8

Ready-Salted Zombies and a Chemical Panic

Addiction, overdose or imprisonment are the guaranteed flipsides to any serious drug habit – and it’s proven to be no different with the new drugs created in the last decade.

In the early days of the online drugs scene, there were a limited number of suppliers, a tiny user group, plenty of legal confusion and a good deal of secrecy and prudence. Even then there were deaths. Only after Operation Web Tryp did this subculture become more widely known, and in the eight years since that legal clampdown in the US, the market has grown exponentially. There has been a new influx of users with scant knowledge of the historical scene that spawned the contemporary one. And even as the user group grows, so too does the number of drugs on offer, and the number of deaths.

That said, hysterical media coverage of the perceived threats of new drugs and corresponding knee-jerk government action seem to be similarly guaranteed. Newspapers were, for a few months in 2010, peppered daily with howlingly inaccurate reports of the deaths of Meow-crazed youths. But the truth is that there have only been two specific deaths from mephedrone in the UK, and one of those victims was compulsively injecting the drug intravenously.

John Ramsey believes the picture is more complex than either users or the authorities might admit. ‘Most people take more than one drug and some unfortunately die – when they do, it is usually impossible to say which one was responsible for causing the death. Unfortunately the tendency is to attribute the death to the latest drug and consequently overstate the risk,’ he told me.

Admin from SOS thinks that the main reason people die from the new designer drugs is a lack of information, and in the US, Europe and the UK that is often true. ‘The current market is insanely negative and dangerous. In the US, at least, the way the Analog Act is worded is incredibly harmful. Specifically, according to that law, analogues of scheduled substances cannot be sold for human consumption,’ he said. He explains that this means no dosage information can be sold along with the chemicals: ‘In the US, the substance is not illegal, and the sale of the substance is not illegal. What’s illegal is the information that is passed along with the sale – so long as the information includes any details on what the substance is and how to use it correctly and safely. This leads to research chemicals being sold unlabelled and without usage guidelines. This single aspect has been responsible for every research chemical-related death that I am aware of. I think that any adult should be able to go to the pharmacy and purchase any chemical they wish. It should come with detailed usage instructions including side effects, interactions and warnings. The pharmacist should be knowledgeable about these chemicals and should dispense advice to the best of their ability.’

That’s a radical and, some might consider, extreme viewpoint. But would we rather have a scenario where people can buy any chemical they want, from Chinese chemists or branded legal high vendors, with no information on dosage and contraindications and no guarantee of purity? For that is the way things are. Would Admin’s solution cause more or less harm? It is impossible to say until we try it, or until we devise a strategy that might prevent people looking online for drugs.

Another, more subtle and non-chemical danger is that while the net may offer a community for drug-users, in itself that can soon become an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors that normalizes once-extreme behaviour. One user told me, ‘Of course there are a lot of people deluding themselves that their self-destructive behaviour serves a higher purpose, helps them develop their personality, gain insights or is part of a spiritual path of some kind. Keeping company with a bunch of other out-of-control polytoxicomaniacs bragging about their exploits on the internet doesn’t exactly help them realize that they have a problem. [The] problem is that the research chemical market is a big candy store where everybody is invited to have a go at everything. And some of the stuff offered is really detrimental but too alluring to be left alone.’

As drug users in Europe were gorging themselves on mephedrone in 2009, the original research chemical scene was bracing itself for a legal clampdown, unhappy at the attention it was now receiving. Then late that year a disturbing series of overdoses shocked even seasoned observers. Mislabelling is perhaps the gravest danger facing research chemical users. If you order one drug with an active dose of 10 mg and receive by accident another drug that is ten times more potent, there’s every chance you will overdose or die.

On 3 October 2009, a twenty-two-year-old Danish man, Dannie Haupt Hansen, took an 18 mg dose of what he thought was 2C-B-FLY, a potent psychedelic phenethylamine that is an analogue of Shulgin’s 2C-B, which he had ordered from a Chinese lab. Before he tried the drug, Haupt had also been selling it from his website, haupt-rc.com, to customers all over the world. Haupt died of a heart attack, for the drug, in common with many psychedelics and stimulants of this class, is a powerful vasoconstrictor – his heart gave out as it worked to pull the blood through his tightening arteries. But he took the ‘right’ amount – he had researched the drug and its dose online. What had gone wrong?

As Haupt was overdosing and dying, in California eighteen-year-old Brian Sullivan was nodding his head to the music, tripping with his brother John and his brother’s girlfriend. They too had taken the Danish batch of the drug, ordered online and sent under plain mail to the West Coast of the US in a few days. They too were overdosing. Sullivan died; his brother and girlfriend convulsed, but escaped with their lives. And they too had only taken a small amount – far below the safety levels they had researched online in trusted forums and in chemistry journals.

