4

The Rise and Fall of the Research Chemical Scene

Soon after PIHKAL appeared on Erowid, in around 1999, the ring-substituted phenethylamine and tryptamine analogues that Shulgin had made and tested on himself and his friends started to appear for sale on rudimentary websites in the US. Users online, where there was a rising wave of chatter about their effects, referred to the new drugs Shulgin had invented as ‘research chemicals’. Research chemicals are nothing more than designer drugs – but drugs that until recently very few people had ever taken. They are broadly either hallucinogens, or empathogens (drugs which bring emotional insight), or stimulants; there are hundreds of them, and they produce almost as many and varying effects as grapes produce wine or milk produces cheese. To fully describe the subjective effects of each of them in turn would fill several volumes.

At this early stage these drugs were used by a few thousand self-defined ‘psychonauts’, or explorers of inner space, who researched their effects by browsing scientific literature and discussing them online. The internet facilitated the supply and distribution of these new drugs, whose names are a baffling alphabet soup of numbers and letters, but most critically it helped people find out which of them were fun, terrifying, transcendentally visionary, a waste of time or money, or fatal. This was as much an information revolution as a chemical uprising.

Consider the dilemma of a research chemical user who could find no accurate information on dosage or the interaction between the new chemicals she has found or manufactured or had made. The safest and most rational solution would be to ask people who had done it before, and with the web that kind of communication became not only possible, but simple. Research chemical users took to Erowid in their droves, filing thousands of reports about the new drugs. Some were lengthy, Shulgin-inspired accounts, detailing their doses and their ‘set and setting’ – that is, describing the users’ states of mind and their physical environments before they took the drugs, since both can impact hugely upon the psychedelic experience. From these inconsequential and underground beginnings, whose effect was felt solely by a tiny minority of reckless or fearless explorers, the virtualization of a part of the international drugs market began.

Research chemicals in 2000 were made in clandestine laboratories on a very small scale in the US, sometimes in Eastern Europe, and, more commonly, in China. The situation is broadly similar today, with China the world leader in their production. At the turn of the century, most of these drugs were legal to produce and export almost all over the world, as although many of them had exactly the same kinds of effects as banned substances such as LSD and certain amphetamines, they were so novel that they did not feature in international drug legislation such as the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, or the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971, and nor did they feature in many countries’ national drug laws. They were not specifically named in the American drug schedules, but they could arguably have fallen foul of the American Analog Act of 1986, of which more shortly.

British law in 1999, though, was rather more advanced than that of many other countries in chemical terms, and certainly far tighter than that of America. Whereas the US attempted to control the appearance of new drugs on the basis of their activity and chemical similarity to banned substances, the UK had crafted tightly written laws specifying exact molecular structures and ring substitutions that would make little to no sense to anyone but expert chemists. And those laws were about to get even tighter.

*   *   *

Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who was born in Råshult, Småland, in 1707, is the father of modern plant and animal classification. On an expedition to Lapland in 1732, Linnaeus travelled 4,600 miles across Scandinavia and then, on foot, across the Arctic Ocean, discovering 100 botanical species. In 1788, the Linnaean Society of London, the oldest biological society in the world, was formed. Its HQ, in Burlington House, Piccadilly, is home to one of the world’s most extraordinary animal and plant collections, and its walls are lined with books and prints; it is a repository of knowledge and selfless exploration and investigation. On 12 February 1999, the London Toxicology Group (LTG), specialists who study the effects of poisons and drugs on the human body, met there to discuss research that would help ban many discoveries made by Alexander Shulgin, whose interior expeditions into unknown realms were now considered a danger to society.

In 1998, there had been a number of acute poisonings and fatalities at raves around the UK, due to a potent amphetamine derivative, 4-MTA. The drugs were being sold under false pretences by dishonest dealers as super-strength Ecstasy pills, and they were known as ‘flatliners’ because their dramatic and unpleasant effects most closely represented a coma – users would simply pass out after taking them, lying inert in corners of nightclubs or raves, a disturbing exercise in deliberate narcotic nihilism. The LTG discussed a number of cases from a recent rave in Shepton Mallet, called Dreamscape. The deaths sounded uniformly gruesome, with one man, twenty-one-year-old psychology student Rene Saunders, dying by the roadside alone, writhing in agony.

