Legally High

Mike Power

Drugs 2.0

Portobello, May 2013

I first heard about the website called the Silk Road through a friend of a friend, a maths undergraduate who liked to experiment with drugs. He described it as “an anonymous ebay,” and proof that the war on drugs was over, “and we won.” The Silk Road was hosted on the Tor network, a kind of alternative-internet popular with hackers, dissidents and criminals, which hides the IP address of users, and therefore their identities and locations. Drugs were bought and sold through the Silk Road using bitcoins, a kind of digital currency that is (to some, debated, extent) untraceable. This friend had bought everything from high quality MDMA to rare hallucinogens on the site, receiving it through the post in innocuous packages disguised as music CDs or greetings cards.

On the 1st October last year, FBI agents arrested a man called Ross William Ulbricht at a public library near his home in San Francisco, alleging that he was 'Dread Pirate Roberts', the owner and operator of the Silk Road. He has been charged with narcotics trafficking, money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to murder at least six of his rivals and former collaborators. It seems that the Tor technology did its work well enough, but Ulbricht left signs outside of the anonymous net that were enough to identify him. When the Silk Road was first set up, in January 2011, Dread Pirate Roberts needed to publicise it, including on the ordinary, traceable web, where most people spend their browsing time. The FBI therefore looked for the first mentionss of the Silk Road, reasoning that whoever knew about the site in the earliest days was likely to be close to its founder.

A user calling themselves Altoid posting on an online forum for discussing magic mushrooms claimed to have 'come across' the Silk Road and recommended it to other forum users. In a post on another site, Altoid had included an email address, rossulbricht@gmail.com. The FBI put Ulbricht under surveillance and undercover agents began to communicate with him. When he was arrested and his laptop seized he was logged in to the Silk Road as Dread Pirate Roberts. According to a letter from the US Attorney on the 20th November 2013 opposing Ulbricht's application for bail, he was even stupid enough to keep a diary of his deeds on his laptop, including entries such as: “04/04/2013 received visual confirmation of blackmailers execution.”

The Silk Road has now been shut down, but the association between the internet and the market in mind-bending substances endures. Indeed, according to Mike Power it's an association that's almost as old as the internet itself, and which pre-dates the invention of anonymising tools like Tor. Power has written a history of drug culture – primarily British drug culture – for the new century, exploring life after the 1994 Criminal Justice act and the entry of MDMA (ecstasy) into the mainstream. He follows the lives of MDMA's many newer, younger descendants, and the future of the culture for which it is a sort of Ur-drug. At the centre of this work is an analysis of the seismic shifts of the last five years. Power identifies a confluence of factors recognisable throughout 21st century capitalism – principally the rise of China as a manufacturing centre and the development of the internet as a vast marketplace – that have transformed the world market in drugs, changing not only the way they’re sold, but the nature of the drugs themselves.

New synthetic substances such as mephedrone (called ‘meow meow’ by gullible British journalists who took a satirical internet post at face value) have rode waves of popularity and infamy before being made illegal, only for others such as methoxetamine to follow the same trajectory. New drugs like 6-APB, itself a variation on a substance called 6-APDB, are being invented all the time. Until 10 June 2013 6-APB was legal in Britain and easily bought online for a few pounds. It is now subject to a Temporary Class Drug Order making it illegal for 12 months while scientists and politicians consider further. After this time it will probably be permanently banned. Power cites a laboratory in Hong Kong that offers over 90 different substances for sale and delivery within days. This is an anarchic free market beyond any realistic prospect of government control or restriction, in which the inventiveness of chemists far outpaces the capacity of lawmakers and police forces to adapt.

The reference to Silicon Valley in the book title is, of course, deliberate. Power makes an explicit link between the free-thinking hedonism of switched-on drug users and the libertarian culture of California in the early years of the internet. He argues that what he calls ‘an online drugs culture’ is as old as the internet itself. What has happened in the last five years is not the penetration of the internet into a world of drug taking that was previously entirely offline, but the explosion into the mainstream of a subculture of online discussion, debate and information-sharing around drugs that has existed since the late 1980s. As Power puts it, ‘the history of the internet is bound up with the counter-culture, and the counter-culture finds some of its richest expression in the use of psychoactive chemicals.’ (This isn’t quite the whole story: it leaves out the US military’s role in the development of the internet; LSD and amphetamines have a similarly curious hybrid military-beatnik history.)

