6
Mephedrone Madness: the Underground Hits the High Street
In the pristine and remote Cardamom mountains in south-western Cambodia in 2008, local forest rangers and conservationists from Flora and Fauna International, a British NGO, came upon a smoking, abandoned campsite. The scene was a bizarre mix of charnel house and war movie, but instead of piled corpses and bones, there lay scattered the husks of a tree beside a vast cauldron over the embers of a large fire. Clothes, books, food and mobile phones were strewn around and a roasting animal still cooking on the spit of a camp fire spoke of recent occupation, and flight. An AK-47 bullet casing lay on the ground near screw-cap plastic gallon containers of a sweet-smelling oil.
The oil was safrole, distilled from recently felled trees that had stood for several hundred years before the arrival of the poachers who had set up the camp. They had cut a savage path into the heart of this, the longest contiguous tract of virgin rainforest in South-east Asia, in search of the mreah prew phnom tree, whose bark and roots contain unusually high concentrations of the oil.
In this and other ramshackle safrole factories, the essential oil is distilled from the tree’s bark and roots by first shredding them with mechanical strimmers and grinders, and then suspending the stripped material over heated water in a vast iron cauldron, which has an outlet pipe in its top that directs the now safrole-rich steam into a condensing chamber. In this form – in which it has no psychoactive effects – it has long been used in traditional Khmer medicines. But the oil, if it had been taken to the capital, could have been sold for fifty dollars a litre. One litre of this oil can make anything up to 1,000 Ecstasy pills.
In late 2008, in Pursat, 170 km west of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, UN anti-drug officers destroyed 33 tonnes of safrole oil,which had been earmarked for use by drug gangs in the Netherlands to make Ecstasy following Shulgin’s recipe. The oil, confiscated over the preceding weeks and months, had been produced in illegal safrole labs like the one in the Cardamom Mountains, that made an average of sixty litres a day. If the thirty-three tonnes of oil had got to Holland, it would have translated into as much Ecstasy as all the users in Britain alone combined would have normally taken in five years. Instead, it was burnt.1
There are many ways to make MDMA, but safrole is the simplest synthetic route; the chemistry of the two molecules is not very different, as can been seen in these diagrams:
Safrole
MDMA
More importantly, the steps from safrole to MDMA are fewer than by most other methods and the yield is often higher. The impact of the events in Cambodia was therefore profound and lasting – and it inadvertently caused the appearance of the drug that came to be known as mephedrone.
An analysis of the data published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in the World Drug Report 2011 stated that in 2004, global seizures of what the UN calls ‘Ecstasy group’ substances were 12.7 tonnes.2 That figure dropped to 9.7 tonnes in 2005, stayed steady for 2006, and then in 2007, almost doubled, to 16.5 tonnes. But seizures then dropped vertiginously to 6 tonnes in 2008 and 5.4 tonnes in 2009. These were the two years of the global MDMA drought and include the year of the 33-tonne Pursat oil burn that took out the precursor required to synthesize 260 million pills. If we calculate 245 million pills at a rather generous 125 mg each tablet, that would add up to around 29 tonnes of MDMA – enough to starve the world market for all of 2007, 2008 and part of 2009.
Not only were the precursors getting harder to find, but in June 2007 the world’s biggest Ecstasy bust had taken place in Australia. The global MDMA market is mainly controlled by Russian and Israeli organized crime groups, Dutch-born chemists and Israeli and Italian smugglers. An alliance of Italian crime bosses and motorcycle gangs in Australia arranged the import of fifteen million pills in tomato cans from Naples to Melbourne in 2008. They were caught after 100,000 telephone intercepts and thousands of hours of surveillance in an investigation that involved 800 police. In May 2012, Pasquale Barbaro, a fifty-year-old farmer from New South Wales, and a member of the powerful Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate, was jailed for life for the offence. His accomplice, fifty-five-year-old Saverio Zirilli, was jailed for twenty-six years.
In late 2008 and early 2009, then, users were crying out for either MDMA or some new replacement. There was a huge untapped and unsatisfied market, filled only with piperazines. A person with close links to those involved in the top-levels of global MDMA manufacture revealed to me what prompted the emergence of piperazines and other adulterants as a response to the increase in prices for safrole and other precursors between 2006–2009: ‘Precursor prices [for compounds such as safrole] had gone up considerably from 2006 onwards. The steadily increasing security in European ports was making it harder to bring bulk quantities of precursors in, even when you could find them. This was sending the price of manufacture up, not by a huge amount yet but it was concerning manufacturers,’ he explained. ‘A number of international syndicates took a vote on whether or not to raise the wholesale prices on pills or look for cheaper substitutions. Apparently the vote came down on the side of substitutions and it was after this that we started seeing more and more pills with what we would consider adulterants, but which the industry was trying to promote as substitutions.’
But the strategy backfired, when users became wary to the point that many of them stopped purchasing the new pills that sickened them so badly.
Around five years earlier, an underground chemist known as Kinetic had posted the web’s first synthesis of a new drug to the Hive. ‘I’ve been bored over the last couple of days,’ he wrote in 2003, ‘and had a few fun reagents lying around, so I thought I’d try and make some 1-(4-methylphenyl)-2-methylaminopropanone hydrochloride, or 4-methylmethcathinone as I suppose it would be commonly called.’3 He went on to document how he had synthesized 4.8 g of the drug in forty-eight hours using toluene, a simple solvent, as the precursor. He then, like Shulgin before him, tried the drug he had made, and reported back to a fascinated audience of fellow renegade chemists. But this drug was nowhere to be found in PIHKAL or TIHKAL – it was almost entirely unheard of, and certainly never seen before on the mainstream drugs markets. Kinetic had used his knowledge as a chemist to devise mephedrone, a new analogue of methcathinone – a powerful and illegal stimulant drug related to methamphetamine, or crystal meth. These diagrams show the similarity between the three compounds:
Methcathinone
Methamphetamine (crystal meth)
Mephedrone
Over the next few hundred words Kinetic laid out, in a remarkably concise yet exhaustive guide, the method, tools, chemical reagents and potential pitfalls involved in the manufacture of this new drug. He did this not to earn money, or to get a job, but to show off his mastery of organic chemistry, to gain kudos, to share his knowledge freely. It was certainly not his intention to trigger a worldwide drug craze, but within a few years, that’s exactly what happened. Kinetic told how he had spent the day synthesizing the material, and a few hours after scraping out the 4.8 g of crystals from his reaction cylinder, had snorted 400 mg. His central nervous system rode the waves of powerful, if short-lived euphoria. He wrote:
400 mg was quite a lot to take in one evening, but it wasn’t too long-lasting so I kept ‘topping up’. The rushes after each line were amazing, and I remember feeling very much like I do when coming up on Ecstasy, but four times! That beautiful weak feeling, when you just think ‘Oh, fuck, I feel so fucking good…’ It’s more euphoric than I remember my first time on the butane methcathinone analogue to be. I felt very compelled to do things, but I was completely unable to keep my concentration on literature searches I was trying to do at the time. I had a very strong urge to socialise, and almost went clubbing, but thought better of it. I could feel the rushes of energy coming across me, and after that, a fantastic sense of well-being that I haven’t got from any drug before except my beloved Ecstasy.
