The World Wide Web has been described as an “ethereal wilderness,” inhabited as it is by eccentrics and madmen roving about everyday society and commerce. Exotic pockets coexist alongside the most sober and commonplace sites with a harmony that simply doesn’t occur outside cyberspace. It’s the perfect stage for the outrageous. The most provocative sites are surely the free-for-all forums that would seem to be hell-bent on testing the limits of free speech in a liberal democracy.
One of the most audacious is one of its most peculiar. It goes by the name Temple of the Screaming Electron, or totse.com. Here one finds opinion, facts, myth, stories and stark, raw data. Some of the information, it would seem, goes well beyond the pale of legality. There’s an abundance of information, including recipes, on how to manufacture various kinds of methamphetamine.
Totse.com is the brainchild of two men by the name of Jeff Hunter and J.C. Stanton. It initially came into being in 1989 as a dial-up system run on a computer with a tiny 20-megabyte hard drive, and gradually evolved into a Web-based system running on ten servers with multiple phone lines and high-speed modems. Its literature claims to have once had the largest text file repository in the world – as of 1997, anyway. According to Stanton, the traffic it sees today is astounding: more than 89,000 hits per hour, 38,000,000 during the month of February 2003 alone.
On the surface, co-administrator J.C. Stanton seems to be an intensely private person. He is, but of necessity. He’s wary of granting interviews, and is emphatic that he knows very little about methamphetamine. He has never made it, thinks it a horrible drug. If he grants an interview, he’ll call you from a pay phone at an agreed-upon time. His sense of privacy, however, doesn’t stem from a fear of the law.
“If law enforcement wanted to know who I am,” he says, “they could get a subpoena in ten minutes. It wouldn’t be a problem for them.” His sense of privacy is a result of the fact that “we get a lot of mail from crazy people, and I don’t want them to know who I am.”
A cursory glance at the Temple of the Screaming Electron, and his point becomes clear. A column of icons running down the left side of the first page has headings such as COMMUNITY, BAD IDEAS, DRUGS, EGO, EROTICA, FRINGE, SOCIETY, TECHNOLOGY. BAD IDEAS has pieces entitled “Guns and Weapons,” and “Irresponsible Activities,” which has the tagline, “How to be a real pain in the ass.” Another piece entitled “KA-FUCKING-BOOM!” announces that it is about bombs, rockets and things that go BOOM! It informs visitors of ten high-explosive mixtures they can make at home. Another piece is entitled “An Aussie Beer Can Mortar.” In it a fellow with a military background who calls himself Andy tells us the story of how he made such a mortar – “and how you can too!”
Pages found under the DRUGS icon are of a similar shrill bent. Those intended as manuals for synthesizing controlled substances are typically conveyed in the first person by a very high-strung narrative voice. Others concern methods of subverting drug tests, how to cook with pot, how to have fun with nutmeg, how to purify heroin, how to make the drug Special K from liquid ketamine, how to make MDMA from Eugenol, which is a clear to pale yellow oily liquid extracted from certain essential oils, e.g., clove oil, nutmeg, cinnamon, and bay leaf. One article by a man who goes by “Freddy Fender” offers the most trenchant and chilling advice: “In the west, California in particular, the meth market is monopolized by ‘bikers’ and anyone producing meth without their knowledge is risking quite a bit of wrath… anyone SELLING meth independently is risking death. So the advice is: If you make meth, tell the bikers.” Mr. Fender then goes on to announce the good news for chemists. “Ninety-nine percent of all narcotics lab-busting is geared toward meth and other amphetamines. Labs that produce psychedelics are safer than ever.”
This site is both a nexus and a sounding board for a gathering of voices heard almost no where else on the planet. Although Stanton himself claims never to have engaged in making methamphetamine or any kind of homemade drug, he seems to have his finger on the pulse of the scene. He lives in an undisclosed metropolitan area where, he says, “methamphetamine has become primarily a gay party drug,” a role it has taken on nationwide. His best insights, however, concern the phenomenon of clandestine manufacturing. “It doesn’t surprise me that meth is popular in these po-dunk towns,” he says. “As shipping becomes global, the drug has gone everywhere.”
