New Zealand’s government was not alone in feeling squeamish about the new crop of drugs that had replaced MDMA. In the United Kingdom, a synthetic cathinone—the lab-made version of the stimulant found in khat leaves—called 4-methylmethcathinone, became a sensation in the late 2000s. Known as mephedrone, it was first synthesized by a French chemist in 1929 and revived in 2003 by an Israeli psychonaut chemist going by the name Kinetic, who, on a hunch, decided to make it from scratch. Using techniques reminiscent of those employed by Sasha Shulgin, he sampled this new drug himself, and then—while he was still high—took to the Internet to share his synthesis process and describe his trip. “50mg didn’t do too much. I thought I’d wasted my time until I snorted another 100mg about 30 minutes later, and then it hit me,” he wrote on a discussion board called the Hive. “Each time 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, who is now known as Dr. Zee, soon began receiving kudos from other commenters. “That’s a wonderful piece of pioneering research, congratulations man!” wrote one, posting an image of a man popping champagne. Before long amateur chemists were brewing up batches themselves and gushing that mephedrone hit the sweet spot between amphetamines and ecstasy. It began spreading to the general population. Though the American analogue act scuttled mephedrone, it was permissible to take in the United Kingdom, where it became the first blockbuster NPS. Sold by vendors from Israel and Eastern Europe operating on the surface web, it was the first recreational chemical most English people had ever bought over the Internet, and was soon also for sale in stores, ushering in the “legal highs” era. An increasingly agitated press called it “meow meow”—based on an abbreviation of its chemical name, M-CAT—but that only drove its popularity, which began to rival that of traditional intoxicants. The results of one survey put it as the fourth-most-popular drug in the United Kingdom, after marijuana, ecstasy, and cocaine. “I prefer mephedrone to MDMA,” said a twenty-seven-year-old fashion industry worker named Dave Timms in 2009. “It makes me laugh when I see people try it for the first time. Many are skeptical that something that’s legal can actually work. But it does.”
Chinese chemists began producing mephedrone in huge quantities, most famously Zhang Lei, who operated out of Shanghai and called himself Eric Chang. Running a company named China Enriching Chemistry, he manufactured and sold mephedrone, meth ingredients (also known as precursor chemicals), “bath salts,” and other drugs on the surface web. Chang was remarkably flagrant, even after 2010, when mephedrone was scheduled in the United Kingdom and many other countries. His chemicals were sold all over the world, and his trafficking network reportedly involved corrupt airline stewards. According to US officials Chang earned $30 million from American customers alone. “He was a very busy guy, living in a fancy apartment—complaining his wife never saw him because he was so busy,” reported Mike Power. Interpol pursued Chang, and the United States charged him under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. He was finally captured by Chinese police in 2013 as part of an operation that spanned continents. Soon afterward, Russian television released a harrowing video taken in a hotel outside Moscow, where a mammoth SWAT team stormed a hotel where Chang’s wares were distributed, described as a “transshipment base.” Brushing aside frightened, barely clothed hotel guests, the SWAT team seized vast quantities of powders and made scores of arrests.
In December 2015, the Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to fourteen years in prison and a fine of 500,000 yuan ($74,000) for the crimes of “narcotics manufacturing” and “teaching criminal methods to others.” The relatively mild punishment was owing to the fact that the NPS Chang was producing tended to be unscheduled in his home country.
The story of mephedrone bore all the hallmarks of the NPS revolution, part of a pattern that has played out again and again. Originally synthesized in a legitimate lab—but then resuscitated for recreational purposes—it filled the void of a popular banned drug, MDMA. It gained fame in specialized corners of the Internet before being manufactured in China and breaking to a wider audience, all the while leaving regulators and police scrambling to try to control it. In particular, mephedrone helped inspire the United Kingdom’s 2016 blanket ban of psychoactive substances.
