8 ms·

In Quest for a 'Legal High,' Chemists Outfox the Law

83 points by J3L2404 16y ago

rms 16y ago
Note that these chemicals are mostly automatically illegal in the USA under the Federal Analog Act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analog_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analog_Act However, the Federal Analog Act has been notably tested twice in court to criminalize new substances and the Act was not upheld the first time and was upheld the second time. So it is not of yet well established and it is suppliers that are at risk of prosecution, not consumers.
- viraptor 16y ago
  Not knowing enough about chemistry: what are the chances of people with medicine bought in another country being stopped as carrying something "substantially similar" to a drug?
  - rms 16y ago
    0+, the federal analog exists as a law on the books but takes a concerted prosecution effort to use.
- markbao 16y ago
  A lot of designer drugs are synthesized in places like Israel, which has no law prohibiting drug analogs. Mephedrone started to become widely popularized in the Middle East and Europe because of an Israeli manufacturer/online distributor. Quote from the pharma crime director of Israel's Ministry of Health: "Israel, to my sad dismay, is a major leader in designer drugs for this reason."
- olegkikin 16y ago
  Wow, many legal drugs should be illegal under that act.
- chc 16y ago
  The article also notes that the drugs are marketed as not being for human consumption, which is an exemption in the analog act as well.
- narrator 16y ago
  Isn't the federal analog act what they use to bust people who are selling fake drugs? The reasoning being, well you said it was the same as illegal drug x so we're busting you as if you were selling illegal drug x (even if what you were selling is perfectly legal oregano). It's a really kind of Alice in Wonderland war on drugs reality but it actually happens all the time. Just put into google news "busted for selling fake drugs" or something like that and you'll get tons of stories.
tptacek 16y ago
This was going on at least back in 2000-2001; I still have a "poisonous non-consumables" catalog in my basement somewhere (I have friends who are into this kind of thing). Read the forum posts about this stuff online; it's funny, there's a backlash of enthusiasts calling vendors like this guy "slash and burn" outfits for popularizing chemicals and getting them banned.
noonespecial 16y ago
I think its going to be a pretty short trip from here to laws that are worded so "that which is not expressly permitted is automatically denied".
- tptacek 16y ago
  These chemicals are already illegal under straightforward interpretations of US law, but they're not illegal "enough" to prevent them from being sold online and shipped Fedex. This seems like the kind of "illegal" that mostly matters if you hang a sign out your window and start doing business. It's worth noting though that there's really no intellectually valid argument in support of mephedrone or MDAI or whatever-the-hell-else they're selling --- if you're going to make meth, cocaine, and LSD illegal, this stuff clearly should be too.
  - dtf 16y ago
    MDAI and MDAT seem to me to be particularly suitable drugs for therapy. Whenever you blanket ban a group of chemicals you also make research on medicinal use practically impossible.
nphase 16y ago
Haha, reminds me of The 51st State (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0227984/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0227984/)
jacoblyles 16y ago
Under current policy regimes consumers seek drugs which aren't illegal yet and don't pay much attention to their safety or lack of safety testing. This seems suboptimal. If these drugs were legal, consumers would prefer drugs that made them feel good and had a good safety record.
- kablamo 16y ago
  I think libertarians under estimate the good that can come from regulation. Regulation can protect people before the bad thing happens. If the drug kills you, your family can take that company to court and get them shut down, but you are already dead and that sucks. On the other hand, I suspect that over regulation by the US FDA has killed a large number of people by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to market. Any choice in the prohibition/regulation debate is going result in some dead people. The goal is to find the point on the spectrum with the least number of deaths. I don't know exactly where that is, but I do feel over regulation is destroying Mexico and other parts of South America and we should move towards less regulation.
  - jacoblyles 16y ago
    Keeping the conversation within the domain of the current article, there is no policy goal to mitigate harm from recreational drugs. If a drug makes people feel good it will be outlawed whether it is completely harmless or very dangerous. This has the side effect of pushing some people from relatively harmless but illegal drugs whose effects are well understood to potentially harmful new drugs that are not yet illegal. No lives will be saved by this policy, which isn't surprising since the goal is not harm mitigation (despite the rhetoric of government officials) but keeping people from consuming psychoactive substances that make them feel good. Are far as FDA regulation vs. liability is concerned - you cannot outlaw the production of drugs which will kill some people. All you can do is provide incentives for drug makers to research the risks of their products as thoroughly as possible. Drugs are still approved by the FDA that kill people despite the fact that the FDA approval process is stupidly expensive. There is no perfect world. The goal of policy should be to reduce risk in a cost-effective way. Harm reduction should be balanced with the corresponding damage regulation does to life-saving medical research. After we weigh various policies we may find that the status quo is suboptimal. As rational people we should keep our minds on the right trade-offs and the right metrics. Many people are comfortable with the idea of a regulatory state regardless of its effectiveness - it makes them feel safe. We should not let these emotions of safety influence our thinking overmuch.
dtf 16y ago
This is the effect of drug prohibition in our modern age. You can attack the supply chain, but not the demand. Savvy entrepreneurs, internet marketing and a cornucopia of untested synthetic drugs will continue to satisfy the demands of a largely youthful consumer base. We've made the safest drugs illegal, only to open up a vast market in utter unknowns. Better the devil you know.
- dkersten 16y ago
  We've made the safest drugs illegal This is the problem.. They've also made alcohol, which is supposedly more dangerous than, for example, cannabis or MDMA, legal. Nicotine is also dangerous and legal.
  - DannoHung 16y ago
    Is Nicotine itself actually dangerous or is it the predominant vector that is dangerous?
    - rabidsnail 16y ago
      Smoke doesn't cause heart disease.
      - pasbesoin 16y ago
