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The drug revolution that no one can stop

230 points by r721 12y ago

xbmcuser 12y ago
Actually it can be stopped very easily legalizing drug use. The major reason we have for designer drugs is market demand.
- jamesdelaneyie 12y ago
  I don't think so. It's like saying we have Heineken, so why would anyone want a craft beer?
  - dagw 12y ago
    People drink craft beer because they taste better, not because it gets them drunk better. In fact I'd wager that people whom drink beer because of its alcohol probably prefer Heineken, since it gives the same end state at half the price.
    - jamesdelaneyie 12y ago
      More than fair point. Craft beers usually do have a higher alcohol percentage though, so they would actually get you drunk 'better'. Taste would be subjective however. Personally I'd be 50/50 on getting drunk, having a nice drink, no reason you can't have both :) The point being, if all substances were legalised, I think we all could easily see there being a wide range of branded drugs that might offer the same base experience with different subtleties to it. Longer and harder or short and sweet etc. You don't think so?
Phithagoras 12y ago
The Government in New Zealand had an interesting response to this sort of thing. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23703-new-zealand-law-permits-low-risk-designer-drugs.html#.VI40xivF-So http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23703-new-zealand-law-... Seems like it might be the most effective idea, since, if there are legalized drugs, the majority of the drug oriented population is likely to stick to the safe, approved drugs, and, those who are inclined to push limits can easily go into research without fear of persecution.
- slyall 12y ago
  Unfortunately things didn't work out so well due to later regulations. A summary here: http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/the-twilight-state-of-the-psychoactive-substances/ http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/the-twilight-state-of-the-...
coldcode 12y ago
I've never found any interest in taking anything stronger than an occasional beer but as a former chemist I find the research into these types of drugs fascinating. We really do need to look into areas that might be highly illegal if for no reason other than to learn how the brain works.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  It's hard, though. Many chemists have accidentally killed themselves with experimentation, because there's no way to really know the results of your experiments without testing it on someone.
  - Fuzzwah 12y ago
    [citation needed]
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Check out the history of LSD. It almost wasn't invented. They tested it on animals, and noticed "some level of disturbance" or some such, but nobody had any clue what the effects were, and nobody really cared. Then someone decided to try it on themselves. The only reason that was able to happen is because the legal and ethical restrictions were looser than they are today. In the meantime, several other such experiments have ended with the deaths of the chemists who decided to self-experiment. I remember reading about several specific chemists. I'll try to find them. Maybe someone else can point them out while I look. EDIT: I'm wrong.
      - Alex3917 12y ago
        To the best of my knowledge there haven't been any deaths among chemists bioassaying new compounds for psychoactive potential. This isn't surprising, considering the vast majority of the 'new' research chemicals coming onto the market were first synthesized by the same 5 or 10, all of whom were/are very cautious and well educated. The closest I've heard of is the grad student who gave himself Parkinsons and later died while trying to make MPPP, but that was because he unknowingly messed up the synthesis and not because he was purposely experimenting with some new molecule.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Custom drugs are all rage in Russia. Chinese plants make synthetic cannabioids with varying formulas which then happen to be not made illegal yet. Those are moved into country, mixed with all kinds of chemical shit and sold as "курительные смеси" - mixes for smoking. This fall dozens of people died from these nasty chemicals, usually in packs in one city or another. There was a law passed which makes all that stuff illegal but I'm not sure if it will pan out. Why they proliferated so badly? I guess because the local market of [relatively] light drugs is underserved in general. For example, I happen to not have ever come in contact with weed and don't know a single person who can get some. But pretty sure there are a lot of advertisements like "курительные смеси 8 9XX XXX XX XX" mask-painted on pavements all around the city.
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  I actually read about a terrifying drug made by cheap materials in Russia (easy to self create) named Crocodile... Skin gets eaten and it's very horrifying to see long term users, carefull not for the weak of heart :s http://goo.gl/wiAXNx http://goo.gl/wiAXNx
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - poizan42 12y ago
    That's just impure desomorphine though
    - refurb 12y ago
      Exactly. Desomorphine itself doesn't cause your flesh to rot off, it's the impurities in it. I think they commonly use an iodine/phosphorus reduction to remove the hydroxyl group. It doesn't surprise me that injecting a drug that has left over phosphorus triiodide or other phosphorus/iodine compounds would destroy your tissue.
    - girvo 12y ago