Kinetic’s new drug, which later became known as mephedrone, was indeed similar to Ecstasy, in that it made you euphoric, excited and energetic, and it provoked empathy and openness. Not only that, but mephedrone was easy to make and it was legal in most countries in the world, since no country had ever seen a methcathinone analogue before, and in the UK, certainly, there had never been a need to pre-emptively ban modifications around the basic methcathinone molecule. The drug’s main difference to Ecstasy was its short duration – about forty-five minutes compared to the four- to five-hour Ecstasy experience. This would make it addictive – as soon as users came down, they wanted more.
On 5 April 2003, at 21.33 exactly, Kinetic posted another message: ‘Oh, and I really just have to say a big “Fuck You” to the UK government and their stupid drug laws, since I’m high as a kite and there’s nothing they can do.’
Kinetic was right: he was defiantly exploring a class of drugs, cathinones, analogues of which had never been controlled in British law, unlike the phenethylamines and tryptamines. And as there was no analogue ruling in UK – unlike America – that blanket-banned products and left legal doubt hanging over users and vendors, he simply rerouted around the law, safe in the knowledge that by obeying it, he could not be punished. Nor could those who followed his instructions, four years later, to create the legal drug that would fill the MDMA gap.
The consequences of this underground bulletin board posting were as unintended as they were unanticipated. Perhaps just a few dozen highly dedicated, highly educated scientists (and various ‘lurkers’ who listen in, but do not contribute to the discussion) were privy to Kinetic’s quietly seismic message. But that post fired the starting gun on the current chemical arms race between clandestine chemists and governments worldwide. ‘The designers of mephedrone stumbled across something with the pharmacology somewhere between cocaine and Ecstasy that was cheap, legal and freely available. And this coincided with a drop in the quality and availability of other drugs,’ says John Ramsey, chief toxicologist at St George’s, University of London.
The global MDMA drought caused the mephedrone phenomenon in a pitch-perfect piece of substance displacement – if one drug disappears, another will replace it. Substance displacement would soon cause the new research chemical scene, now rebranded and introduced to the public as the legal highs scene, to grow at a rapid rate. The internet and the use of social media and new ecommerce techniques guaranteed its influence spread even faster. The way many drugs are bought, sold and taken in the UK and across the world was to change for ever.
At first, mephedrone was hidden inside branded products rather than being sold as a chemical compound in its own right. In early 2007, an Australian subforum on the Bluelight bulletin board was buzzing over the release of branded legal highs named NeoDoves and SubCoca. They were sold by a firm named Biorepublik, who operated out of Tel Aviv, Israel. Previously, legal highs were regarded as a rip off, a hotch-potch of allegedly psychoactive herbs, caffeine and piperazines, the kind of products sold as Herbal Ecstasy at dayglo stands in festivals to the young, the gullible, or those facing drugs tests at work. Nobody knew what was in the Biorepublik products, but they ate and snorted them by their thousands. Australia, like the UK, geographically isolated and without land borders to any other nation, making smuggling harder, suffered the worst of the MDMA drought, as did the UK, and after the MDMA bust that year, the market there was starved. Cocaine is also extremely expensive in Australia – costing AUS$300, or around £195 per gram compared to £50 per gram in the UK – which is why the synthetic stimulant drugs market in Australia is so much more developed and entrenched than it is in the UK. Crystal methamphetamine use has grown there more dramatically than it has in Europe – three per cent of Australians over the age of fourteen have used the drug.
Biorepublik, run by a mysterious and elusive character, pseudonymously known as Doron Sabag, sold these new products as health supplements, in plain capsules. Sabag refused to reveal what was in them, setting a disturbing pattern that would be seen repeatedly in the coming years. Producers wanted to keep the formula secret to preserve their profits. And users were unanimous in their verdict: the NeoDoves and SubCoca worked, and they worked well. They made users feel amazing, briefly, and, at four pounds each, represented better value than the contaminated Ecstasy pills dominating the market. Customs officials were powerless to stop their import since they were sold as health supplements and their contents were not listed. What’s more, they were being imported from Israel, not a country known for clandestine designer-drug manufacture and export, so packages were unlikely to be profiled and opened in any case.
The capsules sold in the hundreds of thousands worldwide throughout 2007 and 2008, and supply soon outstripped demand. Users were rhapsodizing about their MDMA-like qualities. That their sweat after taking them smelled like an old kipper left out in the sun was no great hardship. The smell was caused by poor syntheses and by the fact that the compound was also badly dried, meaning solvents and by-products, some of which smelt fishy, remained in the end product – so much so that Swedish users referred to the drug as krebbe, or crab.
The smell, along with the jittery comedowns, and the pounding heart and split lips and bleeding gums and ground-down teeth, didn’t seem to much bother users. These drugs, whatever they were, were so much better than almost all the available illegal drugs available in the UK, Australia and Europe at that time. Someone somewhere was getting very rich, very quickly. Unsurprisingly, NeoDoves and SubCoca were also psychologically addictive. Some users reported going on unintentional binges for days, losing their minds and willpower, destroying their nostrils by opening the capsules and snorting them, ‘fiending’ through their whole supply – intending to have a single capsule and eating a dozen – chewing through their lips, twitchy and delusional, chasing the fleeting high. Then they ordered some more.