        From memory, I believe one line of thinking is that vasoconstrictors (of which nicotine is one), in the course of chronic exposure / activity, promote rigidity aka hardening of blood vessels.
        rabidsnail 16y ago
        I said smoke not smoking. I think you misunderstood.
        pasbesoin 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
dkersten 16y ago
European authorities blame mephedrone for the death of three young people in the U.K. and Sweden in recent years. Except, at least in the case of the two teenagers who died in the UK, it was in the news a few months ago that autopsies later showed that they didn't actually have any mephedrone in their systems.
- jakerocheleau 16y ago
  scare tactics induced by the media to try and cover up these drugs. I'm not defending drone, it's a horribly fiendish poison and it's certainly something which can kill you if taken in a large enough dose. But media corps lying about the facts on these drugs isn't helping us advance anywhere
  - dkersten 16y ago
    I completely agree. By the way, I know a few people who have taken mephedrone and the general consensus is that its bad: side-effects appear to include not being able to sleep for the next few days, depression, agitation and loss of concentration. I would very strongly advize people to NOT take mephedrone.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
olalonde 16y ago
There was a small cafe here in Montreal that used to sell legal highs but had to shut its doors due to pressures from law enforcement. I once tried Salvia Divinorum (which has no known negative side effects [1]) and I can testify it's definitely not a placebo as I first suspected with "legal highs". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum#Long_term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum#Long_term
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  I can testify it's definitely not a placebo as I first suspected with "legal highs". Cool! How did you set up the double-blind study?
  - ghotli 16y ago
    Don't be fooled by thinking salvia is just a "legal high". It can cause profound ego-loss for upwards of ten minutes. The history is that it is what native american shamans used to chew on to see visions. A common experience is one in which people say "I forgot that I was something, then I realized I was something but I wasn't sure what that was." They then had to figure out the world again as the drug wore off. I think it's foolish to group something this psychologically powerful within the same group as something that "just gets you high" like alcohol or pot. http://www.erowid.org/plants/salvia/salvia.shtml http://www.erowid.org/plants/salvia/salvia.shtml
    - olalonde 16y ago
      You're right that it's much more powerful than alcohol/pot but the truth is that it is legal in most countries and states. The "upside" is that its effects totally wear off after ~15 minutes and there are no known long term or addictive effects.
      - dkersten 16y ago
        The fact that some drugs are legal certainly doesn't mean they're not as strong or powerful than ones that are illegal. Salvia is, apparently, one of the strongest hallucinogens there is. The difference between it and, say, LSD, is that the Salvia "trip" only lasts ten to twenty minutes. I have personally tried Salvia some years back and have had some seriously bizzare experiences. I'd rather not post them online, but if you're interested, send me an email.
bryanh 16y ago
You can see the actual products the have for sale here: http://alchemylabz.eu/products.php http://alchemylabz.eu/products.php. A little Googling on the listed analogues for sale reveals that most people in the usual forums for recreational drug use have long written these sorts of guys of as scammers. However, with this WSJ article, I'd say they are now verified as legit. I expect his business to pick up considerably... Needless to say, this is quite an interesting game of cat and mouse and just goes further to illustrate the futility of prohibition.
roel_v 16y ago
Meh, this has been going on since MDMA was put on banned substances lists across the world in the 1980's. Up until a few years ago, so-called 'smart shops' (in the Netherlands selling drug paraphernalia, 'coming down' products like vitamin pills and magic mushrooms before they were banned) would sell 2C-B which has been synthesized by Shulgin in the 1970's already, and documented along with MDMA, MDA, MDE etc. in PIHKAL. Drug legislation that I am familiar with (all of them Western European) is designed to cope with this process. There is usually a 'drug act' which prohibits all materials on a secondary list, and this list is then to be adjust by 'the minister' or similar, which in practice means that there is a ministry that can fairly easily (within a few weeks) add substances that are banned. It's cat and mouse, true, but the 'war' (between chemists and the government) had largely calmed down by the late 1990's. I guess when new forms of drugs come into vogue, that variations pop up, but these too will be driven into the margins in a few years. (typically after a while the processes for manufacturing become so difficult or dependent on expensive/hard to get precursors that it get out of reach for amateur chemists, at which the police call it 'good enough'.) For those interested, the Uncle Fester books (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Preisler http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Preisler) are readily available online and very interesting from a 'chemistry hacker' point of view (I don't know anything about chemistry but I still enjoyed reading them very much, for the 'underground glamour' aspect and the inventiveness. Don't take any of the legal advice in the books though, the guy may be a great chemist but on other things he has some strange ideas.). As a side note, is this 'meow meow' really popular across Europe? I don't know much about it but it seems to me that it's only widely spread in the UK (then again I get all my information on 'the scene' from journal articles and government reports so I may just be lagging in information).
JonnieCache 16y ago
Mephedrone is horrible stuff, quite similar to methamphetamine in chemistry/effects on the body.[1] It was EXTREMELY popular in the UK when it was legal up until last year. This was due to the total and complete unavailability of the much safer, less addictive and much more well tested MDMA (ecstacy) from the summer of 2008 until mid 2009. This has been speculated to have happened as a result of international co-operation to make sassafras oil, the main precursor of MDMA less available, and generally crack down on the production of one of the worlds most popular synthetic narcotic drugs. This almost certainly had a lot to do with the 2008 summer olympics in china, where a lot of production of precursors and final products occurs. The law of unintended consequences rears its head again. Prevent the supply of one drug and the demand switches to a newer more dangerous drug, whose supply you have no ability to control. [1] http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-cathinodes-report-2010 http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-c...

