, which, in some respects, the war on drugs had become. To see Shulgin’s complex psychedelic drug recipes published to the entire world, for free, was extraordinary. Now, not only could you read the information Shulgin had preserved so presciently, you could forward it to anyone with a few keystrokes.

Shulgin himself joined the online party in 2001, when his Ask Dr Shulgin site launched at American campaign group Cognitive Liberty’s site. The Doctor took questions from members of the public in a weekly email Q&A and seemed to relish the contact with this new audience. The site ran for around three years and placed the counterculture’s most articulate and learned chemist-hero at the heart of the online drug debate, with discussions focusing not just on complex technical matters, but also on the ethical and moral dimensions of the war on drugs.

Shulgin’s influence and experience bridges the gaps between the early 1950s intellectual explorers and psychiatric treatment pioneers, the 1960s hippy counterculture, 1970s and 1980s underground psychiatry, the 1980s explosion of Ecstasy as a recreational drug, the early internet drug scene of the 1990s and early 2000s – right into the chaotic twenty-first-century situation.

What was to complicate the picture was a development that, on reflection, was entirely predictable. As the twentieth century ended, the web wasn’t just a place where you could talk about drugs – it was about to become a place where you could buy them.