4-MTA was actually invented by another American academic, a chemist named Professor David E. Nichols, in his search for medicinal, non-toxic serotonin-releasing agents for use in therapy and as anti-depressants. Nichols is both an experimental medicinal chemist and a friend of Shulgin’s and is, in many ways, Shulgin’s heir. The foreword to PIHKAL, which Nichols wrote, ends with the line: ‘Some day in the future, when it may again be acceptable to use chemical tools to explore the mind, this book will be a treasure house, a sort of sorcerer’s book of spells, to delight and to enchant the psychiatrist/shaman of tomorrow.’1 He has since claimed that line was hyperbole, praise for a much-loved friend’s work, distancing himself slightly from the maverick’s methods.

While the wild-haired Shulgin laboured in his squirrel-infested shack, the only rodents anywhere near Dr Dave, as he is known to many people, were test subjects in cages a few blocks away from his office at the campus on Purdue University, Indiana, where he occupies the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology.

His work, like Shulgin’s, has been adopted by drug users and dealers and synthesized worldwide for recreational use. Nichols, though, is the straight man to Shulgin’s outlaw; and while Shulgin might be faster on the draw, Nichols might just be the sharper shooter. Where Shulgin confronted the law, questioned it, and ultimately encouraged millions of people to ignore it, Nichols works from within the established medical system and does not proselytize as Shulgin did for people’s right to use drugs. His aims are in some ways similar to Shulgin’s, but his methods are altogether different.

With his full but neat beard and easy demeanour, this learned chemist is also a keen gardener and plays a mean blues harp. He admits he moves in circles that would like to see the legalization of psychedelics for psychotherapeutic purposes, but his approach to the disciplines in which he has specialized for decades – medicinal and bio-organic chemistry, molecular pharmacology and toxicology – is meticulously and conventionally rigorous.

Like all academic chemists, after his work on 4-MTA had been peer-reviewed Nichols published it, on this occasion in the European Journal of Pharmacology in 1992.2 Papers such as these are available to anybody, either archived in public libraries or nowadays, in many cases, online. In the late 1990s 4-MTA was found on the streets of the UK and in shops in the Netherlands. When it was taken recreationally its effects were slow to build, and so users simply took more pills, chasing the effects. Most collapsed, and some died, as they had at the Shepton Mallet rave. It was one of the first instances of the widespread use of research chemicals, though this drug, in particular, was not mainly sourced online, and was sold under false pretences. Five people died from use of the drug in the space of about a year.

4-MTA was initially sold in the ‘smartshops’ in Amsterdam, where psychoactive seeds, herbs and smart drugs, such as nootropics – supplements and non-licensed medicines that improve cognition and memory – were sold, legally. These shops also sold magic mushrooms, recovery kits that claimed to ease drug comedowns, Ecstasy-testing kits and other high-tech drug paraphernalia.

The smartshops stopped selling 4-MTA in around 1998, when it was found to be dangerous. Remaining stock was then smuggled to the UK, where a seizure of 25,000 pills, each containing 100 mg of the compound, was found in 1998. Many more got through, with fatal consequences.

Nichols explained on Erowid why he had originally made the compound:

We had been looking for drugs that cause the release of neuronal serotonin, with the expectation that they might have therapeutic value similar to the SSRIs [anti-depressants similar to Prozac]. I am sad to see it being used on the streets. I can’t imagine what pleasure it might produce in users, because our tests with similar compounds in rats showed the substances to have aversive or unpleasant effects.3

A user of the drug confirmed that in an Erowid report:

I was screaming inside my head but couldn’t talk properly. I ran desperately around to try and get the experience to end, my mind was ruined. I knew I had gone too far taking this drug … amphetamines, psychedelics, even ketamine I can handle, but this was beyond recognition, beyond comprehension … I could hear voices telling me I was going to die and that I should probably end it all. I was sweating like a PIG. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, everyone else was breathing air. But air wasn’t right for me, I needed another gas. God, I felt lost. God was telling me I was.4

After the gathered scientists of the LTG had discussed 4-MTA, it was no surprise that, in common with their European counterparts, they recommended that it be controlled.