He’s absolutely right. Relatively small amounts of precursor chemicals and lab equipment are now available to everyone by way of international shipping services. Tiny companies consisting of just one or two people tucked away in crowded neighborhoods of cities such as Berlin, Calcutta, Bangkok, or Jakarta, are able to act as global wholesalers for things that can no longer be easily acquired through traditional outlets in the United States. The chemist in the U.S. only needs this domestic retail contact, and he is in business.
According to Stanton, the phenomenon is in some respects beginning to look more like traditional drug commerce. “In some cases the entire process is being outsourced, moved outside the country to, say, India, where law enforcement is next to nonexistent.” It’s then smuggled into the United States like any other illegal drug. The approach, however, fails to capitalize on meth’s inherent ability to be transported in its component parts, and then synthesized, thereby diminishing the legal liability of its purveyors.
Stanton sees this conventional mode of smuggling as the direct result of more comprehensive drug laws in general, precursor laws in particular, and stiffer penalties for both. Such laws and penalties, he believes, have an unintended consequence. “I see people moving away from conventional drugs and moving toward the most basic and most catastrophic methods, such as inhalants.”
This is an observation that, according to Stanton, gives sites like totse.com their reason for being. As bad as drugs like methamphetamine might be, there are worse options for getting high. His logic proceeds along the line that drug laws inhibit users from getting high by relatively safe means, and cause them to get high by the most basic and dangerous, “such as sniffing glue and fumes from a can of spray paint. You’re never going to be able to stop that. You can’t stop people from getting high.” Hence, the Temple of the Screaming Electron, where anyone can learn everything about any synthesis. Those who sniff glue need no instruction, no totse.com.
Nearly every day Stanton and Hunter receive messages from “concerned citizens” asking and sometimes demanding that they take the methamphetamine recipes down from their Web site. “Our response to that is always the same,” Stanton says. “‘Sorry, but we can’t help you.’” He and his co-administrator see the Web site as a forum for free expression of every order. It is a view held in quarters one might not expect. Surely it’s worth noting that never has anyone at totse.com been contacted by law enforcement concerning its content.
According to the DEA’s Rogene Waite, Stanton and Hunter have little to fear. “Like all of us, they’re protected by the First Amendment,” she says. “Unless they break the law, they won’t be prosecuted.”
And she’s right. To break the law one must either make that first molecule of methamphetamine, or show intent to do so. Merely posting recipes on the Internet doesn’t qualify.
But not all law enforcement entities view the First Amendment through the same lens. In March of 2001, police raided a home in a Denver, Colorado trailer park owned by a man suspected of manufacturing methamphetamine. In the course of their search they found two recipe books on how to make the drug, along with an invoice from the Tattered Cover Book Store, one of Denver’s most venerated independently-owned bookshops.
The next day two plainclothes police officers arrived at the bookstore with a search warrant. They wanted to know if books by a couple of authors writing under colorful pseudonyms had been purchased by their suspect. The books they were interested in were entitled Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture by “Uncle Fester,” and Advanced Techniques of Clandestine Psychedelic Drug Laboratories, by “Jack B. Nimble.” The officers claimed the identity of the buyer of the two books was critical to their case. The store balked, refusing to surrender the information on First Amendment grounds, which set the stage for a landmark court battle.
At a subsequent hearing, a Colorado court upheld the police request, a decision that the owner of the Tattered Cover, Joyce Meskis, challenged in the Colorado Supreme Court. “It’s not our job to do the police’s work for them,” she explained to the swelling ranks of media.