On 5 October, Erowid and Bluelight posted an alert online warning other users that a potentially lethal batch of 2C-B-FLY was circulating worldwide.

In Barcelona that same day at 5 p.m., a young man was staring at his home-made pizza. The topping of goat’s cheese and tomato suddenly looked like pools of pus and blood. A few hours earlier, he had been weighing some 2C-B-FLY and some other research chemicals he had bought, including some synthetic marijuana compounds and an MDMA analogue. He scooped up a tiny crumb of a white powder that had spilt on the table and wiped it onto his inner lip. He lay down to relax, closed his eyes and put on the Beatles LP Rubber Soul, but was quickly assailed by powerful hallucinations. He didn’t know it, but he too was overdosing. At 5.24 p.m., afraid and overheating, he logged on and fired up a Google search. He hit Erowid and found an emergency posting about a spate of overdoses caused by a dangerous batch of 2C-B-FLY.

He described his experiences in an Erowid report a week later under the name Joan Miro. ‘My heart dropped when I saw the photo of the same exact bag that was sitting on my desk. I became angry, agitated.’1

He logged on to Bluelight and begged for help. He was told he had to get to the nearest hospital immediately. His life was saved by the bulletin board – whose posters told him he had a six-hour delay before things worsened dramatically – and the Catalan hospital’s staff, who tranquillized him and monitored his heart rate and temperature.

Miro said he doesn’t remember much of the next few hours other than fear and panic and guilt over impending and self-induced death, all amplified and distorted by the powerfully psychedelic drug, in a chaotic emergency ward filled with screams. ‘I thought a lot about how this would be such a horrible way to go. Especially for my family and friends. What would it do to them for me to leave them like that? Over something so stupid [and] preventable and – especially – without telling them goodbye and that I loved them. I was determined to walk out of that hospital,’ he wrote. He survived.

A poster named Voltech posted a message on Bluelight on 16 October containing the results of lab tests on the compound that had killed and sickened the users so dreadfully. It turned out that the Chinese laboratory had accidentally sent a far more potent drug, bromo-dragonFLY, in place of the more benign 2C-B-FLY. Bromo-dragonFLY had been synthesized originally in the lab of David Nichols in 1998, and was designed to map the topography of the brain’s serotonin receptors. It was not designed for human consumption, but rather for running lab tests using brain tissue. (Even in the petri dish or under the microscope, brain tissue can react to chemical agents allowing data about their action to be gathered, and valuable new medicines to be invented.)

These superficially very similar images (opposite) of two vastly different drugs show how even the tiniest of differences can change a chemical radically and dangerously, reducing its active dose dramatically, thanks to its greater receptor-binding qualities. Bromo-dragonFLY, so named because images of its winged molecular structure resemble an insect in flight, is active from just 200 µg – one-fifth of one milligram. Haupt, then, had taken ninety times the active dose.

2C-B-FLY, active at 18 mg

Bromo-dragonFLY, active at 200 µg

Nichols’ results were published in a 1998 research paper in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, entitled ‘A novel (benzodifuranyl)aminoalkane with extremely potent activity at the 5-HT2A [serotonin] receptor’.2 In common with all formal, peer-reviewed chemistry texts, it would have included the method of synthesis. The Chinese chemists possibly used this recipe to synthesize the wrong compound, and the young Danish vendor and his customers had failed to carry out adequate safety checks. These might be simple reagent tests, or more complex third-party lab tests such as nuclear magnetic resonance analysis, mass spectrometry, or high-pressure liquid chromatography tests. It may be that the vendor ordered the wrong drug, and the Chinese lab actually got it right. The truth will never be known. The drug that was supposed to have been sent, 2C-B-FLY, was legal at the time in Denmark, and it still is.

At the time, bromo-dragonFLY was also legal in each of the countries involved in the transaction – China, the UK, the US and Denmark – or at least unscheduled, as long as it was not sold for human consumption. Predicting the ingestion of every possible psychoactive analogue or chemical is impossible, and so the law must at times be reactive. When innovation is running at a drug a week in the EU, the rulebook has to be ripped up and a new, more intelligent approach devised.

Only Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Romania, Australia and Finland have now banned bromo-dragonFLY. (In Finland, in one of the oddest stories to emerge from the research chemical scene, it was banned after the drug was used in a bizarre murder by a psychopath who stabbed her victim with a syringe full of it.)