      I truly don't understand how desomorphine can be created through the RP/I route. It makes pretty much zero sense based on my chemistry knowledge (BSci in Chemistry, but didn't complete it, dropped out third year). I've no idea what they're actually injecting, but I do know that a lot of the photos a number of years ago that were tagged as "Krokodil" were in fact a different drug entirely
krick 12y ago
Oh, I really hate these articles. Intriguing headline and then a horribly long story with all these pseudo-artistic details like "immediately noticed a tense quality in the ambulance driver’s voice" wich is just too bothersome to actually read it. Some TLDR, anyone?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "pseudo-artistic details like "immediately noticed a tense quality in the ambulance driver’s voice"" You mean storytelling?
  - frozenport 12y ago
    I can sympathize with OP, sometime we just want the info without pictures of the Beatles.
    - robert_tweed 12y ago
      Seriously, I'm considering writing an HN filtering proxy that ignores these kinds of magazine pieces. I just don't have time to read them properly, even if they are interesting enough that I inevitably get drawn into some of them. That's just another factor in HN becoming a time-sink instead of a productive source of useful news. I suspect if we had the ability to downvote submissions as well as upvote, less of them would hit the front page in the first place, but I can't be certain. As for this article, the writing is OK, but I honestly wonder sometimes if these authors are being paid by the word. Take the first paragraph for instance. Replace it entirely with, "It was a dark and stormy night". Did that make the article better, worse, or no different? Had the same information been conveyed in far fewer words, I wouldn't have had to skim over parts and would have got a lot more out of it. There's definitely a place for articles like this, but I don't think HN is that place.
      - r721 12y ago
        Sorry for wasting your time, I purposedly submitted this on Sunday, a slow news day. I can agree though that sometimes it's hard to estimate time which you would spend on a story. I use a word-counting service (textalyser) for that, and this particular story is quite long even by longform standards: 7,800 words / 47,000 characters (with spaces).
girvo 12y ago
I wish I could share some of my knowledge regarding this. Funnily, a good friend of mine in NZ is working for the NZ government, and he synthesizes and tests new drugs, mostly cannabinoids but others too, and works with the NZ government to determine safety. Fascinating character, too. There is an underground forum where the smartest chemists I've ever come across hang out and discuss these novel chemicals, and the routes to get to them.
- veb 12y ago
  In NZ now, the manufacturer needs to be able to prove their drug is safe before it can be 'okayed' by the gov. Saves us from the shitty artificial cannabinoids that was causing so much trouble. It's odd, considering there's so many people selling quality Marijuana everywhere... I just wish we could follow what Colorado has done.
- pasbesoin 12y ago
  One of the smartest people I've known had a long-standing interest in this area -- e.g. coming up with his own grow units for magic mushrooms. He didn't just want to trip. When he took on the interest, he became a veritable encyclopedia on mushrooms, of various sorts and in general. This was also back many years before the current "Maker" trend. I guess you could call him a prototype, or an example of a constant -- there has always been a certain number of these highly intelligent free-thinkers and builders. I was never and am not into drugs. Getting to know him, however, did make my take a closer look at re-evaluate much of the simplistic "drugs are bad" indoctrination I'd encountered and been force fed growing up. Just as life and current circumstances have taught me to more carefully re-evaluate other tropes such as "paying one's dues" and the "self-made man [person]". I'm reminded of decades of research into cannabis severely stunted, so I read, by government policy and laws. "It's bad" and "because we say so" does not comport well with open and full-ranging scientific inquiry.
Nursie 12y ago
Interesting that this article, originally investigated and published over a year ago, mentions phenmetrazine - derivatives have just started to appear on the grey market.... --edit-- I'm amazed at the quote from Caldicott at the end. WEDINOS is widely used by the NPS community to check the identity of their substances. It allows the project to map out drug emergence and for the users it provides a little safety check. For the founder to have been someone who considers drug use a disease and prohibition like an antibiotic seems to go against the open, harm-reductive effects of the service itself.
- girvo 12y ago
  I would take it more as a metaphor than something else. You can still believe drugs are bad for the users and society while practicing harm-minimisation and helping those, in fact any opiate replacement therapy councilor fits that description exactly.
- kragen 12y ago
  Phenmetrazine is itself a "designer drug"; as sort of explained in the article, it differs from amphetamine by an oxygen and a couple of carbons forming a morpholine ring including the amine moiety, and its designers hoped it would have some of amphetamine's effects (like weight loss) with less side effects. As with most designer phenethylamines, this turned out badly, though not as badly as e.g. Fen/Phen. (There have been a lot of "designer" phenethylamines; are you really sure that "derivatives [of phenmetrazine] have just started to appear on the grey market"? Are you sure PiHKAL doesn't have a few?)
  - Nursie 12y ago