Mephedrone is an example of a synthetic cathinone, a stimulant made to resemble the natural psychoactive chemical occurring in the khat plant, a shrub whose leaves are chewed by many in the Middle East. “Khat is alcohol for Muslims,” a Yemeni told Time. Synthetic cathinones were for a time in the late 2000s and early 2010s sold legally in US and UK shops, often marketed as “bath salts”; these are not actually crystals for the bath but rather a nebulous substance that can contain many different chemicals intended for recreational consumption.
Other synthetic cathinones began to take off as well in the early 2010s, including Flakka, a drug that, as demonstrated in YouTube videos, has caused some people to lose control of themselves and run naked through the streets. Flakka’s chemical name is α-PVP (alpha-pyrrolidinovalerophenone), and it had a particularly lethal run in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, area, killing more than sixty people in less than a year and a half, just before the middle of the decade. In 2015 a Broward County narcotics officer said it had become more popular there than cocaine.
By that year Flakka had been explicitly banned in both the United States and China. Yet, with no analogue act to stop them, Chinese chemists immediately began modifying the molecule just slightly, so it was still legal. Soon, a new version of Flakka was being sold on the Internet, called α-PHP. Then, when that was banned in China, it was replaced by something called α-PHPP. Chinese manufacturers next sold something called 4-Cl-PVP—although in August 2018, China scheduled that chemical, and so manufacturers quickly moved on to something else.
“They just added a random chlorine group at the fourth position on the benzene ring,” explained new-drugs expert Sidney Picej, regarding 4-Cl-PVP. The problem is that when something “random” is added to the chemical structure, it often makes the drug’s high worse and the drug itself more dangerous. “It makes it bulkier,” added Picej, “which affects its ability to effectively cross the blood-brain barrier or activate a certain receptor. [These new] stimulants make your heart go crazy, with a slight dysphoric buzz.’”
Methylone, another synthetic cathinone, was developed by Sasha Shulgin and a colleague for use as a possible antidepressant. To many, methylone was a satisfying replacement for MDMA. Matt Bowden even began selling it, until it was clear his government planned to ban that one as well.
Methylone and mephedrone were the best-known synthetic cathinones to be cut into ecstasy pills and have been tied to a number of overdose deaths over the years. Official statistics are hard to come by, but the number is most certainly small, relative to the number of deaths attributed to a much more toxic MDMA-substitute drug called PMA (paramethoxyamphetamine). PMA and a related compound, PMMA, were linked in the early 2010s to more than one hundred deaths in the United Kingdom alone, according to the Guardian, as well as dozens more in Canada and other countries throughout the world. “It has similar effects to MDMA, but it takes about two hours to come up. It leads users, after an hour, to be like, ‘Hey, I’m not feeling anything,’ so they take another dose,” explained Amy Raves, a California-based harm-reduction activist.
“Nobody takes PMA or PMMA on purpose. Nobody ever has,” said Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe, adding that people think they’re taking MDMA. “These drugs are only being manufactured because they’re cheap and easy to produce and replace for MDMA, and they give the user a stimulant effect.”
International attempts to knock out ecstasy had opened the door to a wide array of curious new chemicals; some were dangerous, and some benign, and considering that most of them hadn’t had significant clinical trials (if any), the health consequences of their use were being tested in real time.
Governments around the world—from Japan to France, Australia to Canada—reacted predictably, seeking to criminalize each new drug as it emerged. In Matt Bowden’s home country, however, against the odds, public officials tried to confront the problem in a different way.
After New Zealand made BZP illegal in 2008, Matthew Bowden was frustrated. His pills had ushered in a drop in overdoses and violence in the local party culture but apparently to no avail. “There’d been no deaths, no lasting injuries, no real serious hospitalizations for people using the product as directed, but they decided to make it illegal,” he said. He worried the nightlife denizens would turn back to crystal meth. To console himself, Bowden took some time off. He grew his hair out and, under the auspices of his glam rock alter ego, Starboy—wearing KISS-style face paint and steampunk accessories—started working on a new album. In 2010, however, a new drug called to him: fake marijuana.