The Tattered Cover’s general manager, Matthew Miller, was also in the middle of the action. “Our stance was based on the issue of protecting privacy,” he says. “We certainly were not trying to prevent the police from doing their job.”
The case quickly piqued nationwide interest, and brought out support from literary heavyweights such as Michael Chabon, David Eggers and Dorothy Allison. Fundraisers were held for the bookstore’s defense, and later that year Meskis and Miller were rewarded for their stand when the Colorado Supreme Court overturned the previous judge’s ruling on the matter, handing down a unanimous six-zero decision in the bookstore’s favor.
In the end there is a final irony to the legendary legal battle. The defendant was prosecuted and found guilty, but there was a bit of information known only to a handful of people at the Tattered Cover – information that would not have advanced the government’s case against the defendant whatsoever.
“What only a few of us knew at the time,” Miller now explains, “was that he never bought those books from us.”
The legal fees, he concedes, were tremendous. Thus J.C. Stanton may have some reasons to worry about government interference after all. State and local entities don’t seem as concerned with Constitutional niceties as the Feds.
Stanton is also accurate in his understanding of methamphetamine’s popularity in the gay community. This niche market for meth sprang into the public consciousness during the summer of 1997, with the murder of five people, followed by a suicide.
Today Andrew Cunanan is known most widely as the young man who murdered Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace. Cunanan was a familiar face in the gay communities of San Diego and San Francisco. He was also heavily into crystal meth, which had become commonplace in many gay circles. As some of those who knew him well claim, the five murders he committed – and his own suicide – were the result of amphetamine psychosis.
Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors (Dell, 1999) not only chronicles the course of Cunanan’s desperation but establishes its root causes. In it she quotes Vance Coukoulis, an acquaintance of Cunanan’s, concerning his crystal habit: “It’s a sex drug, and all it does is just heighten your whole sexual feeling about a million times.” He also adds that “It makes you think about sex twenty-four hours a day. The whole system’s become so promiscuous it’s frightening. I believed in the devil after I got involved with the gay society and crystal meth, and then I realized evil existed in human nature and that human nature can be of good or of evil, and I really believe in evil now. Period. And I believe an evil spirit can overtake people, and I believe that’s what happened to Andrew. He changed through the use of that drug.”
For three months during the summer of 1997 Cunanan ran wild on a cross-country killing spree, murdering Jeffrey Trail and David Madson, two former lovers, as well as Lee Miglin, a Chicago real estate magnate, and William Reese, a cemetery caretaker in New Jersey whom Cunanan killed for his truck. Cunanan then drove to Florida, where he waited outside Gianni Versace’s home. As Versace was walking in on July 15, 1997, Cunanan fired two shots into the back of Versace’s head, killing him. Eight days later Cunanan was found dead on a houseboat after having shot himself in the mouth.
Cunanan seemed to enjoy killing. One of his victims had had his head wrapped in duct tape, and was then stabbed in the chest with pruning sheers. After being severely beaten, the man’s throat was then cut with a hacksaw. Finally, the body was driven over again and again until it was, in the words of one law enforcement officer, “mush.” Herein, it would seem, lay the essence of the weird violence surrounding the world of methamphetamine.
Cunanan has been diagnosed posthumously as a narcissist, someone who has a grandiose sense of self-importance, believes himself to be “special,” and is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success. Narcissists also require unlimited admiration, are themselves arrogant, and most significantly, lack feelings of empathy. Heavy methamphetamine use naturally reinforces these feelings, heightening the narcissist’s aggrandized vision of himself, and discounting the feelings of those around him. Under the influence of meth, such unstable personalities become murderously explosive.
The same is true for those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), for they typically display a wide range of impulsive behaviors that are often self-destructive. They are unstable emotionally, and show wide mood swings in response to stressful events. Brief psychotic episodes are not uncommon. Interestingly, research suggests that the condition may be associated with decreased serotonin levels in the brain, one of the neurotransmitters Ecstasy toys with…hence the uncommon allure.