    Yes, actually, there are no phenmetrazine derivatives in PiHKAL, and yes one has just recently started to appear on the grey market in the last few months. 3-FPM. There is one other derivative, phendimetrazine, which is prescribed for some of the purposes phenmetrazine originally was. It is considered a prodrug for phenmetrazine though, so not really a unique thing in its own right. Phenmetrazine was originally banned because it was widely abused, not really because of any health reasons above and beyond the likes of dex-amphetamine, so far as I can tell, rather than anything like Fen/Phen which causes heart valve mutations.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pm90 12y ago
Does anyone find it slightly ironic that opium used to be smuggled into China by Britain earlier...and even fought wars to keep that trade open. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
- civilian 12y ago
  Yup, it's freaking hilarious. It's something like "Opium Wars 2: Revenge of the Chinese".
scythe 12y ago
MXE wasn't designed at random; it was the chosen winner of a long series of tested compounds made by a chemist who had no other way to treat his phantom limb pain. We have a huge thread at bluelight of people's ideas for chemicals that might get you high, but the first thing you'll notice is that basically all of those ideas are infeasible: http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/582708-I-like-to-draw-pictures-of-random-molecules http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/582708-I-like-to-draw-pi... The degree of effort to which people will go to satisfy their curiosity is sort of astounding. There seems to be an endless array of possibilities. The thing is, people who have some understanding are always trying to direct attention to structures that won't cause grievous physical harm, stuff we understand, and so it is usually these that get popular -- there's a reason that synthetic cannabinoids have fluoropentyl chains on the indole nitrogen instead of fluorobutyl chains, and it's because the latter will tear your mitochondria to shreds (fluoroacetate). Unfortunately, as more stuff gets banned, we stray further and further from the beaten path -- methylone was pretty similar to MDMA, but we know a lot less about 6-APB, and whatever comes next will probably be even stranger. Every now and then the predictions fail and something nasty like 5-API shows up on the market and people die, and we don't know what to do about that because there will always be effects we can't predict. Even as we do our best to recommend the things we think are safer, we inevitably shuttle those off the pipeline into prohibition and rush forth to the next scary-looking arylalkylamine. It's a mess. Most people in the harm reduction community want legalization, but none of us wants this. We actually have plenty of drugs that have a history of use and no reported deaths (mephedrone, 2C-B), but of course those got banned, anything that becomes popular gets banned, even if it appears to be safe (Al-LAD on the chopping block) and we go back into the dark again, waiting for the tide of profiteering to carve a new vista out of the world's insatiable demand for something more entertaining than football.
- llamataboot 12y ago
  Interesting interview with the synthesizer of MXE here: http://www.vice.com/read/interview-with-ketamine-chemist-704-v18n2 http://www.vice.com/read/interview-with-ketamine-chemist-704...
aikah 12y ago
> drug laws focused on a group of well-known chemicals have simply pushed users towards new and increasingly dangerous forms of chemical stimulation. This I often get spams from these businesses selling "legal highs" or something like that.And of course you wouldnt even know what you'd be buying... they always have fancy names like "koyotte""mdmazing" or "Dragon kiss" ...
jrapdx3 12y ago
This article fits in with another thread here earlier today where I commented about using any drug entails some finite risk of bad effects. The apparently common belief that "designer drugs" shouldn't be "illegal" is certainly not supported by the article. I'm not sure what makes it so hard for some people to grasp the intrinsic dangers of ingesting "designer" drugs. Our physiology is complex and quirky, rendering all drugs capable of unpredictably causing serious side effects. And even if that's a rare event, in the case of barely (or not at all) studied compounds, it's still like playing pistol roulette with live rounds. There's risk for the chemist too. While we might admire the skill to design and synthesize a novel compound, it's foolish to do so outside of a fully equipped and qualified lab to assure safety for the chemist as well as the environment. Of course, working in such a lab would no doubt imply a level of scrutiny about what the chemist is trying to do. So obviously a designer drug is likely to be produced in conditions that don't favor purity and careful testing. It's no wonder there are tragic outcomes, but it seems human nature to try to do something "against the rules". But it's an entirely different matter when rules are the "laws" of legislatures vs. the laws of Mother Nature. She never cares what we "believe" or desire. Designer drugs will continue to be a problem. The best we can hope for is that bad outcomes will yield here and there a clue to something useful. It's a shame, seems so often we have to learn the hard way.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  I'd much rather take an illegal drug than a legal, 'under the radar' one. The personal risks of possibly getting thrown in jail are vastly dwarfed by the risks of ingesting an untested and completely unknown substance. The sad thing is that even the illegal ones often involve a terrible externalized human cost. Illegal drugs are consumed at scale, exploiting the producers and transporters, legal ones are consumed individually, personalizing the risk. I've nothing against the yearning to alter one's consciousness, however temporary it might be. But alcohol might be the only way to do it without assuming either great personal risk or great moral hazard. And alcohol can be so, well, boring. One of the great sadnesses of the world we live in.