They then turned to the next item on their agenda: the impacts of a new and emerging designer drug craze that some of their members had identified, in which potent new psychedelic chemicals made by Alexander Shulgin were also being sold on the web. Minutes of the meeting note:

Dr Les King of the Forensic Science Service outlined the Misuse of Drugs Act and its application primarily to the phenethylamine group of compounds. All Class A phenethylamines are ring-substituted and are hallucinogenic. These are listed both specifically and generally under the Act. Other phenethylamines are found in Class B (amphetamine and methylamphetamine) and Class C (benzphetamine). The book by Alex Shulgin PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) contains 170 ring-substituted compounds and these are covered under the Act as Class A drugs. Around 34 compounds listed in the book, together with 4-methylthio-amphetamine (4-MTA), were found to have escaped the general classification [in 1971 and 1977], but these are now to be covered by legislation under Statutory Instrument 1999.5

The earlier ban of phenethylamine and tryptamine compounds in 1977 – when the Misuse of Drugs Act had first been amended to outlaw many ring-substituted amphetamines following the discovery of the psychedelic drug bromo-STP in the Midlands – had missed dozens of Shulgin’s compounds, mainly because his chemical ingenuity was more advanced than that of British lawmakers or government advisors.

But now Shulgin’s books neatly did legislators’ and advisors’ work for them, by collating in one place with great accuracy all the remaining possible variations on the basic phenethylamine structure he had discovered until that point. The Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), the independent body that advises the British government on drug-related issues, would draw on this discussion by the LTG, and its advice to government was to blanket-ban the rest of PIHKAL and TIHKAL.

In the event, thirty-six individually named drugs were added to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and the rest of Shulgin’s published work was outlawed in the UK, effective 1 February 2002. The drugs were categorized as Class A, alongside heroin, cocaine and other addictive substances, even though they are not, arguably, as harmful, and certainly in no way physically addictive.

However, the new law inadvertently left the door open for any other drug that did not match these descriptions. Like water, drug designers would soon find their way around these obstacles. Indeed, the obstacles, if viewed from a certain perspective, conveniently outlined with great clinical, pharmacological and legal exactitude exactly what was legally permissible.

On the other side of the Atlantic the loopholes were not only wider, they were created by an opaque law. The USA did not have a catch-all ban on the work of Shulgin, and instead relied on the 1986 Controlled Substance Analog Enforcement Act, which attempted to thwart the work of criminal chemists by banning drugs that were ‘similar’ to banned substances. ‘A controlled substance analog shall, to the extent intended for human consumption, be treated … as a controlled substance in schedule I,’ the Act declared, defining an analog (analogue in the UK) as a substance that is chemically substantially similar to the banned drug it is based on, that has a stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect similar to the parent molecule, or is presented as such.

However, this blunt phrasing ignores the complexity of both organic chemistry and English grammar. To be illegal, need a new compound satisfy one, two, or all three of the requirements? The matter hinges on that clumsy, and innocuous ‘or’ at the end of the second clause, said Shulgin in PIHKAL, who added that the American law is written so unclearly as to appear to be a deliberate act of obfuscation, enabling legislators to jail people at will. In an area as complex as organic chemistry, it was legally and socially myopic.

Long before the new drugs market burst out online in 2000, Damon S. Forbes of Colorado was brought before the courts for purchasing alpha-ethyl tryptamine (A-ET), a medicine in the tryptamine family, from a chemical supplier online. A-ET works as an antidepressant if you take a low dose; ramp it up and you’ll find yourself hallucinating. On 20 November 1992 Judge Lewis T. Babcock had the unenviable task of deciding whether A-ET was an analogue of DMT, under the Act. ‘Defendants contend that this section requires a twopronged definition. The first prong requires a substantially similar chemical structure. The second prong requires either a substantially similar effect on the human nervous system or the intent [my emphasis] to have such an effect. The government argues that a substance may be an analogue if it satisfies any of the three clauses. I agree with defendants,’ he said. ‘I hold that the definition of controlled substance analogue as applied to A-ET under the unique facts here is unconstitutionally vague. Without doubt, it provides neither fair warning nor effective safeguards against arbitrary enforcement,’ he ruled.6 The case was dismissed.