83 points by J3L2404 16y ago

rms 16y ago

Note that these chemicals are mostly automatically illegal in the USA under the Federal Analog Act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analog_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analog_Act However, the Federal Analog Act has been notably tested twice in court to criminalize new substances and the Act was not upheld the first time and was upheld the second time. So it is not of yet well established and it is suppliers that are at risk of prosecution, not consumers.

viraptor 16y ago
Not knowing enough about chemistry: what are the chances of people with medicine bought in another country being stopped as carrying something "substantially similar" to a drug?
- rms 16y ago
  0+, the federal analog exists as a law on the books but takes a concerted prosecution effort to use.
markbao 16y ago
A lot of designer drugs are synthesized in places like Israel, which has no law prohibiting drug analogs. Mephedrone started to become widely popularized in the Middle East and Europe because of an Israeli manufacturer/online distributor. Quote from the pharma crime director of Israel's Ministry of Health: "Israel, to my sad dismay, is a major leader in designer drugs for this reason."
olegkikin 16y ago
Wow, many legal drugs should be illegal under that act.
chc 16y ago
The article also notes that the drugs are marketed as not being for human consumption, which is an exemption in the analog act as well.
narrator 16y ago
Isn't the federal analog act what they use to bust people who are selling fake drugs? The reasoning being, well you said it was the same as illegal drug x so we're busting you as if you were selling illegal drug x (even if what you were selling is perfectly legal oregano). It's a really kind of Alice in Wonderland war on drugs reality but it actually happens all the time. Just put into google news "busted for selling fake drugs" or something like that and you'll get tons of stories.

tptacek 16y ago

This was going on at least back in 2000-2001; I still have a "poisonous non-consumables" catalog in my basement somewhere (I have friends who are into this kind of thing). Read the forum posts about this stuff online; it's funny, there's a backlash of enthusiasts calling vendors like this guy "slash and burn" outfits for popularizing chemicals and getting them banned.

noonespecial 16y ago

I think its going to be a pretty short trip from here to laws that are worded so "that which is not expressly permitted is automatically denied".