  - lostgame 12y ago
jpatokal 12y ago
And these shenanigans, too, would be entirely unnecessary if known drugs were legal and regulated, and people could take controlled risks instead of playing Russian roulette with newly synthesized drugs.
- Havvy 12y ago
  Yeah, it looks like the entire legislative approach is wrong and doing more harm than good. It'd be nice to see more focus on education and building up knowledge. Perhaps even a well designed website (including first-class mobile support) that we could link drug users to that describe the effects in an easy to search and digest format. If people want to do stupid things to themselves, let them. We've found that legalizing marijuana has so far been helpful. I just hope it's not the last step.
  - lostgame 12y ago
    https://www.erowid.org/ https://www.erowid.org/
  - campbellmorgan 12y ago
    http://www.talktofrank.com/ http://www.talktofrank.com/
- Nursie 12y ago
  There is a minority that are interested in novelty for its own ends. But you're right, most people that buy these things would be safer and happier with well-known, illegal drugs.
  - bigiain 12y ago
    I think there's a majority into "novelty for it's own ends". Art, jazz, comedy, movies - they're all often used as sources to satisfy that need for "novelty".
  - syllogism 12y ago
    But how do you propose they buy them, when the legal highs are indistinguishable from them at a glance, and are cheaper and easier for dealers to buy?
jseliger 12y ago
I'm surprised no one has posted a link to this yet, but Mike Power also wrote Drugs Unlimited (http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Unlimited-Revolution-Thats-Changing/dp/1250054710 http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Unlimited-Revolution-Thats-Chang...), which covers this topic extensively. I wrote about it here: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/31/drugs-unlimited-the-web-revolution-thats-changing-how-the-world-gets-high-mike-power http://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/31/drugs-unlimited-the-web-re...
benbreen 12y ago
"Technology and drugs have always existed in an easy symbiosis: the first thing ever bought and sold across the Internet was a bag of marijuana. In 1971 or 1972, students at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory used ARPANET—the earliest iteration of the Internet—to arrange a marijuana deal with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." This is fantastic. Anyone know of an article that delves into this more? Assuming it's true, I'm surprised it isn't more widely known.
- ZoF 12y ago
  I would assume that it is widely known, particularly in this community. I probably come across at least three mentions of this every year.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  I was very surprised too and just found this: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-first-thing-to-be-bought-and-sold-on-the-internet-was-some-weed http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-first-thing-to-be-bough... Apparently the anecdote is from this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769 http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pe...
tt9862 12y ago
It is cool~!
thornofmight 12y ago
Are there any opiate based research chemicals? It seems like I mostly see psychedelics, or an occasional amphetamine or benzo-like chemical.
- Uberphallus 12y ago
  O-desmethyltramadol and AH-7921 come to my mind.
johneth 12y ago
There was a somewhat related documentary on the BBC this week about legal highs in the UK - I'd recommend giving it a watch of you're able to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v3294 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v3294
tobico 12y ago
Another good argument for focusing on harm minimization over prohibition.
rdxm 12y ago
Seems to me ingesting any chemical compound cooked up in an unknown/uncontrolled environment, whether that enviro is the design or manufacturing side of things makes you an active seeker of the Darwin Award. What's irritating is the expense of public resources bailing people out of the pursuit of the Darwin Award. Of course the same could be said for smoking, consumption driven obesity, excessive alcohol intake, etc. The comment here regarding personal accountability sums it. I suspect if the financial disincentive is high enough on any one of these topics, people will deselect participation in said activity. Otherwise society will (or should) deselect them as beneficiaries of resources, etc..harsh, but what other practical course of action is there?
- Nursie 12y ago
  Here's the thing - 'designer drugs' or 'research chemicals' or whatever you want to call them, they all come out of well equipped labs in China. It's not like Cletus is cooking them up in his kitchen with that low-grade crystal meth. They do have unknown harm profiles, for the most part, and they may well have been designed by someone who just liked to draw in an organic molecule drawing package, but the production conditions are likely to be pretty modern.
mr_sturd 12y ago
Seems to me like an excerpt from Powers' book on the subject, Drugs 2.0. It's a great read. Starting out describing the evolution of drug use, and the relatively recent implementation of laws to control the substances. Progressing on to the present day, describing the point we're at now - use of TOR and dark net markets to acquire these compounds, pseudonymously, over the internet.

