slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2008
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By JEANNE WHALEN
ANTWERP, Belgium—When the housing market crashed in 2008, David Llewellyn's construction business went with it. Casting around for a new gig, he decided to commercialize something he'd long done as a hobby: making drugs.
David Llewellyn is part of a wave of chemically savvy entrepreneurs who see gold in the gray zone between legal and illegal drugs.
But the 49-year-old Scotsman didn't go into the illegal drug trade. Instead, he entered the so-called "legal high" business—a burgeoning industry producing new psychoactive powders and pills that are marketed as "not for human consumption."
Mr. Llewellyn, a self-described former crack addict, started out making mephedrone, a stimulant also known as Meow Meow that was already popular with the European clubbing set. Once governments began banning it earlier this year, Mr. Llewellyn and a chemistry-savvy partner started selling something they dubbed Nopaine—a stimulant they concocted by tweaking the molecular structure of the attention-deficit drug Ritalin.
Nopaine "is every bit as good as cocaine," says Mr. Llewellyn, who has lived in Antwerp on and off since the late 1980s. "You can freebase it. You can snort it like crack." Still, he emphasized, "Everything we sell is legal. I don't want to go to jail for 14 years."
article continued here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704763904575550200845267526.html
ANTWERP, Belgium—When the housing market crashed in 2008, David Llewellyn's construction business went with it. Casting around for a new gig, he decided to commercialize something he'd long done as a hobby: making drugs.
David Llewellyn is part of a wave of chemically savvy entrepreneurs who see gold in the gray zone between legal and illegal drugs.
But the 49-year-old Scotsman didn't go into the illegal drug trade. Instead, he entered the so-called "legal high" business—a burgeoning industry producing new psychoactive powders and pills that are marketed as "not for human consumption."
Mr. Llewellyn, a self-described former crack addict, started out making mephedrone, a stimulant also known as Meow Meow that was already popular with the European clubbing set. Once governments began banning it earlier this year, Mr. Llewellyn and a chemistry-savvy partner started selling something they dubbed Nopaine—a stimulant they concocted by tweaking the molecular structure of the attention-deficit drug Ritalin.
Nopaine "is every bit as good as cocaine," says Mr. Llewellyn, who has lived in Antwerp on and off since the late 1980s. "You can freebase it. You can snort it like crack." Still, he emphasized, "Everything we sell is legal. I don't want to go to jail for 14 years."
article continued here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704763904575550200845267526.html