tptacek 16y ago
These chemicals are already illegal under straightforward interpretations of US law, but they're not illegal "enough" to prevent them from being sold online and shipped Fedex. This seems like the kind of "illegal" that mostly matters if you hang a sign out your window and start doing business. It's worth noting though that there's really no intellectually valid argument in support of mephedrone or MDAI or whatever-the-hell-else they're selling --- if you're going to make meth, cocaine, and LSD illegal, this stuff clearly should be too.
- dtf 16y ago
  MDAI and MDAT seem to me to be particularly suitable drugs for therapy. Whenever you blanket ban a group of chemicals you also make research on medicinal use practically impossible.

nphase 16y ago

Haha, reminds me of The 51st State (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0227984/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0227984/)

jacoblyles 16y ago

Under current policy regimes consumers seek drugs which aren't illegal yet and don't pay much attention to their safety or lack of safety testing. This seems suboptimal. If these drugs were legal, consumers would prefer drugs that made them feel good and had a good safety record.

kablamo 16y ago
I think libertarians under estimate the good that can come from regulation. Regulation can protect people before the bad thing happens. If the drug kills you, your family can take that company to court and get them shut down, but you are already dead and that sucks. On the other hand, I suspect that over regulation by the US FDA has killed a large number of people by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to market. Any choice in the prohibition/regulation debate is going result in some dead people. The goal is to find the point on the spectrum with the least number of deaths. I don't know exactly where that is, but I do feel over regulation is destroying Mexico and other parts of South America and we should move towards less regulation.
- jacoblyles 16y ago
  Keeping the conversation within the domain of the current article, there is no policy goal to mitigate harm from recreational drugs. If a drug makes people feel good it will be outlawed whether it is completely harmless or very dangerous. This has the side effect of pushing some people from relatively harmless but illegal drugs whose effects are well understood to potentially harmful new drugs that are not yet illegal. No lives will be saved by this policy, which isn't surprising since the goal is not harm mitigation (despite the rhetoric of government officials) but keeping people from consuming psychoactive substances that make them feel good. Are far as FDA regulation vs. liability is concerned - you cannot outlaw the production of drugs which will kill some people. All you can do is provide incentives for drug makers to research the risks of their products as thoroughly as possible. Drugs are still approved by the FDA that kill people despite the fact that the FDA approval process is stupidly expensive. There is no perfect world. The goal of policy should be to reduce risk in a cost-effective way. Harm reduction should be balanced with the corresponding damage regulation does to life-saving medical research. After we weigh various policies we may find that the status quo is suboptimal. As rational people we should keep our minds on the right trade-offs and the right metrics. Many people are comfortable with the idea of a regulatory state regardless of its effectiveness - it makes them feel safe. We should not let these emotions of safety influence our thinking overmuch.

dtf 16y ago

This is the effect of drug prohibition in our modern age. You can attack the supply chain, but not the demand. Savvy entrepreneurs, internet marketing and a cornucopia of untested synthetic drugs will continue to satisfy the demands of a largely youthful consumer base. We've made the safest drugs illegal, only to open up a vast market in utter unknowns. Better the devil you know.

dkersten 16y ago
We've made the safest drugs illegal This is the problem.. They've also made alcohol, which is supposedly more dangerous than, for example, cannabis or MDMA, legal. Nicotine is also dangerous and legal.
- DannoHung 16y ago
  Is Nicotine itself actually dangerous or is it the predominant vector that is dangerous?
  - rabidsnail 16y ago
    Smoke doesn't cause heart disease.
    - pasbesoin 16y ago
      From memory, I believe one line of thinking is that vasoconstrictors (of which nicotine is one), in the course of chronic exposure / activity, promote rigidity aka hardening of blood vessels.
      - rabidsnail 16y ago
        I said smoke not smoking. I think you misunderstood.
        pasbesoin 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

dkersten 16y ago

European authorities blame mephedrone for the death of three young people in the U.K. and Sweden in recent years. Except, at least in the case of the two teenagers who died in the UK, it was in the news a few months ago that autopsies later showed that they didn't actually have any mephedrone in their systems.