230 points by r721 12y ago

Actually it can be stopped very easily legalizing drug use. The major reason we have for designer drugs is market demand.

jamesdelaneyie 12y ago
I don't think so. It's like saying we have Heineken, so why would anyone want a craft beer?
- dagw 12y ago
  People drink craft beer because they taste better, not because it gets them drunk better. In fact I'd wager that people whom drink beer because of its alcohol probably prefer Heineken, since it gives the same end state at half the price.
  - jamesdelaneyie 12y ago
    More than fair point. Craft beers usually do have a higher alcohol percentage though, so they would actually get you drunk 'better'. Taste would be subjective however. Personally I'd be 50/50 on getting drunk, having a nice drink, no reason you can't have both :) The point being, if all substances were legalised, I think we all could easily see there being a wide range of branded drugs that might offer the same base experience with different subtleties to it. Longer and harder or short and sweet etc. You don't think so?

Phithagoras 12y ago

The Government in New Zealand had an interesting response to this sort of thing. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23703-new-zealand-law-permits-low-risk-designer-drugs.html#.VI40xivF-So http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23703-new-zealand-law-... Seems like it might be the most effective idea, since, if there are legalized drugs, the majority of the drug oriented population is likely to stick to the safe, approved drugs, and, those who are inclined to push limits can easily go into research without fear of persecution.

slyall 12y ago
Unfortunately things didn't work out so well due to later regulations. A summary here: http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/the-twilight-state-of-the-psychoactive-substances/ http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/the-twilight-state-of-the-...

coldcode 12y ago

I've never found any interest in taking anything stronger than an occasional beer but as a former chemist I find the research into these types of drugs fascinating. We really do need to look into areas that might be highly illegal if for no reason other than to learn how the brain works.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
It's hard, though. Many chemists have accidentally killed themselves with experimentation, because there's no way to really know the results of your experiments without testing it on someone.
- Fuzzwah 12y ago
  [citation needed]
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Check out the history of LSD. It almost wasn't invented. They tested it on animals, and noticed "some level of disturbance" or some such, but nobody had any clue what the effects were, and nobody really cared. Then someone decided to try it on themselves. The only reason that was able to happen is because the legal and ethical restrictions were looser than they are today. In the meantime, several other such experiments have ended with the deaths of the chemists who decided to self-experiment. I remember reading about several specific chemists. I'll try to find them. Maybe someone else can point them out while I look. EDIT: I'm wrong.
    - Alex3917 12y ago
      To the best of my knowledge there haven't been any deaths among chemists bioassaying new compounds for psychoactive potential. This isn't surprising, considering the vast majority of the 'new' research chemicals coming onto the market were first synthesized by the same 5 or 10, all of whom were/are very cautious and well educated. The closest I've heard of is the grad student who gave himself Parkinsons and later died while trying to make MPPP, but that was because he unknowingly messed up the synthesis and not because he was purposely experimenting with some new molecule.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

Custom drugs are all rage in Russia. Chinese plants make synthetic cannabioids with varying formulas which then happen to be not made illegal yet. Those are moved into country, mixed with all kinds of chemical shit and sold as "курительные смеси" - mixes for smoking. This fall dozens of people died from these nasty chemicals, usually in packs in one city or another. There was a law passed which makes all that stuff illegal but I'm not sure if it will pan out. Why they proliferated so badly? I guess because the local market of [relatively] light drugs is underserved in general. For example, I happen to not have ever come in contact with weed and don't know a single person who can get some. But pretty sure there are a lot of advertisements like "курительные смеси 8 9XX XXX XX XX" mask-painted on pavements all around the city.

NicoJuicy 12y ago
I actually read about a terrifying drug made by cheap materials in Russia (easy to self create) named Crocodile... Skin gets eaten and it's very horrifying to see long term users, carefull not for the weak of heart :s http://goo.gl/wiAXNx http://goo.gl/wiAXNx
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- poizan42 12y ago
  That's just impure desomorphine though
  - refurb 12y ago
    Exactly. Desomorphine itself doesn't cause your flesh to rot off, it's the impurities in it. I think they commonly use an iodine/phosphorus reduction to remove the hydroxyl group. It doesn't surprise me that injecting a drug that has left over phosphorus triiodide or other phosphorus/iodine compounds would destroy your tissue.
  - girvo 12y ago
    I truly don't understand how desomorphine can be created through the RP/I route. It makes pretty much zero sense based on my chemistry knowledge (BSci in Chemistry, but didn't complete it, dropped out third year). I've no idea what they're actually injecting, but I do know that a lot of the photos a number of years ago that were tagged as "Krokodil" were in fact a different drug entirely

krick 12y ago

Oh, I really hate these articles. Intriguing headline and then a horribly long story with all these pseudo-artistic details like "immediately noticed a tense quality in the ambulance driver’s voice" wich is just too bothersome to actually read it. Some TLDR, anyone?