Charges based on chemical structure and effect could be successfully challenged if you had good enough lawyers. Proof of intent to supply for use as a drug could be argued away with a label stating ‘Not for human consumption’ – a move of transparent sophistry that would partially inspire a later wave of net-based designer drug vendors to label their goods as ‘plant food’ or ‘bath salts’, winking at prospective buyers while dodging drug, food and medicine laws.

The inadequate patchwork of international legislation around synthetic drugs was soon to be weakened still further by the connective power of the web. And no matter what the laws did or did not say, there was a sense in the US – and beyond – in 2000 that online, drug laws didn’t really apply, especially when the chemicals people were buying did not feature on any banned list of substances anywhere in the world. After years of synthesis discussion on Usenet and at the Hive, by 2000, as web use grew and after the publication of PIHKAL online, the research chemical business was starting to take off. You could buy many of Shulgin’s psychedelics and have them delivered anywhere in the world in just a few days. The lid was lifted on the psychedelic treasure chest of PIHKAL and TIHKAL and hallucinogens and empathogens such as 2C-I, 2C-E, 2C-T-7, 5-MeO-DMT, 2C-D, 2C-T-2, and AMT became available to anyone with a credit card. Research chemicals were sometimes sold in very small doses and so large stocks were not necessary to maintain decent inventory: 1,000 mg, or one gram of 2C-E could quite easily be sold as 100 separate and powerful 10 mg doses.

An early forerunner in the American research chemicals scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s was JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables, which had a bold Amanita muscaria mushroom on its home page, but links on pages beyond that brought up dozens of different compounds skirting legality, including 2C-T-7, a drug Shulgin noted for its colourful hallucinations, and which his research group responded to almost universally positively. One of them wrote:

PIHKAL #43 2C-T-7

(with 20 mg) I lay down with music, and become engrossed with being as still as possible. I feel that if I can be totally, completely still, I will hear the inner voice of the universe. As I do this, the music becomes incredibly beautiful. I see the extraordinary importance of simply listening, listening to everything, to people and to nature, with wide-open receptivity. Something very, very special happens at the still point, so I keep working on it. When I become totally still, a huge burst of energy is released. And it explodes so that it takes enormous effort to quiet it all down in order to be still again. Great fun.7

These drugs had seldom been tasted by humans (except by friends of Shulgin), so Erowid became an essential source of information on both their effects and the best means of ingestion – whether they should be smoked, snorted or injected, or taken as an enema (a popular method known as ‘plugging’, favoured both by those looking for stronger effects and by the thrifty, for doses are lower if absorbed by the membranes of the anus).

The sense of excitement and community was palpable during those years from 2000–4. New reports and new compounds were emerging with dizzying speed. Some of these drugs were being sold not only online but also in backstreet headshops, techno-hippy neon-lit caves, their hugger-mugger shelves also filled with the new nootropics such as piracetam, Chinese erectile dysfunction analogues and Oaxacan dreamherbs like Calea zacatechichi.

The scene quickly became global. Japan was an early adopter and headshops there, after years of stocking ineffective legal highs, started selling compounds that had previously only been seen in Shulgin’s shack. As in today’s anarchic scene, the new drugs were sometimes sold with labels that hid their true contents. 2C-T-7 was sold online and in the streets of Roppongi, Tokyo, in 18 mg vials under the brand name Blue Mystic Powder (its true formulation wouldn’t emerge for years). People who bought it knew full well they were buying a drug, and shop-owners would advise, quietly, how it was supposed to be taken and what effects might be expected.

In an interview published in September 2012 in VICE, a designer drug manufacturer told journalist Hamilton Morris about the roots of that drug’s appearance:

Around 1998 there was a group of us that were trying to work on some of Shulgin’s thio-compounds, the 2C-Ts. They were a lot more difficult than the standard phenethylamines and we just couldn’t do it effectively. So eventually a private group of chemists and investors pooled their resources and commissioned a laboratory in Poland to produce a kilogram of 2C-T-7. It was ridiculously expensive, and the entire process felt like a really extreme measure. To the best of my knowledge, that group effort was the first instance of custom syntheses of a gray-market drug by the end users. Less than two years later, the chemical took off and was introduced as Blue Mystic in the Netherlands, and then as a pure chemical [online] in the States. 2C-T-7 was one of the first ‘research chemicals’ in the modern designer-drug sense, and I think some of its initial popularity came from the fact that it had been totally unavailable due to the difficulty of producing it in a clandestine lab.8

The Netherlands was a European hotbed of the early research chemical scene, which existed as much on the streets there as it did on the web. A drug marketed as Explosion was sold diluted in bottles of so-called ‘room deodorizer’ in Holland. Their contents were later identified as a simple solution of BK-MDMA, or methylone – a sort of MDMA-lite that was created by Shulgin in the years after his books first appeared in print. (Nobody knew at the time, but it would have been legal to sell methylone in the UK, since its specific structural modification on the phenethylamine skeleton had been missed by both the 1977 and 2002 amendments.)