Their contents may have been a mystery, but it was a mystery worth solving for users concerned about their health effects after months of blithely swallowing the capsules, and for keen-eyed entrepreneurs who saw the huge profits available. A few months later, one of the compounds was identified on Bluelight as 4-methylmethcathinone, an utterly unknown chemical never before seen on the mainstream global drugs market. A poster at the Bluelight forum, phase_dancer, an Australian chemist working in harm reduction services for drug users was, along with others, responsible for the discovery. ‘We’ve never been an organization as such, more a bunch of interested scientists working in different, but related fields. At the time, I was working as a chemist manufacturing reagent kits for Enlighten Harm Reduction, as well as researching improved formulations to better detect things like ketamine and PMA [a deadly impurity in MDMA pills],’ he told me. ‘No one seemed to know what the active ingredients were in the Biorepublik products. As popularity continued to grow, we put out word that there was a possibility drplatypus [a fellow poster] could arrange to have the products analysed. Samples were anonymously delivered to the hospital where he was working, which in turn passed them on to a colleague of ours from Adelaide Forensics.’
In the end several compounds were identified in the capsules, but the most important was 4-methylmethcathinone – soon to become known as mephedrone. Longer-term observers of the chemical underground, though, recognized this formula as the same one that Kinetic had devised in his home laboratory and posted to The Hive one bored evening back in 2003. The research chemical scene had gone overground – and how.
Mephedrone is chemically related to khat, or Catha edulis, a plant used for thousands of years in Arabic cultures, especially in Yemen and Somalia, as a social lubricant enjoyed for its stimulating qualities when chewed in a quid held in the cheek. Many shops in east London, home to immigrants from khat-using countries, sell the plant, which is legal and imported by established firms. It is brought in daily by air freight as it loses potency when less than perfectly fresh. The active ingredient, cathinone, is, if isolated and sold as a pure compound, a banned substance in most of Europe and is a Class C drug in the UK. Khat is banned in the US and some European countries, such as Holland, and its legality in the UK seems anomalous. It is perhaps overlooked because the number of people using it here is so small – around one-third of the UK’s 100,000-strong Somalian community. In October 2012, 100 Somalian demonstrators petitioned Downing Street to ban the plant, saying addiction to the drug was causing family breakdowns and health problems.
Around 2004, in small kerbside newspaper kiosks in Tel Aviv and in nightclubs across Israel, a legal high known as hagigat, mixing the Hebrew words hagiga, meaning celebration, and gat, meaning khat, was gaining popularity. Hagigat capsules contained cathinone and were sold, legally, to buzz-hungry Israelis throughout the city. Cathinone, a chemical related to amphetamine, floods the brains of users with dopamine, the neurotransmitter that regulates mood, and which can be stimulated by safer methods including sex, good conversation and shared food – or by cocaine or amphetamines. Hagigat was banned in Israel in 2004, but continued to be sold more or less openly there.
In 2007 an unknown chemist associated with the Israeli firm Biorepublik had taken advantage of Israel’s drug laws and, to beat the ban on cathinone, simply created 4-methylmethcathinone, a legal analogue of yet another cathinone derivative, methcathinone, and had sold the resulting drug as NeoDoves and SubCoca. Since the Hive was the most renowned underground synthesis board, and this synthesis and drug had never been seen on any recreational drugs market, it is overwhelmingly likely that the recipe was taken from the 2003 Kinetic posting on the Hive.
Granted, the chemistry is not complex: methcathinone is a derivative of methamphetamine, and 4-methylmethcathinone – mephedrone – is just the parent molecule with a few extra oxygens bolted on. For a chemist, the difference is perhaps a few hours’ work, and analogous to a cakemaker simply decorating their product with a chocolate topping and a cherry. Whatever the truth of the drug’s provenance in its 2008 iteration, most countries’ drug laws were as inflexible as they are elderly and simply could not keep pace with these nimble online dealers.
Within a few months of the massive Cambodian oil burn, in February 2009, I wrote the world’s first press reports about the MDMA drought, and the appearance of mephedrone and other new drugs in the specialist magazine, Druglink. My story was picked up by broadsheet and tabloid newspapers in the UK, who immediately gave the drug major coverage, catapulting it from an underground web cult to the news pages. Then things got even more bizarre, thanks again to the web.
With the formula out and published widely online, British dealers had found out what was in the Biorepublik capsules and had started to order the drug directly from Chinese factories, and set up websites to sell it.
Google’s AdWords programme automatically generates advertisements from keywords paid for by subscribing businesses and places them on websites where those keywords appear, and who subscribe to its AdSense package. Some of these include newspapers. AdSense started helpfully adding links to mephedrone webshops at the end of serious newspaper articles, thanks to AdWords subscriptions by mephedrone dealers. Links to mephedrone telephone delivery services, with dealers on motorbikes offering to drop the drugs off at your home or office within a few hours, were generated automatically and published on the websites of newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, which were demanding swift and decisive government action on the new killer drug menace. Mephedrone and other research chemicals received a vast, free boost.
Google does not manually or pre-emptively check what its advertisers actually sell before it accepts the advertisements, and the newspapers had no control of the ads that Google was generating for their pages.
While mephedrone was legal, Google also carried dozens of adverts paid for by the dealers on its own search pages. I approached the company and asked why, even at the height of the mephedrone story, adverts were appearing on its search pages. A spokesman replied, ‘Under our drugs policy we do not allow ads for mephedrone. If we discover that ads are showing that break our policies, we will remove these as soon as possible.’
That afternoon, it took down dozens of advertisements, but refused to tell me how much it had earned by publishing links to sites selling the drug.
With this inadvertently brilliant marketing campaign by early retailers of the drug, dozens more websites sprang up selling mephedrone, many labelling it as ‘plant food’ in a bid to avoid medicine, drug and food labelling laws. Mephedrone took hold of Britain that year much as the drug hits users – fast and hard. There has never been a drug craze like it before or since, in chemical, legal, social and technological terms – but it’s only a matter of time and molecular manipulation until another drug just like it appears.