k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "pseudo-artistic details like "immediately noticed a tense quality in the ambulance driver’s voice"" You mean storytelling?
- frozenport 12y ago
  I can sympathize with OP, sometime we just want the info without pictures of the Beatles.
  - robert_tweed 12y ago
    Seriously, I'm considering writing an HN filtering proxy that ignores these kinds of magazine pieces. I just don't have time to read them properly, even if they are interesting enough that I inevitably get drawn into some of them. That's just another factor in HN becoming a time-sink instead of a productive source of useful news. I suspect if we had the ability to downvote submissions as well as upvote, less of them would hit the front page in the first place, but I can't be certain. As for this article, the writing is OK, but I honestly wonder sometimes if these authors are being paid by the word. Take the first paragraph for instance. Replace it entirely with, "It was a dark and stormy night". Did that make the article better, worse, or no different? Had the same information been conveyed in far fewer words, I wouldn't have had to skim over parts and would have got a lot more out of it. There's definitely a place for articles like this, but I don't think HN is that place.
    - r721 12y ago
      Sorry for wasting your time, I purposedly submitted this on Sunday, a slow news day. I can agree though that sometimes it's hard to estimate time which you would spend on a story. I use a word-counting service (textalyser) for that, and this particular story is quite long even by longform standards: 7,800 words / 47,000 characters (with spaces).

girvo 12y ago

I wish I could share some of my knowledge regarding this. Funnily, a good friend of mine in NZ is working for the NZ government, and he synthesizes and tests new drugs, mostly cannabinoids but others too, and works with the NZ government to determine safety. Fascinating character, too. There is an underground forum where the smartest chemists I've ever come across hang out and discuss these novel chemicals, and the routes to get to them.

veb 12y ago
In NZ now, the manufacturer needs to be able to prove their drug is safe before it can be 'okayed' by the gov. Saves us from the shitty artificial cannabinoids that was causing so much trouble. It's odd, considering there's so many people selling quality Marijuana everywhere... I just wish we could follow what Colorado has done.
pasbesoin 12y ago
One of the smartest people I've known had a long-standing interest in this area -- e.g. coming up with his own grow units for magic mushrooms. He didn't just want to trip. When he took on the interest, he became a veritable encyclopedia on mushrooms, of various sorts and in general. This was also back many years before the current "Maker" trend. I guess you could call him a prototype, or an example of a constant -- there has always been a certain number of these highly intelligent free-thinkers and builders. I was never and am not into drugs. Getting to know him, however, did make my take a closer look at re-evaluate much of the simplistic "drugs are bad" indoctrination I'd encountered and been force fed growing up. Just as life and current circumstances have taught me to more carefully re-evaluate other tropes such as "paying one's dues" and the "self-made man [person]". I'm reminded of decades of research into cannabis severely stunted, so I read, by government policy and laws. "It's bad" and "because we say so" does not comport well with open and full-ranging scientific inquiry.

Nursie 12y ago

Interesting that this article, originally investigated and published over a year ago, mentions phenmetrazine - derivatives have just started to appear on the grey market.... --edit-- I'm amazed at the quote from Caldicott at the end. WEDINOS is widely used by the NPS community to check the identity of their substances. It allows the project to map out drug emergence and for the users it provides a little safety check. For the founder to have been someone who considers drug use a disease and prohibition like an antibiotic seems to go against the open, harm-reductive effects of the service itself.

girvo 12y ago
I would take it more as a metaphor than something else. You can still believe drugs are bad for the users and society while practicing harm-minimisation and helping those, in fact any opiate replacement therapy councilor fits that description exactly.
kragen 12y ago
Phenmetrazine is itself a "designer drug"; as sort of explained in the article, it differs from amphetamine by an oxygen and a couple of carbons forming a morpholine ring including the amine moiety, and its designers hoped it would have some of amphetamine's effects (like weight loss) with less side effects. As with most designer phenethylamines, this turned out badly, though not as badly as e.g. Fen/Phen. (There have been a lot of "designer" phenethylamines; are you really sure that "derivatives [of phenmetrazine] have just started to appear on the grey market"? Are you sure PiHKAL doesn't have a few?)
- Nursie 12y ago
  Yes, actually, there are no phenmetrazine derivatives in PiHKAL, and yes one has just recently started to appear on the grey market in the last few months. 3-FPM. There is one other derivative, phendimetrazine, which is prescribed for some of the purposes phenmetrazine originally was. It is considered a prodrug for phenmetrazine though, so not really a unique thing in its own right. Phenmetrazine was originally banned because it was widely abused, not really because of any health reasons above and beyond the likes of dex-amphetamine, so far as I can tell, rather than anything like Fen/Phen which causes heart valve mutations.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pm90 12y ago