These stories explain the current super-stringency of customs and border control in Scandinavia. But they pose more questions than they answer. If a classical view of drug abuse correlates it with indicators of social deprivation such as unemployment and poor educational opportunities, why, then, are the rich and prosperous Scandinavian countries – above all, Sweden – so over-represented in the online designer drug world? Why have there been far more overdoses and deaths due to the more novel psychoactives in Sweden than in neighbouring countries, such as Germany? The answer might be found in the country’s drug laws, which are today the most stringent in Europe, and have been for decades. In Sweden potential employers can demand your criminal record before interview, and fifty per cent of them choose to do so. To have a drugs conviction in Sweden is to be an instant member of the underclass, with education and employment opportunities denied outright for many. The country’s extremely punitive drug laws are rooted in the work of medic-turned-drug-campaigner Nils Bejerot, a forceful hardliner who was a lone voice in the 1960s, when Sweden was more liberal on drugs, but whose influence endures twenty-four years after his death. In a report for the Swedish Carnegie Institute, drug policy analyst Jonas Hartelius noted:

Bejerot showed that while the allure of drugs is biological, the level of drug use in a community, in a nation, and in the world as a whole, is largely determined not by brain biology, but by the social reactions to drugs. Tolerate or, even worse, encourage drug use and drug use explodes in a deadly, self-propelling behavioural epidemic. Identify drug users, reject their drug use, and insist on enforced abstinence, and the drug epidemic is quelled. Drug policy really is, Bejerot argued, that simple.3

In the Swedish context, if you accept the simple but, to some people, unpalatable truth that sometimes humans want to alter their state of mind, the search for legal alternatives becomes more understandable. Bejerot’s view of ‘community’ and ‘social reaction’ were formed in a pre-web age, and any notion of enforcement must acknowledge that dealers and users can now act invisibly. Dannie Haupt’s drugs, which were legal, were sent to him and his customers worldwide in the post.

Bejerot’s intentions were doubtless good. But to persist with his drugs policy in this very different, globalized internet age, is, in my view, ill-considered and ignorant of the basic realities of twenty-first-century life.

In July 2012 Swedish coroners reported that 5-IT, yet another new research chemical, a stimulant that had escaped British legislation, had been found in fourteen post-mortems.4 Information was patchy at the time of reporting, but the drug disappeared from research chemical vendors’ sites within days of the news emerging. The usual cause of death in these cases is from serotonin syndrome, where the brain becomes overloaded with an excess of the neurotransmitter and the unfortunate victims overheat, then convulse until they die.

At least Sweden is consistent in its hardline approach to intoxication: alcohol over 3.5 per cent proof can only be bought in government-approved shops, known as Systembolaget, or the System Company. On the other hand, headshops and websites there are selling potent research chemicals with impunity.

Another case of mislabelled research chemicals was reported online in August 2010. Agnetha, a Bluelight poster, was an expert user, and had spent years refining her knowledge of her sources, the drugs and their effects. She knew the dosage of each of the chemicals she took, and approached them with an almost scholastic vigour; she was a curiously puritanical hedonist. She had read all of Shulgin’s work, and had methodically set about trying dozens of the compounds in the books. But when she found herself hallucinating on a stimulant, she knew something was wrong.

The scene’s biggest supplier at that time, with fulfilment centres in Taiwan, had sent her a package containing 2C-P – a Shulgin psychedelic active at 8–12 mg. But the bag was mislabelled as buphedrone, a mephedrone variant with a standard dose of around 80–100 mg. Agnetha overdosed twice in a week. She described the experience in a post on Bluelight:

The chemical took five hours to come up. It started with sweating profusely and uncontrollable muscle spasms and got worse from there. The trip lasted over 30 hours … The night was chaotic and apocalyptic, no sleep, heavily disorientated. No music, no light, the visual and auditory distortions were too heavy anyway to comprehend any external input. Psychotic and delirious would be an accurate descriptions of my mindset in those hours.5

A week later, she overdosed again, having assumed that the error the first time was hers – she thought that she had confused two of the many bags in her drug collection. But she had not got her chemicals mixed up; the vendor had. She wrote:

The second incident was one week later when I finally came around to test the stimulant as I originally intended. There was no mistake this time. The RC vendor had mislabelled the bags. He sent me a very potent unknown psychedelic – most probably of the 2C family – and packaged it with the label ‘Buphedrone’. I overdosed again on 80 mg. Very frightening prospect. It was one of the more respected vendors. I was reminded of the bromo-dragonFLY fuck-up that had cost several people’s lives a while back.

I loved the moment the sun came up. I spent dawn naked on my terrace. The world around me looked like a churning and swirling Van Gogh painting – only much sharper, more precise. A naked animal, poisoned and exhausted … I knew I would survive this, there was a way out … I called in sick … but had to type some emails, make a couple of phone calls and review some texts. In hindsight I actually produced high-quality work that day, enhanced by crystal clear, super-precise psychedelic thinking.

Agnetha survived, no thanks to the vendor. These kinds of labelling mix-ups are mercifully rare in the online drugs market, but the dangers are real and the consequences can be deadly, no matter how statistically improbable.

There were nine other users poisoned in this incident. Agnetha traced most of them. ‘The owner of the site didn’t mention the incident with so much as a single word on his site in the eight weeks or so it endured after my accident. He somehow found time to announce a couple of very appetizing sales within that timespan, though,’ she told me by email.