Bowden was well aware of synthetic cannabinoids’ dubious safety reputation. Still, that didn’t deter him when, he said, he was approached about manufacturing new fake pot compounds. He figured he could do things differently. And so, as before when he was looking for a meth substitute, he focused on making a safer product, working with pharmacologists to try to find a less harmful synthetic cannabinoid. “We were creating hundreds of new [cannabinoid] molecules, working out which ones were going to be less toxic,” he said. The best ones they synthesized and patented.
He renewed his public-relations efforts, hiring a well-connected law firm, led by former New Zealand prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, to help him persuade the government that the country needed a recreational-drugs industry that was required to do product testing, meet safety standards, and clearly label its offerings—not one that operated in the shadows.
Remarkably, politicians started listening. Before long, they even crafted a bill.
“Quite simply they will now have to do what any manufacturer of any product that is consumed or ingested already has to do—make sure it is safe,” argued Parliament member Peter Dunne, speaking in favor of the Psychoactive Substances Act of 2013, which would effectively legalize not just BZP but a host of other party drugs and synthetic cannabinoids as well, including the ones made by Bowden. This would be a completely unprecedented piece of legislation, moving New Zealand in the opposite direction from the rest of the Western world—which was making new drugs illegal as fast as it could.
New Zealand focused on these substances, instead of legalizing traditional ones like MDMA or marijuana, because the country’s hands were tied by the United Nations international drug-control treaties, which outlawed the most common recreational drugs and to which it is a signatory. An issue with the Psychoactive Substances Act was that none of these new drugs (including Bowden’s) had gone through clinical trials, and holding such trials would be extremely time-consuming. To address this, the law would permit new drugs that had previously been sold without incident to be grandfathered in.
It was an extremely complicated bill, one presented under the auspices of regulation, rather than legalization. Quite possibly not everyone in the New Zealand Parliament fully understood what he or she was voting on. When the results came in, on July 17, 2013, they were staggering: 119 to 1, in favor.
Legalization advocates rejoiced, as did Bowden. They were optimistic that this new law could show the world how to avoid an NPS crisis, by putting safety and control above prosecutions and imprisonment. Sales were restricted to those over eighteen years of age. Pills couldn’t be sold in gas stations or grocery stores. And packages displayed warnings not to drive after consuming their contents. This was a mind-boggling policy shift. People around the world suddenly began paying attention to this small island country, best known to many for its sheep.
“New Zealand’s Designer Drug Law Draws Global Interest,” read a CBS News headline, noting that some British parliamentarians hoped to bring a similar policy to the United Kingdom. New Zealand’s government—which Bowden praised as “small and maneuverable”—was suddenly in the vanguard of progressive drug law. And it had Bowden to thank for it.
Though Bowden had been having his new products manufactured in China, he began to believe that his partners there weren’t keeping his new creations secret. And so he began building a lab of his own, in Auckland, which opened in 2013. It featured state-of-the-art equipment and, eventually, five employees. By his accounting, their work was a success. “Our products were not producing addictive behaviors or overdoses,” he said.
For Bowden, the dream he had pursued for more than a decade was finally coming true. Working out of his lab, he and his team manufactured large quantities of his party-pill meth and ecstasy replacements, as well as synthetic-cannabinoid alternatives to strains like Spice and K2, which were causing so much damage. He hadn’t made much money off his drugs previously, Bowden said, focusing instead on his goal to make safer products. But eventually he decided it was time to cash in. After legalization, when the synthetic-cannabinoid profits really started to accumulate, he bought property—including a palatial house for his family in the lush countryside. In that moment, he seemed to have everything he could ever want; a loving wife selected by a divine matchmaker, a beautiful family, and a successful business doing something he felt proud of, grounded in utopian ideals and endorsed by the government.
But within a year Matt Bowden’s revolution went up in smoke. Public opinion quickly shifted against the now-legal drugs.