‘I prefer mephedrone to MDMA,’ Dave Timms, a twenty-seven-year-old Londoner working in the fashion industry told me at the height of the craze in 2009. He was a sensible, intelligent, articulate guy who kept in good physical shape, dressed well, and liked to spend his weekends, from the second he left his office, getting as wasted as you can possibly imagine. He’d always liked taking drugs and partying, he said, but with the low quality of drugs available in the UK, mephedrone was just a better option – and far easier to get hold of. ‘Mephedrone is more reliable, cheaper and actually more convenient than going to a dealer,’ he said. ‘I pretty much stopped buying coke and pills and MDMA once I found meph. I’d just make a bulk order and send off the payment and the package would arrive a few days later. I’ve been doing it for fourteen months, and have not experienced any negative effects, except sometimes I’m a little less motivated in work and training at the gym. It makes me laugh when I see people try it for the first time. Many are sceptical that something that’s legal can actually work. But it does.’
He said he preferred mephedrone to MDMA as it gave him less of an emotionally fraught comedown after a weekend’s use of the drug, and because it gave him greater mental sharpness. Timms once took it from Friday night until Monday morning without sleeping, and when he needed to straighten up and go to work, he simply snorted another line and put his suit on. He claimed during that honeymoon period with the drug that it had no downside, no comedown or hangover to speak of. And at ten pounds a gram, it was far cheaper than cocaine, which was selling then as now at around fifty pounds a gram for badly adulterated product.
Mephedrone completely wrong-footed the police, politicians, health workers and newspaper editors that year; they had little idea what the drug was or where it came from. It was the first drug that worked at the pace and in the manner of a web viral, following the now-classical narrative arc of digital marketing, with delighted users recommending the drug to their friends, who recommended it to their friends. The drug gained mass-market popularity in a matter of weeks, especially in small towns, where supplies of illegal drugs were more heavily cut or prohibitively expensive, while mephedrone was cheap, plentiful, uncut and 100 per cent legal. By contrast, MDMA took years to become so widely accepted and used.
Many sites that sold it referenced rave culture in both their graphic design and imagery, and it was clearly intended for use as a narcotic. Sites such as Ravegardener, Champagnelegals, Bubbleluv and market leader UKLegals sold the drugs by the vanload. Items to be sold for human consumption must pass food safety and medicine laws, but as with the earlier research chemicals, as long as mephedrone carried labels saying it was not to be consumed, vendors could avoid any of the customer protection laws that the UK had in place, as well as the Misuse of Drugs Act, which did not cover this previously unseen, unheard of beta-keto methcathinone.
A kilo could be imported to the UK in a matter of days from China, and customs officials were powerless to intervene. Now that there was serious money to be made, more professional outfits stepped into the market, and started selling it blatantly on public websites, with slick design, smart-ordering systems, sharp back-end databases and overnight delivery, one-click orders and thousands of positive online reviews.
Soon dozens of Chinese labs were pumping out tonnes of the drug every week, feeding a voracious demand. It was a move of considerable ingenuity on the part of many British manufacturers to avoid setting up laboratories here in the UK with all the attendant risk and expense, and simply to outsource production to a country where the well-established chemical and pharmaceutical industry was willing to turn a blind eye to sketchy export dockets, where local officials could be paid off cheaply, and where labour costs were lower. It had worked in every other manufacturing sector so why not for designer drugs, too? Legitimate Chinese exports to the EU in 2003 were 106.2 billion euros. They more than doubled to 231 billion euros in 2007. By 2010 they stood at 292 billion euros – a threefold increase in under seven years. Business, both legal and para-legal, was booming.
The owner of one factory sent me a list of his consignments to the UK at the height of the mephedrone phenomenon in February 2009. Posing as a bulk buyer for an undercover report for the Mail on Sunday’s ‘Live!’ magazine’s Reportage slot, I had demanded references from satisfied clients. He was more than happy to help. He revealed that he had sent fifty kilos of mephedrone from Shanghai to the UK in a single week, by Fedex and DHL, through Charles de Gaulle airport via Gatwick and Stansted, to every corner of Britain, and hundreds more kilos all across Europe. As the UK shivered under its first real snowfall in a decade, the country was buried under an avalanche of a very different white powder. Within a few months, Chinese mephedrone had Britain and Europe in its fierce, eye-rolling grip; it was like the Opium Wars in reverse.
The 2011 MixMag drugs survey, the world’s biggest, clearly showed the explosive growth of mephedrone. The majority of the more than 2,000 drug users recording their habits for the previous year for the clubbers’ magazine said they had taken the drug, which now ranked fourth behind Ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana. There had not been a new drug since Ecstasy in 1988 that had such immediate and dramatic effects on patterns of consumption.
That year, other modified drugs also came on to the market. There were new analogues of mephedrone itself, such as methylone, butylone and pentylone, and other stimulants, such as the powerful MDPV (active at just a few milligrams and responsible for users posting reams of alliterative nonsense online); there were flephedrone and buphedrone, brephedrone and dozens of other drugs in the cathinone family: all emerged in rapid, dizzying succession, all potently psychoactive, and all completely legal. Research chemicals had now been re-marketed, with considerable skill, as legal highs. Some websites sold the pure chemical compounds, others sold branded sachets that carried no information about their contents.
Marijuana replacements also came into vogue between 2008 and 2010, as alternatives to a popular, but illegal drug. Again, the research chemical scene and Chinese laboratories were responsible for the appearance of these new, untested drugs. Before that time, anyone who bought legal alternatives to marijuana was almost guaranteed to have been sold an inert substance that would irritate the lungs, empty the wallet and do very little else. Given the easy access to marijuana in most of the world, the market for such function-free products was narrow, limited solely to the very young, the gullible, the exceedingly stupid, or the very cautious.
But at more or less the same time as mephedrone appeared, reports started to emerge on dozens of drug forums that a new synthetic marijuana product, named Spice, was actually very powerful, and that it smoked very much like marijuana. News of its potency spread around the web as quickly and pungently as billowing gales of ganja smoke through a festival crowd. But just as with mephedrone’s first appearance in the NeoDove capsules, nobody knew what the active ingredients were in these bags of herbs.
The bags of Spice were sold for about fifteen pounds each for the classic pot dealer’s measurement of three and a half grams, or one-eighth of an ounce. Manufacturers claimed a hitherto unknown synergy between the ingredients, which were listed as baybean, blue Egyptian water lily, skullcap, lion’s tail and sacred lotus, albeit in the original Latin for added authenticity and confusion. The real truth of Spice’s power lay in the laboratory of a brilliant chemist named John William Huffman.
