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Mike Power in "Matter" "The Drug Revolution No-One Can Stop"

Si Dread

Si Dread

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Joined
Mar 29, 2002
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JOHN BUCKLEY WALKS THROUGH a North London street, in his pocket a small key. A photographer’s satchel over his shoulder contains a series of identity documents and a printout of a lengthy email correspondence. He hopes he won’t need the papers, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

The streets are busy enough to provide perfect urban anonymity, but even so, Buckley feels watched—followed, even. A year has passed since he last smoked a cigarette, but anxiety triggers the old familiar tug on his receptors; nicotine would smooth this tension out like a steam iron on a shirt cuff. Deep breaths instead. He turns, without breaking stride, through the glass door into the mailbox shop where, a few weeks before, he’d lied barefaced to the staff as he set up a bogus mailing address for a company that does not exist.

Buckley recognizes none of the workers today. He walks straight to the wall of corporate-gray mailboxes and opens number 203 with a fluid turn of the key. He expects a package that contains the products of weeks of meticulous planning and molecular-level precision. Instead, it’s empty.

One worker, a rangy guy with a Brazilian accent in a checked shirt with an asymmetrical east London fringe, sees his confusion and comes over, helpful, and gestures him to a back room, where there’s a wire cage filled with letters and boxes. They search together through perhaps 50 different packages looking for Buckley’s name, the colors of the courier, anything.

It’s several minutes until Buckley spots his name on a large plastic envelope. The Brazilian passes it to him; there are Chinese characters on it, and inside he can feel a small, square box. But he can’t open and check it, not here, so he walks out of the shop and jumps in a black cab home.

Safely indoors, I shed the persona of “John Buckley”, put my journalist’s press card, passport and paper trail back in its drawer, and tear open the envelope in haste. Inside the box lies a vacuum-sealed metallized bag, and inside that, a pair of small pinch-seal baggies. One of them contains a few grams of white powder.

It could be absolutely anything, one of several million compounds of different potencies and effects and toxicities. Or it could be sugar. There’s only one way to find out for sure.

MY JOURNEY, FROM MIKE POWER TO JOHN BUCKLEY, from investigative journalist to drug designer, started six weeks earlier. To understand exactly how access to designer drugs has changed—to see exactly how easy it is to commission, purchase and import powerful new compounds that are beyond the reach of the law—I decided to get one made myself.

I chose to focus on the Beatles’ drug, phenmetrazine: a nod to the cultural significance of Prellies and their illustrious user base. How easy would it be to get a legal version made? What procedures would it take, what roadblocks would be put in the way?
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...this from about midway through the article.

https://medium.com/matter/19f753fb15e0
 
“While new harmful substances have been emerging with unfailing regularity on the drug scene,” it said, “the international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon.”
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This is true as it usually floundering over whole plethora of other issues. Like the violence it causes and the inability to make positive differences. But in a way the IDC can thank the IDC for this current explosion. If people weren't constantly looking for legal highs to use and sell in not sure this would have ever happened.


This was a great article thanks for sharing it.
 
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Pleasure :) Mikes book is well worth a read too, expanding considerably on the subject touched on above - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Drugs-2-0-R...6392646?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391109163&sr=1-2

I agree completely, I doubt many of the present crop of RC's would exist outside of the most dedicated psychonauts repertoire if not for the laws against the well known drugs. In fact, in an article I found about cannabinoids, the creator of the JWH series of compounds indicates that he pursued the synthesis of these cannabinoids because he wished to explore the action of cannabis on the brain but found it difficult to work with cannabis itself because it was illegal.

Huffman began his research on a class of chemicals found in marijuana, cannabinoids, in 1984. Over the course of 20 years – supported by generous grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) – Huffman and his team developed more than 450 different synthetic cannabinoids that could mimic the effects of natural marijuana.

At first, these compounds provided other scientists with a way of studying marijuana without the bureaucratic inconveniences of trying to get hold of the real thing. While marijuana was, and still is, classified as a Schedule I substance – the most restrictive category of drugs – demand for research on the therapeutic effects of cannabinoids was growing fast.

At first, it seemed like a good idea.

Huffman recounted to the Los Angeles Times in 2011 that one of the compounds he created, JWH-133, was shown to fight brain tumors and non-melanoma skin cancers in mice.

But the lack of restrictions surrounding these new marijuana-like compounds meant that eventually his work would catch the attention of people with other plans – and not to Huffman’s surprise.

“I always had a hunch that someday somebody would say: ‘Hey, let’s try smoking them.’ And lo and behold, that’s what happened.”

As it turns out, anyone who wanted to recreate his synthetic inventions only had to follow the step-by-step instructions Huffman published along with his research. As he explained in a separate interview with ABC News, the instructions were relatively straightforward.