jakerocheleau 16y ago
scare tactics induced by the media to try and cover up these drugs. I'm not defending drone, it's a horribly fiendish poison and it's certainly something which can kill you if taken in a large enough dose. But media corps lying about the facts on these drugs isn't helping us advance anywhere
- dkersten 16y ago
  I completely agree. By the way, I know a few people who have taken mephedrone and the general consensus is that its bad: side-effects appear to include not being able to sleep for the next few days, depression, agitation and loss of concentration. I would very strongly advize people to NOT take mephedrone.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

olalonde 16y ago

There was a small cafe here in Montreal that used to sell legal highs but had to shut its doors due to pressures from law enforcement. I once tried Salvia Divinorum (which has no known negative side effects [1]) and I can testify it's definitely not a placebo as I first suspected with "legal highs". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum#Long_term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum#Long_term

michael_dorfman 16y ago
I can testify it's definitely not a placebo as I first suspected with "legal highs". Cool! How did you set up the double-blind study?
- ghotli 16y ago
  Don't be fooled by thinking salvia is just a "legal high". It can cause profound ego-loss for upwards of ten minutes. The history is that it is what native american shamans used to chew on to see visions. A common experience is one in which people say "I forgot that I was something, then I realized I was something but I wasn't sure what that was." They then had to figure out the world again as the drug wore off. I think it's foolish to group something this psychologically powerful within the same group as something that "just gets you high" like alcohol or pot. http://www.erowid.org/plants/salvia/salvia.shtml http://www.erowid.org/plants/salvia/salvia.shtml
  - olalonde 16y ago
    You're right that it's much more powerful than alcohol/pot but the truth is that it is legal in most countries and states. The "upside" is that its effects totally wear off after ~15 minutes and there are no known long term or addictive effects.
    - dkersten 16y ago
      The fact that some drugs are legal certainly doesn't mean they're not as strong or powerful than ones that are illegal. Salvia is, apparently, one of the strongest hallucinogens there is. The difference between it and, say, LSD, is that the Salvia "trip" only lasts ten to twenty minutes. I have personally tried Salvia some years back and have had some seriously bizzare experiences. I'd rather not post them online, but if you're interested, send me an email.

bryanh 16y ago

You can see the actual products the have for sale here: http://alchemylabz.eu/products.php http://alchemylabz.eu/products.php. A little Googling on the listed analogues for sale reveals that most people in the usual forums for recreational drug use have long written these sorts of guys of as scammers. However, with this WSJ article, I'd say they are now verified as legit. I expect his business to pick up considerably... Needless to say, this is quite an interesting game of cat and mouse and just goes further to illustrate the futility of prohibition.

roel_v 16y ago

Meh, this has been going on since MDMA was put on banned substances lists across the world in the 1980's. Up until a few years ago, so-called 'smart shops' (in the Netherlands selling drug paraphernalia, 'coming down' products like vitamin pills and magic mushrooms before they were banned) would sell 2C-B which has been synthesized by Shulgin in the 1970's already, and documented along with MDMA, MDA, MDE etc. in PIHKAL. Drug legislation that I am familiar with (all of them Western European) is designed to cope with this process. There is usually a 'drug act' which prohibits all materials on a secondary list, and this list is then to be adjust by 'the minister' or similar, which in practice means that there is a ministry that can fairly easily (within a few weeks) add substances that are banned. It's cat and mouse, true, but the 'war' (between chemists and the government) had largely calmed down by the late 1990's. I guess when new forms of drugs come into vogue, that variations pop up, but these too will be driven into the margins in a few years. (typically after a while the processes for manufacturing become so difficult or dependent on expensive/hard to get precursors that it get out of reach for amateur chemists, at which the police call it 'good enough'.) For those interested, the Uncle Fester books (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Preisler http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Preisler) are readily available online and very interesting from a 'chemistry hacker' point of view (I don't know anything about chemistry but I still enjoyed reading them very much, for the 'underground glamour' aspect and the inventiveness. Don't take any of the legal advice in the books though, the guy may be a great chemist but on other things he has some strange ideas.). As a side note, is this 'meow meow' really popular across Europe? I don't know much about it but it seems to me that it's only widely spread in the UK (then again I get all my information on 'the scene' from journal articles and government reports so I may just be lagging in information).

JonnieCache 16y ago

Mephedrone is horrible stuff, quite similar to methamphetamine in chemistry/effects on the body.[1] It was EXTREMELY popular in the UK when it was legal up until last year. This was due to the total and complete unavailability of the much safer, less addictive and much more well tested MDMA (ecstacy) from the summer of 2008 until mid 2009. This has been speculated to have happened as a result of international co-operation to make sassafras oil, the main precursor of MDMA less available, and generally crack down on the production of one of the worlds most popular synthetic narcotic drugs. This almost certainly had a lot to do with the 2008 summer olympics in china, where a lot of production of precursors and final products occurs. The law of unintended consequences rears its head again. Prevent the supply of one drug and the demand switches to a newer more dangerous drug, whose supply you have no ability to control. [1] http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-cathinodes-report-2010 http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/drugs/acmd1/acmd-c...