Huffman is now eighty years old, and has recently retired after a long and distinguished career as Professor Emeritus in organic chemistry at Clemson University in South Carolina. You’d never guess that this elderly gentleman, with his tidy beard, plain spectacles and owlish manner, is responsible for getting thousands of people incapably stoned. On a mild spring afternoon in 2012, Huffman was kind enough to speak to me while relaxing after a recent bout of painful surgery. The professor chuckled down the Skype line mellifluously, sometimes gazing at the nearby Smokey Mountains, as I asked him how the Spice story happened.
Between 1984 and 2011, Huffman and his colleagues had created over 400 synthetic cannabinoid compounds while studying the structure-activity relationship between a series of compounds that resembled tetrahydrocannabinol, the active constituent of marijuana, and the human brain. The human brain has cannabinoid receptors, and the molecules that are found in marijuana and hashish, such as THC (a highly active constituent of the drugs), act as keys to open those locks. Huffman wasn’t looking to create a psychoactive compound in his research – quite the opposite. He was following in the research footsteps of American firm Sterling Winthrop Pharmaceuticals (SWP), who were trying to develop non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, a class of drugs to which aspirin belongs. One of the compounds SWP discovered turned out to be a weakly active cannabinoid. Huffman’s team’s work was based on this series of chemicals, and the new compounds they produced were tested on rat brains. ‘We were trying to relate chemical structure to biological activity,’ says Huffman. ‘The way you do this is to make a series of compounds, varying the structure from one compound to the next, and we were then trying to figure out how these interact with the same receptors that THC interacts with.’
His motivation? ‘Pure science, scientific curiosity,’ says Huffman. ‘As it turns out, the human endocannabinoid system, as it’s called, has profound effects on human behaviour, pain, mood, nausea and appetite, and lots of other important biological functions. And here we have these compounds that don’t look anything like THC, and they don’t look like the endogenous cannabinoids, but they did have activity.’
In 2008 a German newspaper sent the mysteriously effective bags of Spice for nuclear magnetic resonance analysis, which peered into the molecular structure of the sample and definitively identified it. Spice did not work through any herbal synergy; the active component was JWH-018.4
Somewhere, somehow, this experimental medicine had escaped from the medical journals where it was published in 2006 and was being sold for profit on the research chemicals market. More brands quickly appeared, such as Black Mamba, SKUNK! K2 and Abama. Clumsy though these brand names may be, they’re certainly snappier than (1-pentyl-3-(1-naphthoyl)indole), or JWH-018. The compounds were soon being exported from China in massive bulk to the US. Thanks to the relentless hedonistic imperative, and laws prohibiting the use of marijuana in much of the world, in the space of a couple of years these herbal mixes sprayed with JWH-series drugs would be seized by police in every city in the US.
‘My immediate reaction [upon hearing people were smoking these compounds] was that I thought it was humorous,’ Huffman said. ‘I heard somewhat later that these compounds have extremely bad side effects and they are much, much worse than marijuana. The synthetic compounds seem to cause some serious psychoses.’
Some dealers then dropped the herbs and started synthesizing the pure compound and selling it by the gram. As the compounds were legal in the US and UK and Europe, Chinese labs would send kilos of the white powder under plain cover for a few hundred dollars. Profits were around US$10,000 to US$20,000 per kilo. The synthesis of the compounds is relatively simple, and with a digital grapevine trembling loudly with the news of ‘legal pot’, thousands of sites appeared in a matter of weeks. Some of them sold what they promised, others were rip-offs, but all of them made large amounts of money by selling an array of Huffman’s compounds – even some of the inactive ones. A very early JWH-018 pioneer fills in the gaps. ‘It started out with just me, then a friend and his partner helped out – they’d been in the RC [research chemical] business since the early to mid-nineties. They gave me access to resources I would never have had otherwise, such as the ability to produce and ship JWH-018 in the USA on a monumental scale.’
Setting the company up wasn’t without its trials, he says, and an early problem was payment and banking. ‘PayPal never allowed research chemicals traders, and they’re bastards with your funds if you get caught by them. I managed to trick them for nearly two years by developing a fairly convincing yet totally fake website for JWH-018 “Bonsai fertilizer”, which was guaranteed to produce bigger and taller bonsais. Yeah, I was the original “Bonsai food” vendor!’
Online today, young American users persist in discussing how they have ‘applied the material to their plant’s lungs with great success’, believing that this cunning subterfuge will outwit any jury and judge thrown at them.
But perhaps before mocking them, we might consider that drug laws in the US are among the most punitive on the planet. America’s incarceration rate is the world’s highest, and that shameful statistic has been largely driven by its war on drugs. America’s lack of credible nationwide action on drug law reform, in particular around decriminalizing marijuana, has turned many thousands of its citizens into unwitting lab rats, self-administering chemicals more dangerous and untested than the compounds they are substitutes for. In 2011 many of the new cannabinoids were banned in the US on a state, but not federal level. And again, the scientists simply went back to the labs, or the web, or medical literature, and cross-referenced the new compounds with their local drug laws.
Likewise, in the UK, as soon as the Misuse of Drugs Act had been amended to include the new cannabis-like substances a year earlier, in 2010, many more appeared. One of the new drugs that replaced JWH-018 in the UK was AM-2201, a particularly powerful compound active at such a tiny level – just a milligram – that overdoses were virtually guaranteed. This would not have been the intention of its creator, the eminent biochemist Alexandros Makriyannis of Northeastern University, Boston, whose work investigating the body’s cannabinoid receptor system is as respected as Huffman’s.
On 1 March 2011, the DEA temporarily placed five synthetic cannabinoids (JWH-018, JWH-073, JWH-200, CP-47,497 and CP-47,497 homologue) into Schedule I in the US for one year (extendable by six months). But hundreds, if not thousands of possible analogues of Huffman’s and Makriyannis’s work remain legal, their effects completely unresearched. And there are many Chinese laboratories willing to send these simple compounds to the West, making thousands of dollars in the process.