Does anyone find it slightly ironic that opium used to be smuggled into China by Britain earlier...and even fought wars to keep that trade open. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

civilian 12y ago
Yup, it's freaking hilarious. It's something like "Opium Wars 2: Revenge of the Chinese".

scythe 12y ago

MXE wasn't designed at random; it was the chosen winner of a long series of tested compounds made by a chemist who had no other way to treat his phantom limb pain. We have a huge thread at bluelight of people's ideas for chemicals that might get you high, but the first thing you'll notice is that basically all of those ideas are infeasible: http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/582708-I-like-to-draw-pictures-of-random-molecules http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/582708-I-like-to-draw-pi... The degree of effort to which people will go to satisfy their curiosity is sort of astounding. There seems to be an endless array of possibilities. The thing is, people who have some understanding are always trying to direct attention to structures that won't cause grievous physical harm, stuff we understand, and so it is usually these that get popular -- there's a reason that synthetic cannabinoids have fluoropentyl chains on the indole nitrogen instead of fluorobutyl chains, and it's because the latter will tear your mitochondria to shreds (fluoroacetate). Unfortunately, as more stuff gets banned, we stray further and further from the beaten path -- methylone was pretty similar to MDMA, but we know a lot less about 6-APB, and whatever comes next will probably be even stranger. Every now and then the predictions fail and something nasty like 5-API shows up on the market and people die, and we don't know what to do about that because there will always be effects we can't predict. Even as we do our best to recommend the things we think are safer, we inevitably shuttle those off the pipeline into prohibition and rush forth to the next scary-looking arylalkylamine. It's a mess. Most people in the harm reduction community want legalization, but none of us wants this. We actually have plenty of drugs that have a history of use and no reported deaths (mephedrone, 2C-B), but of course those got banned, anything that becomes popular gets banned, even if it appears to be safe (Al-LAD on the chopping block) and we go back into the dark again, waiting for the tide of profiteering to carve a new vista out of the world's insatiable demand for something more entertaining than football.

llamataboot 12y ago
Interesting interview with the synthesizer of MXE here: http://www.vice.com/read/interview-with-ketamine-chemist-704-v18n2 http://www.vice.com/read/interview-with-ketamine-chemist-704...

aikah 12y ago

> drug laws focused on a group of well-known chemicals have simply pushed users towards new and increasingly dangerous forms of chemical stimulation. This I often get spams from these businesses selling "legal highs" or something like that.And of course you wouldnt even know what you'd be buying... they always have fancy names like "koyotte""mdmazing" or "Dragon kiss" ...

jrapdx3 12y ago

This article fits in with another thread here earlier today where I commented about using any drug entails some finite risk of bad effects. The apparently common belief that "designer drugs" shouldn't be "illegal" is certainly not supported by the article. I'm not sure what makes it so hard for some people to grasp the intrinsic dangers of ingesting "designer" drugs. Our physiology is complex and quirky, rendering all drugs capable of unpredictably causing serious side effects. And even if that's a rare event, in the case of barely (or not at all) studied compounds, it's still like playing pistol roulette with live rounds. There's risk for the chemist too. While we might admire the skill to design and synthesize a novel compound, it's foolish to do so outside of a fully equipped and qualified lab to assure safety for the chemist as well as the environment. Of course, working in such a lab would no doubt imply a level of scrutiny about what the chemist is trying to do. So obviously a designer drug is likely to be produced in conditions that don't favor purity and careful testing. It's no wonder there are tragic outcomes, but it seems human nature to try to do something "against the rules". But it's an entirely different matter when rules are the "laws" of legislatures vs. the laws of Mother Nature. She never cares what we "believe" or desire. Designer drugs will continue to be a problem. The best we can hope for is that bad outcomes will yield here and there a clue to something useful. It's a shame, seems so often we have to learn the hard way.

vinceguidry 12y ago
I'd much rather take an illegal drug than a legal, 'under the radar' one. The personal risks of possibly getting thrown in jail are vastly dwarfed by the risks of ingesting an untested and completely unknown substance. The sad thing is that even the illegal ones often involve a terrible externalized human cost. Illegal drugs are consumed at scale, exploiting the producers and transporters, legal ones are consumed individually, personalizing the risk. I've nothing against the yearning to alter one's consciousness, however temporary it might be. But alcohol might be the only way to do it without assuming either great personal risk or great moral hazard. And alcohol can be so, well, boring. One of the great sadnesses of the world we live in.
- lostgame 12y ago

jpatokal 12y ago

And these shenanigans, too, would be entirely unnecessary if known drugs were legal and regulated, and people could take controlled risks instead of playing Russian roulette with newly synthesized drugs.