“JWH-018 can be made by a halfway decent undergraduate chemistry major in three steps using commercially available materials.”

Huffman first heard of people using JWH-018 and other synthetic cannabinoids to get high in 2008 – after someone sent him an article from a German magazine. Synthetic marijuana had sprung up in Europe about two years earlier, soon after Huffman published a paper on how to make the JWH compounds.
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from - http://www.leafscience.com/2013/09/25/the-surprising-origins-of-synthetic-marijuana/
 
This arms race between drug developers and prohibitionists sure makes for some great journalism. It's a super easy topic for writers looking to cultivate that aura of "we're on the edge of a brave new world" that readers of all types lap up. But for all the jaw dropping and hand wringing, for all the narrow misses and quirky characters who walk the fine line between brave and stupid, I have yet to see much in-depth speculation on what the practical ramifications will be.

Might postal services and shipping companies start banning the shipment of all powdered substances?
Might hospitals start a policy of giving no drugs at all to patients who present with unexplained altered mental status?
Might insurance companies start refusing to pay for healthcare services rendered as a direct result of the use of new and unknown intoxicants?
Might civil courts start ruling in the favor of defendants, when doctors attempt to treat the adverse effects of novel drugs, unintentionally harm the patients more, and get sued?
Might a legal precedent be set for construing the ingestion of a new synthetic analogue as "attempting to falsify a drug screen", and possibly even "obstruction of justice"?
Might there be pressure to engineer cheaper, faster, more portable, and more reliable technology for determining the molecular structure, or even likely receptor binding affinities, for unidentified powders?
Might would-be takers of established and well-studied synthetic drugs be dissuaded by warnings that they'll never be sure it's the real McCoy?
Might institutions and subcultures that once defended recreational drug use withdraw their support because of the erratic and unpredictable nature of all the new drugs and their users?
Might rubrics develop for the vetting of new recreational drugs, analogous to the USFDA's three-phase clinical trials?
Might a bipartisan recreational drug market develop, its "left" consisting of users willing to try anything and accept anyone who uses anything, while its "right" consisting of those willing to use only established or well-vetted drugs?
Might whole new ways of classifying recreational drugs be used by healthcare and law enforcement?
Might street / slang names for drugs start referring to sets of effects, rather than specific chemicals, once the list is too long and growing too fast for a short list of clever nicknames? I see this foreshadowed in the term "ecstasy", a.k.a. "MDxx"
Might drug use come to be confined to a nerdy elite, the poor and uneducated having launched a new backlash against drug use due to uncertainty over what they're getting?

Most of all, might governments actually face the elephant in the room and explicitly outlaw the ingestion of anything for the primary purpose of altering ones mental state? Because that's exactly what they want to ban.

Let's not forget that this is an arms race. Though this article is good news for those of us here who value the freedom of consenting adults to alter their own mental states responsibly, let's not be naive enough to assume society's various anti-drug fronts won't respond in kind. And when they do, I'm sure they'll do so in a few ways that really make us groan.
 
MyDoorsAreOpen said:
Most of all, might governments actually face the elephant in the room and explicitly outlaw the ingestion of anything for the primary purpose of altering ones mental state? Because that's exactly what they want to ban.
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Like they just did in Queensland, AU? That would kill the legal high market overnight because no part of it would remain "legal".
 
Anyone got access to that ^ full article, sounds interesting..?
 
Thanks Ed :)

Have you heard "The Prince & Old Lady Shade", by Peter Murphy (Bauhaus)?

I always think of it when I see your posts!
 
I think the only reason this hasn't been done is because this piece of legislation would bring with it some big legal problems that would need to be resolved. Off the top of my head:

* It would be hard to justify keeping alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine legal.
* The border between a food and a drug is fuzzy one, especially in light of the fact that dietary changes have profound and proven effects on one's mental state, and people indeed craft their diets aiming to cultivate these mental states.
* If someone is found in public in an altered mental state and all screens for known intoxicants and medical problems turn up nothing, can you ever prove the patient really did take an obscure substance, rather than just have a rare [presentation of a] medical or psychiatric illness?
 
Hi Si Ingwe! The name kind of popped into my head about a decade ago when I was trying to think of a good alias for a forum. Maybe Edgar Mitchel was in the news at the time. Otherwise I have no idea how/why I thought of it!

@MyDoorsAreOpen: According to the bill itself it actually does make exceptions for socially accepted intoxicants and foods in section 36ZE.

I suppose the only good thing about this bill is it actually says, "Thou shalt not get high on anything except on alcohol, caffeine, tobacco and food", instead of pretending that it has anything to do with safety. Perhaps they'll outlaw meditation next.
 
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