A poster named Where Wolf told the Bluelight drugs forum in 2008 why he smoked Spice instead of marijuana.5 During one of the unpredictable yet regular marijuana droughts that seize even the world’s largest capital cities, he had, he said, got fed up of smoking adulterated grass. In 2008, marijuana dealers in Holland, and Vietnamese growing gangs, particularly in London but also in the rest of the UK, had discovered that by spraying small silicone beads onto freshly harvested plants they could increase weight – and profits – by up to 20 per cent. What’s more, the small glassy balls looked like crystals of THC to the naked eye, their glistening globules promising a strong smoke. This adulterated grass became known as ‘grit weed’. It was dangerous to burn and inhale, but that didn’t concern the dealers much, since their profits were boosted by the extra weight. ‘I’m based in London at the moment, and have pretty much quit weed for Spice entirely now,’ wrote Where Wolf. ‘This is partly because, though I have a range of sources all over the city, quality has dropped significantly in the last few years: for all the press hysteria about killer skunk, I damn sure haven’t had any outstanding weed in years. Previously great sources have become so-so.’
He also said the drug laws banning marijuana had driven him online in search of an alternative. He wrote:
I hate carrying [marijuana] on public transport: I’m part Middle-Eastern (Israel: Arab-Jew), and get searched quite a lot. Random use of sniffer dogs at Tube stations is pretty common these days. I discovered Spice when the market first went to hell, and was amazed to find it worked. Tolerance does build quickly, but when you haven’t smoked anything for a while, 2–3 spliffs can produce a real glowing body-high. I’d say it’s as pleasant, if not always as potent, as a lot of the hybrid pseudo-skunk I’ve smoked over the last five years. Seems a really sad comment on the UK cannabis scene that there’s a legal product that’s almost as good.
It may have been as effective, in certain ways, but it certainly wasn’t as safe as marijuana, says Huffman. ‘The synthetics are much more dangerous,’ he explained. ‘No one has ever died of an overdose of marijuana. You’d probably forget where you put the stuff, because it has an effect on memory. These synthetic compounds, they interact differently with the cannabis receptors to marijuana. They have the same effects at a superficial level, but marijuana and THC lower blood pressure, whereas some of these compounds raise blood pressure dramatically, but we don’t know why.’
In the US there exists now the most knottily tangled of legal situations. Keeping marijuana illegal means people are taking largely unknown compounds of unknown strength with zero toxicology reports even in animal tissue, much less actual animals, since smoking them is less likely to end in a life-ruining jail term. Still, in the US, where US$23 billion is earmarked for the drug war in 2012, there’s a lot more money than logic going around. And it can only be described as a crisis of integrity that while President Obama has spoken openly of his habitual and much-enjoyed marijuana use in his youth, his administration offers no logical, scientific basis for the retention of the ban.
* * *
By the middle of 2009, the mephedrone market had turned into an even more frenzied free-for-all, with new vendors popping up daily. Quick profits were guaranteed, as mephedrone and other analogues could be bought for around £1,000–£2,500 per kilogram in China, and sold for £10,000 perfectly legally. Fedex, USPS, UPS and other international couriers were soon unknowingly sending multi-kilo consignments of designer drugs all over the UK and Europe to retailers. ‘We can send this under plain cover, marked as deodorizing crystals for babies’ nappies to you in Britain,’ said Eric, a major vendor who operated out of Shanghai.
Next-day delivery to individuals via the Royal Mail turned thousands of postmen nationwide into unwitting drugs couriers. Facebook groups dedicated to the drug sprang up, and pubs and clubs all over the UK began to reek fishily of mephedrone, which was sweated out as gurning users danced and ranted. When a Facebook page called THE MEPHEDRONE EXPERIENCE! appeared – presumably set up by an excitable user under the influence – it quickly gathered dozens of members, too stupid, high or careless to realize that they were sharing information about their drug habits with their workmates, friends and family. Many users were still so unaware of the drug’s exact effects or its power that they could be seen taken by surprise in the least likely of places. Even an upmarket private members’ club in London’s West End had a few staff giggling, saucer-eyed, over-tactile and unable to add up a two-drink order correctly, on the night I visited in early 2010.
Many internet forums dedicated to selling and discussing mephedrone and other new legal highs came online, with hundreds of thousands of page views in a month. An early gathering point for mephedrone users was Champlegals.co.uk, a forum attached to the website by the same name. Threads there stretched out to a mindboggling size, with tens of thousands of page views. ‘Juice soldier’, posting on the Bluelight drugs discussion board, spoke for many users when he said on 4 April 2007 of the Biorepublik range, ‘After trying them properly, I can honestly say I got more of an md[ma] like buzz out of these than any pill I’ve eaten in over 12 months. That’s got to be saying something. Doesn’t last as long – but they are easily as effective if not more, not [heavy] like MDE – clean and euphoric like real MDMA.’
No one had the vaguest idea what the long-term effects of mephedrone and all the other new drugs were. People couldn’t even agree on what to call mephedrone: as its chemical name could be rendered ‘M-MCAT’, users on Champlegals jokingly said it could be called ‘Meow’. Soon enough, that information turned up on Wikipedia, was quoted verbatim by lazy journalists on short deadlines, and entered the popular culture rapidly. Until the newspapers called it Meow, no user ever did, seriously.
A simple web analytics exercise using Google’s tools showed an Everest-like peak for users entering the term ‘mephedrone’ into the search engine within weeks of my first stories appearing. But more tellingly, the tool showed an even more pronounced spike in the use of the term ‘buy mephedrone’. Later research would show that searches motivated by the desire to purchase the drug actually peaked most dramatically following news reports of alleged deaths from the drugs.
Like all parties, the mephedrone craze had to end, or at least wind down to the last few die-hards. Disturbing stories started to emerge. Users reported that their knees and fingers had gone purple, whether because the drug caused severe cardiotoxicity and vasoconstriction (narrowing of the arteries), in common with other cathinones or amphetamines, or because they were paranoid. Hospitals also reported a sharp increase in admissions of users suffering heart palpitations. Dr Adam Winstock, consultant addictions psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust and honorary senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, says the mephedrone honeymoon was short. He told me, ‘Two years after first encountering mephedrone and considering it as a relatively benign substance, I now think it has a deeply unpleasant harms profile with a high risk of abuse and dependence in many users. Users rank it as more unpleasant and risky than either cocaine or MDMA. It is early days still and there is lots we don’t know – but it is not a safe alternative to MDMA.’