Disturbingly, as we move out of the post-mephedrone era many more powerful drugs are available now to many more people than ever before, and the culture and practice of buying drugs online in this way is becoming more prevalent. As more drugs appeared in the UK after the mephedrone ban in 2010, the number of deaths also increased. Drugs such as methoxetamine gained great popularity worldwide in 2010 and onwards. Some found it numbed chronic pain or helped lessen their neuroses, thousands more enjoyed the semi-alien buzz the drug gave and ramped up their doses until they slipped into a space outside time, geography and human interaction, lying inert on their sofas and floors, but travelling thousands of miles inside their minds. Some users, perhaps not knowing anything more than that it was a legal white powder that got you high, were merely overwhelmed by the drug; the unluckiest died.

Reports of methoxetamine addictions and patterns of problematic use surfaced within months of the chemical’s release, with users bingeing until they were delusional or psychotic. The first methoxetamine death was in December 2010, when a user in Sweden intravenously injected the drug along with a massive dose of the Nichols-designed serotonin agonist, MDAI. Intravenous drug use is ill-advised even for chemicals such as heroin and cocaine, drugs that have been used in this way for decades, albeit perilously. Injecting drugs means they are not metabolized by the liver, or digested by the stomach, bringing an extreme rush into the bloodstream, and the brain, seconds after the injection. This intense hit is sought by users who either want to conserve their drugs – making them go further, since less is required – or by those hellbent on the most extreme high at any cost. To use research chemicals this way is extraordinarily dangerous, and indicative of a serious drug problem. The death was reported on the Swedish drugs forum, Flashback, by a poster named Miss Tranquil. ‘His heart started beating about a million beats per second and then *bang*. Dead. On my couch. So take it reeeeal easy.’6

Fred, an author and musician in London, took methoxetamine on his forty-fifth birthday in a London pub in early 2012. He was unprepared for what happened next, he told me by email:

It was a Sunday afternoon pub birthday. All very civilized and middle-aged. As evening turned to night and the kids went home with the babysitter, someone came back from the bar with a round of shots, which was only thirty seconds behind the round of shots we’d just sunk. With this sudden bolt of hedonism, my thoughts turned to a line of coke, or anything else that might put an adventurous shape on the night. Most people there were no strangers to class As and a quizzical muttering went round the room, only to come up flat. ‘I’ve got this,’ said a mate unenthusiastically, passing me a wrap. ‘We got it off the net, and we did it in Berlin. It’s horrible but you might like it.’

Hardly a recommendation. But I’m a curious type. I’ve taken my fair share of pills and powders in two decades of drug-taking, with Ecstasy, cocaine and ketamine regularly on the menu, as well as the occasional acid or mushroom trip. I even did DMT once, and rattled around Burning Man 2005 guzzling the postcode drugs (2C-B, 2C-E and their chums). I asked my mate more. Turns out it was something synthetic. ‘One of those new ones, off the net,’ he said. The important thing was to only do a tiny amount. He stressed this: ‘Just half what you’d do if it was K.’ I knew about the new synthetics and I knew dosage was a serious thing: overdo it even a little and you’d be cabbaged or worse.

All I wanted was some casual dislocation, so as I went in the cubicle foremost on my mind was to take a tiny amount, to be really careful. But as the door closed, the alcohol ambushed my brain, rational thought evaporated and I fell into autopilot – just a drunk in a pub doing what I’d done so many times before: taking a bump in a toilet. The only notion in my head was the automatic ‘Do what fits on a door key … twice’.

Had it been one of the old familiars, that animal rule of thumb would have worked fine. I was ready for the bendiness of ketamine, followed by its reasonably swift return to normality, or the sharpening effects of coke. But instead I had overdosed on methoxetamine. Everything in my experience said my little hit should have just dented the edges of reality for a while. Nothing I couldn’t handle. My instincts told me the night would continue fairly unchanged. I’d carry on chatting to my friends, just with a slight twist.

Instead, within minutes I was slumped on a sofa unable to move or talk. I fought it valiantly, but I was poleaxed. Most of the next three hours is gone, the only real memory is the awful reality of puking in public. Not exactly the urbane sophisticated drug-taker I’d been for the last decade. As for the drug itself, it felt like a really pointless version of ketamine: no psychedelic effects, no pleasant slide into rubbery nonsense, just a sudden drop off the cliff of wrongness. The alcohol mix no doubt made it doubly unpleasant. Hours afterwards it still felt like the switch was in the wrong position. I was doped and wired at the same time; I couldn’t even sleep it off.

For me, that was the day it changed. Never again will I bumble my way into an unfamiliar powder trusting to instinct and experience. The care you need to take with these new drugs isn’t compatible with a feral night out. My generation is ingrained with a set of rules for safe and sociable drug-taking, rules that have served us well for a long time. Well, the old rules no longer apply.