There might also be a social-psychological similarity between some ‘tech entrepreneurs’ as we are now bound to call them, and certain kinds of drug dealers. They are men halfway between capitalist and dropout. They despise the idea of conformity and of traditional ‘work’, but love making money. A friend of mine sold a few kilos of MDMA while he was at university, and ended up paying his final year fees and rent in cash. He’s full of business schemes. He once told me he’d like to be ‘a drug venture capitalist.’ He exploited his privileged access to financial capital – usually the lump sum of a new term’s student loan – to buy a starting float of drugs at wholesale prices to sell at a profit, but he also leveraged his social capital. He was selling, but also participating in, a social-cultural experience. He mostly sold to people he knew, and went to the same parties as they did. He was so immersed in his product that making money didn’t feel like work.

Power locates the origin of the online drugs culture in a discussion network called Usenet, which was enormously popular in the late 80s and 90s. Among Usenet’s thousands of discussion groups was one called ‘alt.drugs’. Here users discussed their personal experiences with drugs, and the relationship between drugs, law and morality. In the sub-group ‘alt.drugs.chemistry’ they also discussed the chemistry and manufacture of illegal drugs, principally MDMA and methamphetamine. By 1995 alt.drugs generated around 130 posts and had around 120,000 readers every day. At the height of the worldwide scare about ecstasy, 120,000 people a day were reading detailed messages about the manufacture and consumption of drugs. They were also able to exchange information and discuss issues of safety in the face of what amounted to a campaign of disinformation by governments and media. Power draws an analogy between the nature of online life and the experience of taking ecstasy. They both foster ego-dissolution and a desire to share one’s experiences with others. Ecstasy and the internet, Power says, belong together. (The dullness of drug users’ sharing – in the form of their idle chatter when high – may strengthen not weaken the analogy, given the nature of much social media content.) Such sites as Erowid, founded in 1995, and Bluelight (a better source than the NHS if you want to know which illegal drugs are safe with your prescribed anti-depressants) depend upon the social mode.

By the end of the 1990s, there were thousands of self-described ‘psychonauts’, posting chemical recipes, comparing notes on drugs’ effects, and sourcing small batches from laboratories mainly in Eastern Europe or China. Although this remained a minority sub-culture, not all of the substances used were illegal. Some acquired a degree of fame and popularity, particularly a group of hallucinogens known as the 2Cs. 2C-T-7 was sold online as ‘Blue Mystic Powder’, and in shops in the Netherlands and Japan. Around the same time, a Dutch drug dealer realised that the then UK law on magic mushrooms (it was illegal to prepare them for human consumption, but not to grow, pick or sell them fresh) left a loophole for the sale of punnets of fresh mushrooms to British customers. A craze for mushrooms lasted until the law was changed in August 2005, demonstrating that people – particularly the British, Europe’s leading drug takers – were ready to try something new, and buy it online.

By then the underground was ready to enter the mainstream; all that was required was a gap in the market and the right product to fill it. The gap came in 2007, at the beginning of a two year global MDMA drought. The easiest way to make MDMA is from Safrole, a natural oil distilled from the mreah prew phnom tree found in South-East Asian rainforests. Heightened security in European ports from 2006 onwards caused the price of safrole and other precursor chemicals to rise. Manufacturers attempted to maintain the wholesale price of their products by using cheaper substitutes such as piperazines, but users noted the inferior quality of the MDMA they were being sold; millions of them were now online and able to exchange information. UN anti-drug officers also targeted the supply of safrole at its source; on one occasion in late 2008, the Cambodian government destroyed a quantity of safrole which would have supplied the entire British market for five years. Rather than take weaker, dangerous or more expensive MDMA, users chose an alternative: mephedrone.

Power makes a plausible claim to have found the origin of mephedrone. It seems to have been discovered by a chemist in the UK calling him- or herself ‘Kinetic’. In 2003, Kinetic posted a message to a website called the Hive: ‘I’ve been bored over the last couple of days, and had a few fun reagents lying around, so I thought I’d try and make some 1-(4-methylphenyl)-2-methylaminopropanone hydrochloride, or 4-methylmethcathinone as I suppose it would be commonly called.’ Kinetic then ingested this substance and recorded the results. Later he posted: ‘I really just have to say a big ‘Fuck You’ to the UK government and their stupid drug laws, since I’m high as a kite and there’s nothing they can do.’

Mephedrone is a methcathinone, a variation of cathinone, a Class C drug in Britain. It is loosely related to chat, the natural stimulant popular among Yemenis and Somalis, recently made illegal in the UK. Mephedrone was synthesised in 1929 and written up in the journal of the Société Chimique de France, but before Kinetic no one had thought to use it as a drug, and it was legal in most countries.