In December 2008, an eighteen-year-old Swedish woman in Stockholm had become the first woman in the world to die after using the drug. A day after her death, the drug was banned in Sweden. The first media reports of deaths in the UK appeared in November 2009, when Gabrielle Price, a fourteen-year-old from Worthing, in West Sussex, became ill at a house party where she had taken the drug together with ketamine. At first, it was claimed and widely reported that she had died as a result of the drug. However, a pathologist’s report showed the girl died of broncho-pneumonia following a streptococcal A infection. This kind of inaccurate reporting was repeated with grim regularity. By July 2010, fifty-two deaths were claimed to be associated with the drug in the UK, but coroners’ reports eventually and conclusively showed that over a quarter of the supposed victims hadn’t taken the drug at all, and no clear data existed to prove that mephedrone caused the deaths of those who had. Fiona Measham, a member of the ACMD and a senior lecturer in criminology at Lancaster University, says the reporting of the unconfirmed deaths by newspapers followed the usual cycle of ‘exaggeration, distortion, inaccuracy and sensationalism’. Not since the death in 1995 of fifteen-year-old Leah Betts (the Essex schoolgirl who died because she drank many pints of water after taking Ecstasy, fearing she was dehydrating) had the media launched such a concerted, and misinformed, campaign around a new drug.
There is no doubt that the drug could be dangerous, as Winstock and other doctors have asserted with insights gleaned from two years of working with users, but media reports at the time were so misinformed and badly verified that they often had an air of satire. Some tales were laughably implausible, yet they were repeated verbatim, becoming part of the folklore. Newspapers reported how one user in County Durham in November 2009 had torn off his own scrotum after hallucinating for eighteen hours on the drug. The paper failed to mention that the press release on which it was based actually gave the source of that claim as a spoof testimonials section of a website selling the drug.
The media reports of deaths continued, and a tipping point was reached in March 2010, when two young men from Winteringham and Scunthorpe, eighteen-year-old Louis Wainwright, and nineteen-year-old Nicholas Smith, were found dead at their homes. Later investigations found the pair had actually taken methadone, the potent heroin substitute that can slow breathing dramatically in users with no tolerance to the drug, leading to death. It is unknown whether Wainwright and Smith believed they were taking mephedrone, but certainly many people mistook the word ‘mephedrone’ for methadone around that time. No matter. Politicians had to be seen to act fast, and in the charged atmosphere of a tabloid feeding frenzy, it’s hard, on reflection, to blame them completely.
The ACMD had a torrid year in 2009. Chairman David Nutt was sacked in October following his statistically accurate observation that Ecstasy was less likely to kill users than horse riding, and after his call for a new discussion on the classification of cannabis was rejected by the Home Office. There were five resignations in support of Nutt’s views. In March 2010, another member, Dr Polly Taylor, resigned in protest when the Code of Practice for Scientific Advisory Committees – new government guidelines, widely seen as impinging on scientists’ objectivity – were published. Science, the government had decided, was now the servant of policy. The ACMD had been weakened by these events and when the debate and press panic over mephedrone began, it was already on the back foot.
In April 2010, after months of increasing media hysteria and misinformation on drugs generally, and mephedrone in particular, the government felt compelled to legislate. Usually, the ACMD would be allowed time to investigate and research a drug’s harmfulness and then offer its expert guidance to politicians. But the ACMD was pressured by the government to announce that the drug was harmful and should be made illegal. The British government then banned all the substituted cathinones, the chemical family to which mephedrone belonged. ACMD member Eric Carlin, an executive consultant in the drug and charity sector, immediately gave up his seat in protest, and said in his resignation letter:
We had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people’s behaviour. Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure … I am not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalization of increasing numbers of young people.6
In the April 2010 edition of British medical journal The Lancet, a leader writer lamented the ‘collapse in integrity of scientific advice in the UK’, berating the government for political interference in its haste to ban the drug without proper expert consultation. ‘The terms of engagement between ministers and expert advisers endorsed by Alan Johnson have been blown apart,’ wrote The Lancet. ‘During the past 12 years the Labour government has done a great deal to build up a strong science base in the UK and enhance the important role that science plays in our economy and society. However, the events surrounding the ACMD signal a disappointing finale to the government’s relationship with science. Politics has been allowed to contaminate scientific processes and the advice that underpins policy,’ it said.7
China bowed to pressure from British institutions, including SOCA, and banned the manufacture, export and possession of the drug in August 2010. Mephedrone had now been banned in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK. The European Commission advised the remaining EU countries to ban the drug in October that year. ‘It is good to see that EU governments are prepared to take swift action to ban this dangerous drug,’ said EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding after the twenty-seven-nation bloc agreed the total ban, imposed in December 2010.
John Ramsey of St George’s, University of London, is an advisor to the ACMD. He also runs a commercial organization, TICTAC Communications, which produces and sells a database of chemicals bought from the internet or retrieved from amnesty bins at raves, festivals and clubs across the UK. Ramsey tests the drugs, and then publishes the database on a CD which police forces and hospitals use to identify the torrent of new tablets, powders and capsules that are washing up across the UK and Europe. He was among the first to identify mephedrone in UK pills and powders bought on- and offline. ‘Do come and look at the archives – did you notice on your way in?’ he said to me as I visited his laboratories at the hospital in May 2012. He showed me a huge row of metal drawers. Inside each, labelled with the careful exactitude of a taxonomist, were samples of drugs that this lab has tested. There were 27,000 samples of different drugs here, gathered by this careful and dedicated man. With his bookish air, smart dress and a keen and scholarly attitude, he was the least likely procurer of drugs I had ever met.
‘Ah, yes,’ Ramsey mused over one small vial. ‘2C-B. There’s about 400 quid’s-worth here. I do wonder why they threw them away. I wonder what story lies behind these?’ he said, looking at the small butterfly-stamped tablets that were seized from an amnesty bin at a rave. ‘Why would they throw away such a huge amount of drugs? It’s baffling.’ Ramsey has the most comprehensive stash of drugs on the planet – and it’s very likely that he’ll soon need new premises. Since the discovery of mephedrone, the situation involving new drugs is ever more complex, and evolving faster than anyone can keep track of, he says. ‘It’s drug control that spawns it all to some extent. The link to the whole thing is the Chinese chemical industry, the ability to scale up from what you can do in a bedroom set-up to an industrial level,’ he says. ‘I’m sure there are people who, like Shulgin, tinker with stuff and then take it, but it’s never going to become mainstream unless you can make it in reasonable quantities.’