This is a message that bears repeating: the rules of chemical engagement have changed.

On 30 January 2012, two men under the influence of methoxetamine died in Canterbury. Popular and talented busker Daniel Lloyd, aged twenty-five, and his beat-boxing friend Hugo Wenn, aged seventeen, were both found drowned in Reed Pond, near an army barracks in the town. Hugo’s mother Fiona told the Kentish Gazette about her son’s rural upbringing, and how she had hoped this might have offered her son protection from the dangers of drugs: ‘We often talked to all our children very bluntly about the dangers of drug-taking but Hugo grew up in the village in the countryside and none of his friends were into that sort of scene. It was so far removed from our lives. There was never any sign or suggestion in the past that Hugo was taking drugs. It just wasn’t him.’7

In February 2012 a fifty-nine-year-old woman and a thirty-two-year-old man were found dead at their homes in Leicestershire, after taking a methoxetamine overdose.8 That same month Andrew Cooke, a twenty-nine-year-old drummer from Crystal Palace, went missing in east London and it is thought he may have consumed methoxetamine – knowingly or unknowingly – in the hours before his disappearance. ‘He was last seen between 3–4 pm Sunday afternoon (February 12) at a free/squat party located on 1 Lea Valley Road near Chingford,’ his friends wrote on Facebook. His body was found in a nearby canal on 14 March.9

After the government ban was announced in late March that year, Sally Bercow, the wife of John Bercow, speaker of the House of Commons, tweeted, ‘Mexxy is a legal high that is, er, no longer legal. And now we’ve all heard of it, demand will rocket.’ And with that, the research chemical scene was at the heart of British political life, reported upon in Middle England’s tabloid of choice, the Daily Mail, and tweeted about by the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons.10 In every major city in the UK and many small towns there were people buying new, untested and powerfully psychoactive chemicals marketed as legal highs, with no indication of what the drug was, what it did, or how it should be taken.

The most obvious response to these tales is to preach a message of personal responsibility, but when the new drugs are this powerful it’s highly unlikely that people will be able to dose correctly, even if the fault ultimately lies with the user rather than the drug. Many of the new families of drugs are too potent to use in any casual setting by either experienced or uninformed users. They are not party drugs.

We need a more nuanced, insightful approach than banning new drugs as they appear, as simply expecting people to stop buying, selling and using them is unrealistic. The knowledge exists, the drugs exist and the market exists – what is lacking is education and a new legislative approach.

Dr Adam Winstock agrees that wider society is not ready for the greater availability and more novel research chemicals that have followed since mephedrone. He told me, ‘The internet parachuted these new drugs into user groups, and that meant there was no way for people to accurately discuss correct and safer use around things like dosage and onset of action. So with methoxetamine, the information that it was active at just 10 mg, with a slower onset of action than ketamine was lost, and people redosed dangerously. Government action and blurring of legislation means we can’t tell people that effectively. It should be on the label!’

The most worrying aspect of the recent new growth of the research chemical scene into the mainstream is that many new users are not observing the most basic principles of harm reduction. Expert users have long stressed the importance of knowing and trusting your source, but users are now simply buying from the first, or cheapest, or most convenient source. The only way to know for certain if the correct substance has been sent is to have it tested via expensive chemical means; vital nonetheless, as even an allergy test of 1 mg might be an overdose.

There is a sense of unregulated, late-stage capitalist anarchy in the online research chemical scene at this point, in 2013. For people who had been watching the story develop, the emergence in 2009–10 of public forums with site sponsors using banner ads to offer cut-price research chemicals of every hue was a death knell. In the early days of the online designer drug scene people were barred from forums or listservs (email subscription lists) for asking for sources. Twenty years later, there were links alongside and below forum posts to vendors of chemicals that hadn’t been tasted by any human beings on earth at all. In the past, conversations about newly synthesized chemicals were carried out in what were essentially private members’ clubs, digital speakeasies known only to a few old trippers and radicals. Since 2008 or 2009, there has been an endless real-time stream of conversation, all public, all unmediated, about where to find and buy and sell drugs that did not even exist five years ago.

‘The caution and concern back in the early days was that sharing sources openly and discussing the chemicals explicitly might prompt a bust or, worse, a chemical being specifically named and banned in the US, as plenty were after Operation Web Tryp,’ one user told me. ‘Most of all, the omertà on sourcing was a bulwark against stupidity, a safeguard in a world where no rules applied. The thinking was that if you didn’t put the legwork in, you probably weren’t clued up enough to use these drugs. After mephedrone, it just went silly, mental, there was so much money to be made. The main reason people didn’t give sources back in the day was because a good number of these drugs could kill you – even if you were actually sent the right compound. Who wants that responsibility?’