Methylone is similar to MDMA, but its effects are less dramatic, less profound. Some users say it is a more ‘honest’ version of MDMA, which they feel can engender what seems in retrospect a phony intimacy. For every user, there is a different experience, though, and because of this many posts on forums where these drugs are discussed ended with the disclaimer acronym ‘YMMV’ – Your Mileage May Vary. Psychoactive drugs are subtler than alcohol, and the state of mind of users and the environment in which they consume them can change the effects of the drug enormously.

The number of drugs on the market and their availability were expanding every few months in the late 1990s and the start of the 2000s. Some drugs and the groups using them were truly bizarre: one compound, DiPT, was said to make music sound as if it had dropped an octave, while another powerful tryptamine, DPT, was believed by members of The Temple of the True Inner Light, an esoteric religious movement in Manhattan, to be the literal flesh of God.

Online vendors started to commission custom syntheses in laboratories and fine chemical companies in China started to take over most of the manufacturing. The names of the Chinese companies began to be jealously guarded – as well they might be, for this was slowly becoming a multimillion-dollar business. Chemists were winning a game the authorities did not even know they were playing, and people were taking, making, buying and selling all manner of novel psychoactive compounds and talking about them openly online. And they appeared to be evading legal repercussions for the first time, re-routing around the laws stemming from Nixon-era diktats and trite Reaganite homilies as lithely and blithely as data squirms past censors.

The American war on drugs had created not only a market, but a motivation for both the sale and consumption of these drugs. If a drug user wanted to experience something akin to LSD without being jailed they could simply buy these neo-legal alternatives. Vendors believed, wrongly as it turned out, that the pseudo-scientific nomenclature of research chemicals and the enclosed instructions not to eat them would save them from the attentions of a 4 a.m. battering ram from the DEA. They believed that if it came to a court case, they could claim they sold the drugs as curios, collectors’ items for chemistry geeks. JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables had a fairly comprehensive disclaimer that it thought would protect it from the authorities. Its mockery may have cost it dear:

Do not take orally (into your mouth) as a food, a beverage, a chew, a toothpick, a nutritional supplement, a medicine, a recreational drug or an agent of suicide. Do not inject, inhale, snuff, snort, smoke or slam. Do not stick, put, insert or throw into your or another person’s mouth, nose, ear, eye, anus, urethra, vagina or any other orifice or port-of-entry that may exist on your or another person’s body. Do not allow any carbon-based product to become moist, then allow it to decompose with a pathogenic micro-organism, then allow the foul-black-rot to come in contact with your body, (especially mucous membranes) or insert into the orifices previously mentioned, thereby causing an infectious disease. Do not do that. Also, do not do this: Do not deploy any of JLF’s products as weapons of war or tools for violence such as dangerous high-speed projectiles aimed at people or property. Do not use for tinder to start a fire to commit arson or to burn yourself or another or any public or private property. Do not leave lying on the floor to trip over or slip on to incur personal injury.9

Within that rather too-pleased-with-itself disclaimer there was an interesting reframing of drug use as a set of choices for which each user is responsible, with the individual the sole arbiter of right and wrong. The subtext was clear: if you know what you’re doing, if you have done your research, read the books and the sites and the trip reports, then why should the nation’s drug laws apply to you? It, and more generally the entire research chemical scene, was startlingly individualistic and felt like a digital-age updating of 1960s philosophies.

