I knew little about Slovenia before arriving there, except that it was the birthplace of Melania Trump. In my ignorance I half-expected a war-torn Balkan wasteland. In truth, the 1990s Yugoslavian conflict barely touched Slovenia, which won independence through the short-lived Ten-Day War in 1991, and nowadays the capital, Ljubljana, gleams. Surrounded by mountains and forest and overlooked by a medieval castle, the city has buildings hundreds of years old, and its denizens shop on traffic-free cobblestone streets in the city center. There are very few homicides, and the city feels clean and tidy.
Most of the same drugs are scheduled in Slovenia as in the United States, but, per a 2008 law that made sharp distinctions between drug use and drug trafficking, possession of a small amount for personal use is punishable by only a small fine, ranging from 40 to 200 euros, though even the fine can be waived if the individual is willing to enter a drug-treatment program. Those engaged in drug manufacturing and dealing are still subject to incarceration. The country is focused not on locking up users but on helping minimize harm associated with drug abuse. Adam Auctor said, “The Slovenia government is one of the most liberal, when it comes to substance abuse, in the world.” The country is home to cutting-edge harm-reduction groups like Drogart, an army of gung-ho young volunteers, who call themselves “peers” and are well-respected on the nightlife scene. In bathrooms at music events, they set out papers that can be rolled to snort cocaine and offer counseling and drug checking, though they don’t push their services on anyone. They have also created harm-reduction-themed compilation albums, featuring songs with such titles as “Drink Water” and “Eat before Rave.” The model is practiced in an environment much different from that of US electronic dance music events, where practically anyone could be an undercover cop. Because Drogart members engage openly and honestly with them, users are more likely to follow advice about how to take drugs safely.
Slovenia has also been particularly successful at containing the scourge of dangerous drugs. In 2016, the most recent year for which statistics were available, only forty overdose deaths occurred—in the entire country of two million people—a per capita overdose death rate far smaller than that of the United States, where more than four times as many people died from drug overdoses every day that year. Slovenia is aggressively concerned with helping problem users, approaching drugs from a public-health perspective rather than a strictly law-and-order one. Even the Ljubljana police support these efforts. In fact, drug checking involves the police directly: users drop off samples of their substances at Drogart’s offices, whereupon police pick them up, check them for purity, and then send back the results. No harm, no foul.
In 2016 Adam Auctor moved to a house on the outskirts of Ljubljana that doubled as the Bunk Police’s lab and production center. Accessed through a separate door on the ground floor, the modest lab facility has a low ceiling, fluorescent lights, a big orange cabinet of chemicals, respirators, and an emergency eye-wash station; it looks not unlike a typical laboratory at a university, even as it analyzes the newest, most powerful drugs in the world. “That cost six times more than my car,” Auctor said, pointing to a fume hood, a type of workstation capable of quickly eliminating noxious gases. “You could explode a bomb in there, and it would suck it away.”
In recent years Bunk Police’s efforts have gone largely into creating a new and extensive reference booklet. Each page reveals different drugs’ reactions to reagents that Bunk Police sells. Resembling time-lapse photography, the reaction pictures are taken from video stills, which show—second by second—what colors the drugs turn when hit by the reagents. The booklet covers hundreds of different chemicals, many of which are obscure. There isn’t a greater resource in the world, if you want to know whether the drug in hand is 5-APDB or 5-DBFPV. Videos of these reactions are also available online. “While my peers were putting a down payment on their houses, I was making these booklets,” Auctor said. “These things cost me about three years of my life. Close to $100,000 dollars.” He’s currently focused on developing highly specialized strips that quantify the amount of fentanyl in mixtures; users don’t need to know just whether their drugs are adulterated with fentanyl—they need to know how much is in them.
Good help is hard to find. “It is so easy for people to be tempted,” he said, noting that after he spent months tracking down a rare sample of pure heroin, one of his employees used it to get high.
Auctor was convinced to come to Slovenia in the first place by psychonaut and new-drugs expert Julijan “Sidney” Picej, who later served as Bunk Police’s head of European operations, though he has since left the company. A millennial who, with his wild, uncombed brown hair, resembles a Deadhead, Picej is willing to risk his health for the sake of new thrills and has taken just about every drug in the book—not to mention plenty of new chemicals that aren’t in any books. He’s something of a psychedelic historian, diligently cataloging hundreds of psychoactive drugs that have come onto the market in recent years.
Over lunch in Ljubljana, between eating and blowing big plumes from an electronic nicotine pipe, Picej explained how he went from high school dropout to landing his job with Bunk Police. He smoked marijuana and ate mushrooms as a teenager but at age seventeen found his real passion—mephedrone, the synthetic cathinone—when a girlfriend introduced him to it. At that time mephedrone was unscheduled in Slovenia and sold over the Internet by Hungarian labs. Buying drugs over the web seemed too good to be true, however, so Picej regularly trekked to Budapest, a scenic four-hour car ride, to acquire kilos of mephedrone, which he sold to his high school classmates. No drug kingpin, he just sought to support his habit. His father was absent and his mother not around much, and so, when he should have been studying, Picej was binging on mephedrone or roaming the city with his girlfriend.
Picej doesn’t take much mephedrone anymore, because it’s hard to find. After it was scheduled in Slovenia in 2011, a close analogue took its place, known as 3-MMC (short for 3-methylmethcathinone; mephedrone is 4-methylmethcathinone). The analogue was designed to evade the mephedrone ban and provide similarly stimulating and euphoric effects while still remaining technically legal.