Mislabelling, then, is not the only danger. Ignorance kills just as fast. There has been a spate of deaths among teenage users in the US in recent years. They may be choosing research chemicals because they have less access to traditional drugs, and they may be more foolhardy, and less knowledgeable about the effects of the drugs. In the small American town of Blaine, Minneapolis, on 17 March 2011 a group of high school students shared the drug 2C-E at a spring break party. The night ended in a mass poisoning and a fatal overdose from this potent, Shulgin-devised psychedelic. Various drug forum users suspected that a mislabelling had occurred as in the Haupt case, or as in Agnetha’s case, and there was a palpable sense of fear. However, forensic tests showed that the drug taken was indeed 2C-E – it had just been dosed wrongly and dangerously.

Trevor Robinson-Davis, the nineteen-year old father of a five-month-old son, was taken to hospital after snorting a large line of the drug. He became instantly agitated and died of a heart attack. The teenagers had not used a scale to weigh the drug out and had instead ‘eyeballed’ it – judging a suitable dose by looking at it – with fatal consequences. 2C-E is active at around 8 mg, and has an extraordinarily high dose-response curve, meaning that 18 mg of the drug will hit you far more strongly than even 14 mg. The young people who survived reported delirium, hallucinations, paranoia, auditory distortions and overheating. Timothy Lamere, a twenty-two-year-old, was charged with third-degree murder for supplying the 2C-E and was jailed in 2012 for nine years and nine months – the longest available term under local sentencing guidelines.

Lamere told the court that he bought the drug online and believed it be legal; at the time, it was not specifically scheduled in the US, and its status as an analogue had never been debated in court. In an unusual move, federal prosecutors intervened in the state case, threatening to escalate the charges if the court did not hand out the maximum sentence possible to Lamere, who had previously been admitted to a psychiatric ward for complications with bipolar disorder.

The town’s local newspaper, the Star Tribune, hosted videos of the survivors of the night. Katrina Loomis told journalist Pam Louwagie: ‘I think about it all the time, every day. Constantly probably. I will never touch another drug. If we’d just been smarter and thought about what we were doing before we did it, we would still have our friend here. And Timmy was our friend. So we lost two friends that day.’11

Elsewhere in the US, the research chemical scene has spilled into headshops from its online roots, just as it has in the UK. ‘Bath salts’ are the American iteration of the ‘plant food’ craze seen during the UK mephedrone craze, whereby vendors dodged the law by marketing new and potent drugs with a nod and a wink and a fake label. A thriving market for bath salts and fake pot started up in the US in 2010, and until 2011 both were sold legally by some tobacconists and other shops. The products contained a very wide range of substances. Bath salts contained stimulants such as MDPV or 2-DPMP, flephedrone or mephedrone, none of which was scheduled in the US at that time. The shops also sold ‘incense blends’ that actually contained the then-legal JWH-series of cannabinoid receptor agonists.

Some of the brand names for bath salts – surely the greatest misnomer ever for drugs that caused palpitations rather than relaxation – included Bliss, Blizzard, Blue Silk, Charge+, Hurricane Charlie, Ivory Snow, Ivory Wave, Ocean Burst, Pure Ivory, Purple Wave, Red Dove, Snow Leopard, Star Dust, Vanilla Sky, White Dove, White Knight, White Rush and White Lightning.

Branded synthetic marijuana products also started to sell to millions of users in the US, via gas stations, convenience stores and skater shops, with names like Blaze, Dream, Aroma, Mr Smiley, Red X Dawn, Kush, K2 and Abama (perhaps a pun on the famously pot-puffing president’s name); they cost ten to twenty-five dollars a bag and contained JWH-series drugs, just as the Spice branded legal highs had in the EU.

By mid-2012 in the US, media reports about users behaving in violent or bizarre ways after taking bath salts took on a surreal, filmic quality. Perhaps the most famous case reportedly involving bath salts was that of thirty-one-year-old Rudy Eugene, who will be grimly remembered as the man killed by police after biting off the face of fellow homeless man, sixty-five-year-old Ronald Poppo, in Miami in May 2012. Stories flashed around the world instantly, with police who were not present at the scene of the crime saying it was likely that the attacker was under the influence of a bath salts type drug. Eugene was impervious to gunshot, police said, and took several bullets from marksmen before he died.