If high-level pressure were to be placed on the Chinese, he says, it wouldn’t be long until production shifted somewhere else. ‘It would inconvenience them slightly, but it’d only be a matter of time until they moved elsewhere.’ One vendor supported Ramsey’s view, when he told me he believed the Chinese authorities were complicit in the mephedrone trade, until it started to gain Chinese users. ‘It all contributes to their surging economy,’ he said. ‘In the case of mephedrone, there was some external pressure from the UK government, but also, it was starting to show up in clubs in Taiwan, Hong Kong and even China. That’s probably why it was actually banned there. We tried to get a lab going again underground, but the Chinese authorities were right on top of it, even after bribes were offered, and so we had to give up,’ he says.
Ramsey’s laboratories could not be further removed from the muddy fields and laser-lit clubs where these drugs were seized or surrendered. Bags of pills and white powders marked ‘V Festival, 2011’ and ‘Glastonbury 2011’ lie on the workbenches. There are bags with online vendor names from all over the world, including Taiwan and the US. ‘We sometimes buy in euro or pounds and they get sent in to us from Belize, all sorts of places,’ says Ramsey. TICTAC’s most recent research reveals much about current patterns of drug use in the UK, especially for those who feel this is a small market.
Ramsey and his team asked anonymous volunteers to use a temporary toilet they had placed in the car park of a major London club. Analysing the urine afterwards, he found there were over thirty-five different metabolites in the waste, including many of the new drugs mentioned in this book. ‘It’s very widespread,’ he says. ‘The data is complex, but if I can just stick a toe in the water here, the problem is very widespread – and growing.’ A half-beat pause, then he cracks up in laughter. ‘Poor metaphor.’
To identify the chemicals in the powders and pills, Ramsey has them crushed to a fine powder, then pinned with a diamond against a transparent plate, illuminated from below with a beam of infrared light. The resulting spectrum of each compound has a distinct signature, a translucent splash of psychedelia, which is then catalogued; check the library and if the image matches, it’s a drug. Gas chromatography is the next test, which splits the compound in a solvent and then analyses the gases. Then it undergoes mass spectrometry, during which a beam of electrons is smashed into the molecules, which are then ionized. That data is parsed electromagnetically into the substance’s likely chemical composition. Finally, if it’s still not clear what the chemical is, it’s sent off to the nuclear magnetic resonance machine, which ‘sees’ into the molecular structure and identifies, once and for all, what it is.
Under the strip lights, there are also thin slices of rats’ brains kept alive in buffers fed with oxygen. Here, the new drugs that land in the laboratories have their first ever empirical and formal testing. This is pharmacokinetics, the study of the drug and how it reacts in vitro. Rats’ aortas, cut from their hearts, are flooded with the chemicals Ramsey and thousands of users worldwide have bought online. There are serotonin receptors in mammalian hearts, and these and the rats’ brain slices are monitored by micro electrodes that measure the amount of serotonin or dopamine released, as well as the pharmacokinetics – how the released neurotransmitters move around the tissue.
This, other than taking it yourself in a Shulgin-esque game of chemical Russian roulette, gradually increasing from a small dose to a larger dose over a number of days, is the only way to tell the active dose of an unknown chemical. And this, perhaps, is the key issue in drug use today for many people. They are acting as Shulgin did – testing unknown compounds, but with the difference that they neither made the drug nor have any real idea where it came from. Receptor binding studies such as those carried out by professional pharmaceutical laboratories are vital, but they are a complex task of the kind unlikely to be commissioned by either Chinese vendors or resellers on the net, even though their cost – at between £1,500 and £2,500 per sample – is a fraction of the profits made by the illegal laboratories that come up with the new drugs. But illegal drug salesmen tend not to be renowned for their altruism.
The drugs are getting into the UK in serious bulk because the Border Agency is overworked and underfunded. Once here, they find a ready market. ‘This is a trade like any other,’ says Ramsey. ‘You need several components: an innovator to think of structures, a manufacturer to produce it, marketing and advertising.’ Those elements combined made the research chemical scene burst on to the high street in 2009, in a drug-starved country reeling a from a banking crisis brought on by a lack of regulation. The cathinones, with their speedy, cocaine-meets-MDMA-like buzz, were the perfect drug for those outlaw times. Mephedrone was credit crunch cocaine, neither one thing nor another, an analogue of an analogue. The Labour government, its drug policy no more radical than the previous Conservative administration’s, swung into action and banned it, driving a coach and horses through both scientific concerns and all political protocol. Mephedrone is harmful if taken to excess, and many users could not control their use, but questions about its relative harmfulness were never properly asked of the scientists who are specifically charged with establishing those harms. That led, in the minds of many users, to a deepening mistrust of the government, whose politicized messages on drugs no longer existed in a vacuum of information, and were subverted by the views of users on the web.
The anti-hierarchical structure of the web, created in an act of deliberate subversion and anarchy by countercultural, drug-loving hippies, instead offered the curious a range of voices, of experiences, and value systems that laid bare the prohibitionists’ stance as a flimsy charade. The dominant discourse was disrupted – permanently. Official responses over the coming years were often short-termist and morally panicked, but the bigger story was the change in consumer habits, and drug habits. Mephedrone changed attitudes to drugs overnight. People who had never heard of Shulgin, who would not previously consider buying a drug online in the original research chemical scene, who had never read a trip report much less likely written one, were taking research chemicals they had sourced on the web in the belief that they were safe because they were legal – or not caring either way.
The mephedrone ban had a series of unintended but wholly predictable consequences. Rather than reducing harm; rather than limiting the production of new replacements; rather than reducing demand, instead, it increased all of these. All the circles closed in 2009–2010. The web had become a space where many of our cultural and economic transactions were taking place. Social media, knowledge-sharing and ecommerce were also now the norm. Drug use in the EU was so commonplace as to be an epidemic. By the middle of 2010 as mephedrone was banned in the UK, the scene was set for the next stage in the Drugs 2.0 revolution. The search for mephedrone’s replacement began in earnest, with users and dealers outdoing each other in ingenuity and greed.