A combination of factors turned the tide. For one, not many stores applied to sell the drugs, perhaps because shop owners didn’t want to go through the cumbersome approval process. As a result, the few stores that did receive licenses sometimes had lines around the block, creating loitering masses who got high and created disturbances. “Imagine if you only had one liquor store in town. You would have a queue of people,” Bowden said. “So that’s what we had. There would be these big queues of people, smoking and getting a little wasted in the streets.” The media began picking up on this problem, as well as the preponderance of emergency-room visits, and the fact that some were becoming addicted to the cannabinoids.
A controversy also began to erupt around the issue of animal testing, a critical component of drug development. Protests sprang up, which Bowden said led to the spread of misinformation: “Some were saying, ‘The party-pill guys want to kill our dogs!’” Bowden affirmed that he never, in fact, tested on dogs. He also claimed that when he began attempting to develop a safer alternative to alcohol, the beer, wine, and spirits lobbyists began campaigning against him.
And so, in 2014, an election year, New Zealand reversed course, revising the legalization bill to make the party pills and synthetic-cannabinoid strains illegal. Some of the same lawmakers who had voted in favor of the legalization bill a year earlier now claimed not to have realized what they were endorsing. The drugs that had been grandfathered in were now un-grandfathered. Under the revised bill they could still win authorization for legal sale, but the revised bill also curtailed animal testing, which threw a wrench in the process. Effectively, it all but blocked the possibility of new drugs receiving approval.
“The immediate effect was that the industry was handed on a silver plate to the black market,” Bowden said. “All the manufacture standards, all the dosage control, it went out the window.”
After New Zealand’s legalization repeal, Matt Bowden still planned to try to bring his drugs, including BZP, up to code, but the collapse of the industry he had so heavily invested in left him financially obliterated. Owing unpaid back taxes and other obligations that amounted to some NZ$3.6 million (US$2.4 million), he was forced, in May 2015, to liquidate his company. “I did make some mistakes,” he admitted. “I was sloppy with accounting back when we were a small company starting out.”
Unable to secure new loans, Bowden was locked out of his lab and lost his estate and other possessions, even the steampunk fashion line he had worked on with Kristi. According to a 2015 news report, the “fixed assets” of Bowden’s company, including “lab equipment, music equipment and the costume and prop hire branch of the business” were sold off for NZ$230,000—money that went to creditors. Broke and owing millions, Bowden faced the possibility of jail time over the unpaid back taxes, a criminal offense. And so he, his wife, and their two young children fled the country in 2015 and landed in Chang Mai, Thailand.
In July 2017, ten Auckland deaths were attributed to synthetic cannabinoids. The fatalities caused a national uproar. The country’s National Drug Intelligence Bureau soon released a report, placing blame on the Mongrel Mob—New Zealand’s biggest gang, known for extensive facial tattoos—for controlling much of the drug’s distribution. “It is believed they have started manufacturing their own product in order to increase and retain control of the supply chain,” wrote New Zealand news website Stuff. The worst fears of Bowden and others, who had hoped to bring synthetic cannabinoids into the light, were being realized. The strains associated with the Auckland fatalities were not the same ones that had been previously sold legally in New Zealand—they were much, much stronger. “Dose escalation is going crazy,” Bowden said.
By the end of 2018, more than fifty New Zealand fatalities had been tied to synthetic cannabinoids. The deaths prompted international news coverage. Most of the stories made only passing, if any, mention of New Zealand’s political experiment. Little analysis was undertaken to determine whether legalization—with workable safety testing and clear labeling—might have saved some of these lives. “The law was ruined over the animal testing BS,” Bowden said, noting that, because the law was changed, human beings were instead serving as the unwitting test subjects.
The scourge of deadly synthetic cannabinoids was by no means limited to New Zealand. Media reports of mass overdoses and “zombie” outbreaks began appearing across the United States—the same country where, in medical labs, many of the most potent strains were invented.