The American Center for Disease Control and Prevention lost its mind that week too, and responded, in all apparent seriousness, to online rumours of a zombie apocalypse following a rash of other reports involving cannibalism in the US and elsewhere. ‘CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),’ agency spokesperson David Daigle told The Huffington Post.12

There is no doubt that Rudy Eugene was mentally ill and it is possible that he took drugs on the day of the attack that made his condition worse. But at the time of initial reports, there was no confirmed evidence that Eugene had actually taken bath salts. Some undigested and as-yet unidentified tablets were found in his stomach, but the branded legal highs sold in the US are typically powdered and are snorted. No human flesh was found in his stomach, meaning initial reports of cannibalism were also inaccurate. Local TV station CBS4 blamed an ‘LSD-type drug’ for the man’s attack. Leaving aside the fact that no toxicology reports were available at the time of that report, and that no bath salts type drugs are anything remotely like LSD, the source for these allegations was flimsy at best – neither the doctor nor the policeman quoted in the early stories had first-hand knowledge of the case, reported Reuters’ Jack Shafer.13

It is complex enough untangling the facts in news stories that involve novel psychoactive substances without media hype confusing the picture so completely that it seems almost wilful.

Each generation has its drugs moral panic, whether it comes in the guise of LSD users jumping from buildings in the 1960s, PCP-crazies in the 1980s, superhuman crackheads in the 1990s, or Meow-frenzied and entirely fictional schoolkids taunting their teachers with their bags of legal highs in the early twenty-first century. As Alasdair Forsyth, of Glasgow Caledonian University’s Institute for Society and Social Justice Research, told me, ‘There was a cartoon in Punch a few years back depicting two farmers looking at a huge scarecrow with the caption: “To have any effect I find I have to make it more scary every year”.’

Any retelling of the Rudy Eugene story is incomplete without a wider analysis of the sociocultural and economic climate in which it occurred. It is certainly not as grimly compelling as the possible news of a zombie cannibal apocalypse, but no mention was made of the fact that Florida has the second-worst funding of mental health services in the US. There are 325,000 adults with severe and persistent mental health problems in Florida, and only forty-two per cent of them receive state support, found the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy in a 2009 report. That means over 190,000 seriously mentally ill people do not receive the help they need.14 In March 2011, Senator Joe Negron of the Appropriations Committee proposed a further two-thirds cut to the mental health budget in the state. Banning a drug allows politicians to appear in control, but the problems that led Rudy Eugene to almost kill Ronald Poppo can’t be solved that easily.

Edward Huntingdon Williams MD wrote in the New York Times of 8 February 1914 about the dangerous new cocaine craze sweeping through the ‘shiftless’ black working-class communities of the south.15 The piece displays all the casual racism so common at the time, but leaving aside that easy target, it’s interesting to note how the central meme – that of a terrifyingly violent black man made superhuman by drugs and impervious o gunshot – prevails a century later. Bigger guns were needed to control these negroes, it was decided in 1914. While the so-called Miami zombie cannibal case inspires both pity and a sheer visceral terror, the reports conflated ethnicity, drugs and violence just as other racists had done a decade before.

Bath salts were involved in other bizarre news stories in the US in 2012. The flesh-eating virus had taken hold more quietly earlier that year when the American medical journal Orthopedics reported that a woman had suffered a bout of necrotizing fascitis contracted after injecting a dose of bath salts into her arm. Medics reported that the flesh-eating disease crept through her body even as they watched, and moved so rapidly that they had to amputate her arm, collarbone and shoulder and then perform a radical mastectomy.16 But the disease had nothing to do with the drug in question, more the route of administration – an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection – and the patient’s existing health conditions. Most casual drug users do not inject themselves, and it is a fair assumption that habitual injecting drug users have worse health and correspondingly weaker immune systems than other drug takers.

A measure of the drugs’ popularity and the dangers associated with their use was seen when the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported that it took almost 6,000 calls related to bath salts, and 7,000 related to fake pot in 2011. In 2009, there had been none at all. Louisiana Poison Control Center Director Dr Mark Ryan told ABC news, ‘It doesn’t matter which socioeconomic strata you’re from, we’re seeing these drugs being used across the board – all ages, all economic groups. We’ve had some people show up who are complaining of chest pains so severe that they think they’re having a heart attack. They think they’re dying … They have extreme paranoia. They’re having hallucinations. They see things, they hear things, monsters, demons, aliens.’17

In the southern state of Alabama in May 2012, thirty young people were admitted to hospital wards with kidney failure after smoking the herbal blends that had been sprayed by accident with a pesticide as well as the synthetic cannabinoids. Some of those afflicted will be on dialysis for life, doctors said.

The sheer range of branded legal highs in the US shows the popularity of the drugs, and the prevalence of their use, while the profitability of the drugs when sold in branded sachets is extraordinary. One single gram of MDPV bought in bulk for three dollars in Shanghai can be made into forty packets of a branded high sold at US$25 in American convenience stores – a profit of US$997 before packaging and distribution. The profit margins for the drugs in the JWH-series and other cannabinoid chemicals is just as high.

It is clear that the US has taken to bath salts, synthetic pot, and other research chemicals. Why it has done so is a thornier and much harder issue to identify. The country is the world’s number one consumer of regular drugs, with the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health revealing that twenty-two million citizens – nine per cent of the country – use illegal drugs. In those aged eighteen to twenty-five, that proportion more than doubles, to 21.5 per cent. It is noteworthy that this report – published in 2011 – contains no mention of the new drugs that have become so widely used in the US, although the internet and TV channels are alive with social chatter and news reports of their use.