It was developed commercially by an Israeli pharmaceutical company called BioRepublik, based in Tel Aviv. In 2003 Israelis had buzzed about hagigat, legal pills containing cathinone whose name came from the Hebrew word for chat. After cathinone was banned in Israel in 2004, BioRepublik chemists seem to have searched for a replacement, and found their way to mephedrone either by reading Kinetic’s post or following the same steps he took. By early 2007, BioRepublik was selling mephedrone in branded capsules called NeoDoves and SubCocas. They were especially popular in Australia, where illegal drugs have always been expensive due to difficulties of importation. They became even more popular as the MDMA drought worsened – compounded by a police seizure of a shipment of 15 million ecstasy pills ordered by an Australian member of the Calabrian mafia. Sweden was another early adopter of mephedrone, which Power attributes to its especially punitive laws on the possession of illegal drugs.

Mephedrone is not hallucinogenic. Although it’s chemically different from MDMA, it produces a similar sensation. Users feel energised, ready to dance, empathetic and open. If you were used to MDMA, you could take it as an approximate substitute, and if you were new to drugs you could take it knowing that you wouldn’t lose control. BioRepublik did not name the active ingredient of their pills, but some users opened up the capsules and tested the contents; the results were published on Bluelight. While it was still legal, there were minimal barriers to entering the market for mephedrone. Laboratories in China began producing and exporting in bulk to Europe. By the time it became illegal in Israel in 2008 its manufacture was almost entirely a Chinese affair. By early 2009, when Power wrote the first stories on mephedrone in the British press, a kilo could be bought in China for as little as £1000 and could be shipped to a British supplier in a few days. One Chinese manufacturer told Power he was sending 50 kilos a week to Britain by FedEx and DHL. His British customers sold the mephedrone on in small amounts through websites. At around £10 a gram in those days (compared to £40 a gram for adulterated MDMA), mephedrone was cheap to its users. Even so, importers were making a profit on each kilo of up to £9000: those 50 kilos per week were therefore worth around £400,000 weekly profit to the British middle men that bought them.

By the end of 2010 mephedrone was illegal in most of the world, including in China. But the trade in new synthetic drugs continued to grow and diversify, now often driven by the experiments of suppliers in their own laboratories. As long as production remained legal in the supplying country (or local officials could be bought off), export to Europe was relatively easy. Shipment of legal substances was straightforward, but even if the product was illegal in the target country it could be shipped under a false label bought with bribes to local customs officials, or routed via a contact in an EU country where it remained legal – routing via a ‘safe’ EU country means that a shipment is less likely to be inspected on arrival at its ultimate destination. In any case, the volume of freight from China and the Far East is too large for all illegal imports to be stopped.

The constantly updating supply of legal drugs can pose significant health risks, as Power outlines. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction reports that between 1997 and 2010 150 new drugs appeared on the European market. The figure was matched and possibly exceeded in the next three years. The new substances have no history of human use and are produced speculatively, in unregulated circumstances, for profit, and are legal only on the basis of the fiction that they are not sold for human consumption. Even if vendors have a good idea about the properties of what they are selling (not always an assumption one can make) they still can’t provide instructions about appropriate dosage. This has serious consequences: a gram of Ketamine can get two or three people high in a night; a gram of Methoxetamine, sold as a direct substitute, can get a hundred people high. It’s too easy to overdose, especially when a 2012 survey found that 15 per cent of respondents had taken an ‘unknown white powder.’ A third of these had taken it from a stranger. If possession of a ‘legal high’ is not illegal, and its sale is not illegal, what is illegal? Only the information needed to make it safer.

The Elephant in the Room

This review of Alex Niven's book about Oasis, Definitely Maybe (33 1/3), was originally published in the Oxonian Review. http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-elephant-in-the-room/

The Elephant in the Room

Alex Niven
Definitely Maybe (33 1/3)

Alex Niven opens Definitely Maybe, his book about Oasis’ debut album and the culture that made it, by saying that the band was “mostly popularly loved, mostly critically scorned.” That’s a fair assessment (though a lot of non-critics hate them too), but it’s not the end of the story, as Niven makes clear. In the mid-1990s Oasis were massive. They were front page news, the most potent symbols of a popular mood that seemed to promise not just the rejection of Thatcherism but its electoral annihilation. You couldn’t get away from them, even if you wanted to. (I didn’t, at the time). Their significance must be greater than that opening aphorism would imply.

In his last book, Folk Opposition (Zero Books, 2011), Niven argued that the contemporary left has largely abandoned any effort to speak to, or for, a mass of people sharing a common culture. At the same time, while some parts of postwar popular culture were always created in a semi-commercial context (television, for instance), now even more popular practices like music and football have been transformed by the neo-liberal project. In response to this shift the left has not articulated any sort of resistance rooted in mass identity—the “folk opposition” for which Niven would wish—but has instead retreated into a kind of Fabianism, detached from, and rather scornful of, popular culture. If the left is to find any kind of mass appeal it needs to start by reclaiming populism from the far right.