Though Picej didn’t like 3-MMC quite as much as mephedrone, many people found it just as satisfying. White crystals that could be snorted or eaten, the drug was reportedly first seen in Sweden in 2012 but soon began to take off in Slovenia. A survey of students at the University of Ljubljana in 2015 found that it was by far the most popular of the new drugs; 6.6 percent of students said they had tried it, followed by 4.1 percent who had tried methylone, and 3.9 percent who had taken mephedrone. Little was known about 3-MMC; no human studies had been done, though scientists had tested it on pigs. “During the pig studies the authors reported no treatment-related mortality and morbidity was observed and no gross pathological findings were detected,” summarized the World Health Organization in a report.
Along the way, 3-MMC acquired a curious nickname—“ice cream.” In fact, when I was in Slovenia, “ice cream” was all anyone in drug circles was talking about. I soon learned that 3-MMC is a perfect example of how brand-new chemicals can enter countries and immediately take hold. Its story is one not just of law and chemistry but of savvy marketing.
Picej knew the drug dealer who had popularized it. His name was Vlad, and Picej warned me that he was in bad shape because of heroin addiction. Nonetheless, Vlad was willing to talk, perhaps because his weird local celebrity hadn’t been publicly acknowledged before. He had a bedraggled, Bobcat Goldthwait air about him, down to the shaggy hair and high-pitched, off-kilter voice. His English was limited, but he got his point across. There was still a light in his eyes; heroin had not defeated him, though he looked a decade older than his twenty-eight years. He was friendly and not suspicious or paranoid, though he did ask to use a pseudonym.
“I get addicted to everything,” he said. “To cigarettes, to coffee, to everything”—most detrimentally, to heroin. Vlad had previously excelled in his studies, but around 2012, not long after he started university, he and his girlfriend got heavily into heroin, and at one point he was doing five grams per day, he claimed. This interfered with his schoolwork, and his life began to go off course. He was currently on something called substitution therapy—taking twelve methadone pills and two hundred milligrams of morphine almost every day. It was enough for him to achieve a daily general feeling of “below average,” as he described it—not great, but better than withdrawal.
Though he had stopped taking heroin, Vlad still indulged in other drugs. Like Picej, he had tried almost everything, natural or synthetic, including, he said, as many as ten drugs at the same time. He knew a little chemistry and had made the ultra-powerful psychedelic DMT with a friend. Though people who have done DMT describe it as a face-melting, life-changing experience—many claim to meet God—Vlad did it almost casually. “I like to ride my bike when I’m on it,” he said.
The sudden popularity of NPS earlier in the decade had benefited Vlad’s drug-dealing business, and he began to specialize in semi-obscure synthetics, including the psychedelics 2C-B and 25I-NBOMe. “I just went to parties and gave out free samples, and people were interested. I got it so cheap.” He ordered these chemicals off the Dark Web or bought them from other dealers. Police caught him a number of times; around 2011, he said, cops stopped him with fifteen or twenty grams of methylone, but he managed to talk them out of arresting him for dealing by insisting (accurately) that it was unscheduled and therefore legal.
He and his girlfriend stayed together despite their heroin abuse, and in fact she was behind his most famous drug—“ice cream.” Vlad sold mephedrone until it was scheduled, and then soon afterward began selling its close analogue 3-MMC. He didn’t invent this new drug but, after hearing about it online, began purchasing it from anonymous sources—first on the surface web and then on the Dark Web. It was a powerful stimulant and inexpensive. Vlad heard it described as “Chinese cocaine,” although it lasted longer than cocaine.
Sales were fine, but 3-MMC really took off when, around 2013, Vlad’s girlfriend had the idea to cut it with vanilla protein powder. It was extremely successful branding. Diluting drugs with other, cheaper substances is common. But it’s rare that the cutting agent becomes a main selling point. She thought the powder might give the drug’s users—who often binge and go without eating for extended periods of time—some necessary calories. But neither of them anticipated just how much buyers would appreciate the vanilla flavor when they snorted the drug, which they could taste in their mouths as well. The vanilla taste earned the drug the nickname “ice cream,” and before long it was in great demand, not just in Ljubljana but all over Slovenia and in parts of the Czech Republic and Austria as well. At one point Vlad removed the vanilla flavoring. He’d had a change of heart about selling adulterated products to his customers, he said. But they complained, so he added it back.
Dare Kochmur, the director of Stigma, a Slovenian harm-reduction organization dedicated to fighting drug addiction, said “ice cream” is dangerous because, as with cocaine, when its effects wear off users feel a strong urge to take more. Thus, it can become habit forming.
Perhaps this explained why Vlad’s customers kept returning. He said he made a lot of money during his time selling “ice cream”—maybe 5,000 euros a month, quite a lot in an inexpensive country. He noted that most of his profits were spent on his drug habit. Another run-in with police, in 2015, convinced him to stop dealing entirely. Vlad has since revived his pursuit of a university degree and is trying, not always with success, to limit his drug use.
“Ice cream” has nonetheless marched on without him. In fact, he said, a host of knockoff stimulants are currently being sold in Slovenia as “ice cream,” even some that don’t have the vanilla powder or even the same active chemical.