Perhaps a driver in this market is the far wider use of drug testing in American firms, and the use by some American parents of testing kits on their children. College sports scholarships demand regular drug testing; fail and you’re not just off the team, you’ve lost your scholarship and you’re out of college. Many of these new chemicals will return a negative test result.

Consider, too, that in 2011 three dozen states proposed drug testing for people receiving welfare, job training, food stamps, public housing and unemployment assistance. The state of Georgia was the most recent to pass the law in April 2012 and now compels ‘some’ benefits recipients – it’s not clarified which criteria are used – to submit to drug testing before essential benefits are paid. Not satisfied with targeting the welfare payments of some of the poorest and most needy in society – penniless addicts and drug users – the state also demands that those targeted pay seventeen dollars to urinate into a testing vessel that will decide their fate. The New York Times reported that in Florida ‘people receiving cash assistance through welfare have had to pay for their own drug tests since July, and enrolment has shrunk to its lowest levels since the start of the recession.’18

But when drugs active at just a few milligrams are sold to anyone with thirty dollars to spare, the blame lies not only on the labs in China who make them knowing full well that they will be sold as drugs, and on the shops and websites in the US that sell the drugs, but most of all on a legal system that has made the sale of these compounds profitable and their use attractive. The reason these drugs are causing deaths, overdoses and delusion is because they are being sold under false pretences as cheap and legal alternatives to drugs like MDMA or cocaine or marijuana.

While official responses are failing to effectively address the situation, grassroots voluntary organizations are taking direct action to ensure the health of festival-goers. The Bunk Police is a US-based group that produces test kits that use a simple set of reagents to identify – or at least test for the presence and absence of – certain chemicals. Small samples of drugs are placed in a small plastic tube and each reagent is added to the mix. The colour changes depending on what chemical is present, and this is then compared to a printed chart. Bunk Police also conducts more complex lab tests on substances that have hospitalized users. The group checks drug quality at raves and festivals, and also distributes test kits to drug users so they can perform these basic tests themselves.

‘We started in June 2011,’ the group’s spokesman, who remains anonymous, told me by email. He went on:

When we were doing live testing it would depend on the venue and amount of traffic we had. Now that we distribute test kits, the number has increased dramatically but still depends on those factors. We’ve distributed well over 1,000 kits at a single four-day event. We operate at music festivals and other rave type events that offer camping [operating among the tents and speaking privately with users]. We also distribute portable test kits that can be concealed and used in a crowd at smaller events.

Our objective is to put an end to the dishonesty that goes on in the black market. In most cases, those who choose to take illegal substances have no way to tell if what they are taking is real. Some of the substituted chemicals can be much more dangerous than what the user intended to take. We find poor-quality drugs more often than not, but it really depends on the event – some are much worse than others.

Individuals in the US are now buying research chemicals by the kilo from China and substituting them for regular drugs more often than they are actually selling the regular drug itself, he explained:

The best example is that synthetic cathinones and other stimulants are sold as “molly” (American slang for powdered or crystal MDMA) more often than MDMA. There are only a handful of substances being offered (LSD, MDMA, cocaine, mescaline, etc.) but in fact these substances could be any of over fifty research chemicals. The dangers with RCs are in the unknowns. There is very little formal research on these substances, which means that there could be any number of hidden dangers associated with them. The dangers associated with taking an unknown substance or a mixture of unknown substances is also very substantial.

In this book’s final chapter I will attempt to untangle the legal and social complexities the increase in new drugs have brought about, and suggest ways that might reduce the likelihood of further tragedies in the future.

In this celebrity-obsessed age, a tipping point whereby these drugs entered into the national consciousness, at least in the US, occurred when actor Demi Moore’s friends’ called 911 as she suffered a terrifying reaction to a synthetic cannabis compound she had taken. In a call posted to YouTube in December 2011, Moore’s friend says to the operator as the star suffers fits next door, ‘It’s not marijuana but it’s similar to – it’s similar to incense. And she seems to be having convulsions of some sort.’19

That Hollywood stars, who have ready access to the purest and most exclusive drugs on the market, are choking down damiana and dried sage sprayed with John William Huffman’s cannabinoids demonstrates beyond doubt that the research chemical market has penetrated areas of society unthinkable a decade ago. While it is true that the new drugs scene has in many cases been caused by a scarcity of a preferred product, it is also true that for many drug users, a new kick is always welcome.

And while many drug users are avoiding the law by making or taking drugs that lie outside international control, a high-tech anarchist cadre has built an online market in traditional narcotics that may very well be untouchable, and which represents a major new battlefield in the war on drugs.