But some did not use the new drugs correctly, and overdosed and died; the margins of error and safe usage were narrow. Several people died after dosing on 2C-T-7 incorrectly – they snorted it, which intensifies its effects since the drug is not metabolized first by the digestive system. These deaths led to the very first exposé of the research chemical scene, in Rolling Stone magazine, in 1999. In October 2000, a twenty-year-old Oklahoma man, Jacob Daniel Duroy, snorted about 35 mg of 2C-T-7. Within moments he was vomiting and yelling about being attacked by evil spirits. An hour and a half later, on the way to the hospital, he died of a cardiac arrest.

In April 2001, seventeen-year-old Joshua Robbins from Cordova, Tennessee, did not heed the most important of warnings repeated endlessly online: he too snorted an unmeasured quantity of 2C-T-7. He died in pain, screaming, Rolling Stone magazine reported, ‘This is stupid, I don’t want to die.’ The same month an unnamed man died in the Seattle area after combining an unknown quantity of 2C-T-7 with 200 mg of MDMA.10

It was alleged that one of these victims died from a compound sourced from JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables. The site was shut down by the DEA in 2001. The owner, Mark Niemoeller, received a sentence of three years of supervised probation, twelve months of home confinement with electronic monitoring, a fine of US$12,100, and the forfeiture of US$200,000 and a vehicle. But it was a warning shot that few in the industry heeded.

In 2003, the DEA’s Operation Pipe Dream arrested fifty individuals who sold paraphernalia such as pipes, bongs, rolling papers and other such tat online. DEA acting administrator John B. Brown III told journalists: ‘One important facet of this case is the use of the Internet by drug paraphernalia marketers. There’s no easier way to reach young people – and to get around their parents – than through the Internet. It takes a lot of hard work to get at these sites. But we can assure worried parents that today there are 11 dot.coms that are dot.gone.’11

Brown’s vanity in believing that he had controlled the situation seems even more pronounced when viewed from the perspective of 2013.

The new drugs scene kept rolling for a few more years, but for every high, there’s a low, and the ultimate comedown hit hard when it came. It is possible that the 2003 launch of the Research Chemical Mailing List (RCML), which aimed to facilitate the purchase of these new drugs by recommending companies not listed on the .alt forums, played a part in the DEA’s discovery of this hidden scene. The RCML collated and aggregated information from trusted contributors and other sources and attempted to regulate what was, essentially, an illegal industry. ‘This list is an attempt to bring a comprehensive, up-to-date listing of all research chemical companies that do not require DEA licensing from their consumers,’ the admin announced in 2003. It went on, ‘Because of the publicity research chemicals have gained recently, it is no longer safe to publish the names of these companies in public forums like alt.drugs.psychedelics. There are also new companies springing up all the time. Some of these will undoubtedly be fraudulent. That is why we are promoting a private dialogue between list members for the discussion of these companies, the grade of chemicals they sell, and their prices.’12

The RCML administrators were respected and despised in equal measure for the move, since it handed valued information out to anyone who subscribed. The research chemical market had, by 2003, grown worldwide to a multimillion-dollar business and presented lawmakers with a unique set of challenges. Users knew more than the police about the laws, and about the drugs they were using. The drugs themselves were so small they could be sent anywhere in the world. But money trails and paper trails were now added to data trails, and it was inevitable that the hammer would fall, and the party would end. On 21 July 2004, the authorities swooped. Operation Web Tryp was a DEA clampdown that resulted in the arrests of ten vendors and the closure of five research chemical vendor sites: Pondman.nu, American Chemical Supply, Omega Fine Chemicals, Rac Research and Duncan Lab Products.

The DEA announced its success – the war was over, mission accomplished. DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy said:

Operation Web Tryp investigated Internet websites distributing highly dangerous designer drug analogues under the guise of “research chemicals” primarily shipped to the US from China and India. These websites are known to have thousands of customers worldwide. One website operator is known to conduct estimated sales of US$20,000 per week, while another is known to have been in business for more than five years. These websites sold substances that led to the fatal overdose of at least two individuals and fourteen non-fatal overdoses. These dealers now enter into the privacy of our own homes to entice and sell destruction to our children veiled under the illusion of being safe and legal. The formulation of analogues is like a drug dealer’s magic trick meant to fool law enforcement. They didn’t fool us and we must educate our children so they are not fooled either. Today’s action will help prevent future deaths and overdoses, and will serve as notice for those dealing in designer drugs and the illegal use of the Internet.13