Havvy 12y ago
Yeah, it looks like the entire legislative approach is wrong and doing more harm than good. It'd be nice to see more focus on education and building up knowledge. Perhaps even a well designed website (including first-class mobile support) that we could link drug users to that describe the effects in an easy to search and digest format. If people want to do stupid things to themselves, let them. We've found that legalizing marijuana has so far been helpful. I just hope it's not the last step.
- lostgame 12y ago
  https://www.erowid.org/ https://www.erowid.org/
- campbellmorgan 12y ago
  http://www.talktofrank.com/ http://www.talktofrank.com/
Nursie 12y ago
There is a minority that are interested in novelty for its own ends. But you're right, most people that buy these things would be safer and happier with well-known, illegal drugs.
- bigiain 12y ago
  I think there's a majority into "novelty for it's own ends". Art, jazz, comedy, movies - they're all often used as sources to satisfy that need for "novelty".
- syllogism 12y ago
  But how do you propose they buy them, when the legal highs are indistinguishable from them at a glance, and are cheaper and easier for dealers to buy?

jseliger 12y ago

I'm surprised no one has posted a link to this yet, but Mike Power also wrote Drugs Unlimited (http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Unlimited-Revolution-Thats-Changing/dp/1250054710 http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Unlimited-Revolution-Thats-Chang...), which covers this topic extensively. I wrote about it here: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/31/drugs-unlimited-the-web-revolution-thats-changing-how-the-world-gets-high-mike-power http://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/31/drugs-unlimited-the-web-re...

benbreen 12y ago

"Technology and drugs have always existed in an easy symbiosis: the first thing ever bought and sold across the Internet was a bag of marijuana. In 1971 or 1972, students at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory used ARPANET—the earliest iteration of the Internet—to arrange a marijuana deal with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." This is fantastic. Anyone know of an article that delves into this more? Assuming it's true, I'm surprised it isn't more widely known.

ZoF 12y ago
I would assume that it is widely known, particularly in this community. I probably come across at least three mentions of this every year.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
I was very surprised too and just found this: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-first-thing-to-be-bought-and-sold-on-the-internet-was-some-weed http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-first-thing-to-be-bough... Apparently the anecdote is from this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769 http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pe...

tt9862 12y ago

It is cool~!

thornofmight 12y ago

Are there any opiate based research chemicals? It seems like I mostly see psychedelics, or an occasional amphetamine or benzo-like chemical.

Uberphallus 12y ago
O-desmethyltramadol and AH-7921 come to my mind.

johneth 12y ago

There was a somewhat related documentary on the BBC this week about legal highs in the UK - I'd recommend giving it a watch of you're able to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v3294 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v3294

tobico 12y ago

Another good argument for focusing on harm minimization over prohibition.

rdxm 12y ago

Seems to me ingesting any chemical compound cooked up in an unknown/uncontrolled environment, whether that enviro is the design or manufacturing side of things makes you an active seeker of the Darwin Award. What's irritating is the expense of public resources bailing people out of the pursuit of the Darwin Award. Of course the same could be said for smoking, consumption driven obesity, excessive alcohol intake, etc. The comment here regarding personal accountability sums it. I suspect if the financial disincentive is high enough on any one of these topics, people will deselect participation in said activity. Otherwise society will (or should) deselect them as beneficiaries of resources, etc..harsh, but what other practical course of action is there?

Nursie 12y ago
Here's the thing - 'designer drugs' or 'research chemicals' or whatever you want to call them, they all come out of well equipped labs in China. It's not like Cletus is cooking them up in his kitchen with that low-grade crystal meth. They do have unknown harm profiles, for the most part, and they may well have been designed by someone who just liked to draw in an organic molecule drawing package, but the production conditions are likely to be pretty modern.

mr_sturd 12y ago

Seems to me like an excerpt from Powers' book on the subject, Drugs 2.0. It's a great read. Starting out describing the evolution of drug use, and the relatively recent implementation of laws to control the substances. Progressing on to the present day, describing the point we're at now - use of TOR and dark net markets to acquire these compounds, pseudonymously, over the internet.