Si Dread
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2002
- Messages
- 3,226
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?
...this from about midway through the article.
https://medium.com/matter/19f753fb15e0