Tandy didn’t give fuller details of the American Navy raves she briefly mentioned, where randy sailors were caught distributing and consuming a drug bought at one of the busted sites. The drug was 5-MeO-DIPT – a potent aphrodisiac. In common with many research chemicals, there has been little to no academic research carried out into the drugs’ effects and it is impossible to say how this famously erotic compound works. But reams of online reports attest to its potency in the bedroom. Shulgin reported in TIHKAL: ‘(with 7 mg, orally) In one hour I was in a marvelous, sexy place. Everything was shaded with eroticism. Sex was explosive.’14

Operation Web Tryp was followed by other arrests in the US. In 2005, the owner of Pondman.nu, fifty-two-year-old David Linder of Bullhead City, Arizona, was jailed for 410 years, because a court found him responsible for the death of an eighteen-year-old man, Phillip Conklin in Hancock, New York, who took an overdose of another drug, AMT. Linder, known online as Dr Benway, was also much criticized by many of his customers for sloppy packaging and dubious business practices.

Operation Web Tryp was the first time the US had targeted drug dealing on the internet, and the first time the research chemical scene got coverage in serious newspapers and magazines. But despite the seriousness with which it regarded the crimes, the US did not judge the threat level correctly and therefore did not change its drug laws. It left the Analog Act in place and did not add many new compounds to the schedules. The fuzzy edges of that law meant that hundreds of drugs existed in a legal limbo and the customers were not an easy target for prosecution.

Only in the UK, where these drugs were completely and specifically illegal, was the decision made to target users. A few months after Operation Web Tryp,on 7 December 2004 officers involved in its British counterpart, Operation Ismene, arrested twenty-two people for purchasing the hallucinogenic drug 2C-I, again a Shulgin compound, from the companies busted in the US. Dozens of police officers from fourteen counties stormed people’s homes for the crime of importing small personal doses of the ultra-rare psychedelics which, thanks to the 1999 law change, were illegal. One of those arrested in the UK action recalls ‘the day of infamy’: ‘December 7th – it was like bloody Pearl Harbor! It was early one morning when they came for me. I was sleeping in and I answered the door bollock naked – I’d got stoned the night before. Next thing I know I’ve got a load of police in my flat, telling me to get dressed because they had a woman police constable there with them. A few months previously, I’d bought some 2C-I online, a tiny bit, from an American research chemicals vendor. But I thought the cops were looking for my hash, so I just co-operated, and handed them my stash tin. I had about 80 mg of 2C-I left. It seemed best to just be polite to them, I handed it over with my hash. They arrested me, but no charges were brought. I think the UK operation was carried out in order to appease the American Drug Enforcement Agency,’ John told me.*

The boss of Britain’s now-defunct National Crime Squad, Jim Gamble, who handled the raids, announced the events to the BBC. ‘The internet has become the street corner for many drug users. By working in partnership with the DEA, the Crime Squad and police forces throughout the country have been able to arrest people suspected of purchasing drugs online. A drug supply route between the USA and the UK has been dismantled,’15 he thundered.

The ‘drug supply route’ he claimed to have destroyed was actually a loose, unconnected group of twenty-two people making private purchases of extremely rare phenethylamines mainly for their own use. No one was jailed, and most were released without charge. It was hardly the crime of the century, and nor was it the investigation of the century – the customers of the websites had all paid for the chemicals using their credit cards. The DEA had emailed their names and addresses to the British police, who simply knocked on their doors or smashed them open with battering rams.

The British police did not monitor the online designer drugs market after that raid, and trained no officers in web surveillance techniques specific to drugs. Meantime, chemists and users’ knowledge of the law, and of the new drugs available, were growing faster than the police could keep up with.

‘The research chemical scene was an underground thing at first, there were only twenty-two of us in the whole UK who got nicked,’ says John. ‘But it really started to take off after that. I think it was Operation Ismene that brought it to the attention of many more people. It was all over the papers. People who’d never thought of buying drugs online thought: “Oh, great, look – you can buy drugs online!”’

Over the next few years the unintended consequences of those raids were to crystallize. The police had wanted to clamp down on the trade, but had only encouraged its proliferation. And with the number of people using the web growing and connection speeds getting faster every year, they would soon be running a slow second place to the frontrunners in the field.