Such a project would necessarily entail taking popular culture seriously; in his examination of Oasis, Niven shows how this might work. He sets out to find, in “the most apparently banal, ordinary, hackneyed phenomenon of the last 20 years”, some previously missed clues that might explain why “populism has disappeared from pop music” and why “we don’t seem to have made any real artistic or social progress since the 1990s.” In a sense then, though he never says so explicitly, this book can be thought of as a sequel to his last.

Niven sticks close to the songs, mostly discussing the tracks in the order in which they appear on the album. There are digressions though, especially to the B-sides, and the book is divided into four sections titled ‘Earth’, ‘Water’, ‘Fire’ and ‘Air’. Niven uses this loose structure to group his thoughts about the wider political and social context from which Oasis emerged. ‘Earth’ is a discussion of the bands’ roots, both geographical and musical; ‘Water’ refers to the context of the 1990s, when Oasis rode a wave of optimism to wealth and fame; ‘Fire’ examines the anger that infused their music, particularly in this first album; ‘Air’ is broadly about politics.

Given his determination to rescue the band from critical derision, Niven is often on the defensive. Some of this comes over too strongly, detracting from his broader claims about the group’s significance. In the course of a discussion of Oasis’ borrowings from other musicians Niven makes a comparison with early hip hop and the practice of sampling. It’s fair to say that “Oasis’ appropriation of the past was just as valid” as Public Enemy’s, but it’s a stretch to suppose that it was equally successful artistically. We can agree that Oasis were not straightforward plagiarists, without regarding as plausible the claim that their form of cut and paste was as interesting as Public Enemy’s, or its end product as novel.

Niven is on much firmer ground defending Oasis’ lyrics. For a start, he points out, most pop and rock lyrics are basic, internally inconsistent, and even nonsensical. Where popular music lyrics succeed they usually do so as fragments, arresting couplets that function as slogans or, in Niven’s phrase, “verbal graffiti”. Accompanied by the music, lines like “we see things they’ll never see” are more than capable of carrying the song along with them. The point isn’t that Noel Gallagher’s lyrics were as good as Morrissey’s, or even Jarvis Cocker’s, it’s that they weren’t unusually bad. (They’re arguably better, for instance, than those of Kurt Cobain, often regarded as a tortured genius.)

Although the “sampling” analogy is misguided, Niven is good when he examines the musical influences from which the group assembled their styles. While many are inclined to dismiss them as a facsimile of the Beatles, Niven convincingly shows how the band also drew from shoegaze, grunge, acid-house, and punk. Before they later became a derivative cliché of themselves, Niven argues, Oasis produced a music that was vital and contemporary, a clear product of the early 90s. (The only omission in Niven’s list of influences, I feel, is Irish traditional music: the Gallagher’s father, Tommy, was an occasional DJ in South Manchester’s Irish clubs, and Noel’s solos often use the pentatonic scale popular in folk*.)

For all the laddishness that Oasis projected, there’s a strong escapist tone to their music and lyrics. Escape is a recurring theme, and though it’s portrayed as impossible in ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ (which Niven compares to the exhortation in Trainspotting not to “choose life”), it is defiantly and definitively promised in ‘Live Forever’. In many ways Oasis inherited the vague unspecific euphoria of rave, filtered it through a football crowd, and produced a kind of “lad psychedelia”.

Ultimately though, Niven’s argument comes down to politics. Here, as he concedes, the elephant in the room is Tony Blair. Many versions of the story of the 1990s assume an obvious parallel between Blair and Oasis, with Britpop as the state-music of New Labour. Niven denies much of this, pointing out that the band was formed, Definitely Maybe written and recorded, and their first single released, before Blair even became leader of the Labour party. There’s certainly an argument for 1995 as a watershed for both Oasis and the Labour party. But even if Oasis’ euphoric  fellow-feeling had a political edge—Niven quotes Gallagher ascribing an explicitly anti-establishment meaning to ‘Up in the Sky’—it was sufficiently unspecific and stripped of content to render it useable to a charlatan fraud like Blair.

Niven wants us to see Oasis as representing not only a lost past, burned out and pensioned off by 1996, but also as the clue to a possible future, to be excavated from the ruins of that first burst of Mancunian-Irish energy. From the present vantage point such an excavation of the late 80s and early 90s is more urgent than ever. While New Labour might have seemed to promise a more optimistic, open, social-democratic Britain, that moment now appears as merely a brief slowdown in a three (going on four) decade-long project of neoliberalism, powered by the financial services industry and justified by an increasing hatred of the poorest and weakest. Niven sees it is vital that we examine the time between the second summer of love and the Criminal Justice Bill for clues as to what went wrong. Even if he is too kind about their music, Niven is right to identify Oasis as the most culturally central, and in that sense the most important, voice of the period.

* Incidentally, how many great ‘English’ musicians have in fact come from Irish roots? John Lydon, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, John Lennon, to name just a few.