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

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704763904575550200845267526.html

by J3L2404 • 16 years ago

83 72 16 years ago

online.wsj.com

tptacek2• 16 years 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.

rms2• 16 years 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

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• 16 years 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?

rms2• 16 years ago

0+, the federal analog exists as a law on the books but takes a concerted prosecution effort to use.

markbao• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

Wow, many legal drugs should be illegal under that act.

chc• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

noonespecial• 16 years 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".

tptacek2• 16 years 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.

dtf3• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

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

jacoblyles3• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

jacoblyles3• 16 years 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.

dtf3• 16 years 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.

dkersten10• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

Is Nicotine itself actually dangerous or is it the predominant vector that is dangerous?

silentbicycle6• 16 years ago

Sugary water will catch wild yeasts from the air and spontaneously ferment into alcohol [1]. It's incredibly difficult to prevent its production. AFAIK, 5-MeO-DMT or "Meow Meow" don't magically appear just because you forgot to put a jug of apple cider in the fridge.

[1] http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Tej

Also, alcohol generally isn't that dangerous, unless people are driving and/or concentrating it via distillation.

aaronblohowiak2• 16 years ago

MDMA is not safe for long-term use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA#Chronic_use

fexl• 16 years ago

Also, alcohol is both dangerous and good for you, depending on how you use it. A recent study showed that moderate drinkers outlive heavy drinkers, but heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers. As with all drugs, the key is dosage control, cost versus benefit, and personal responsibility.

But that's not good enough for some people. They want to incarcerate those who produce or use anything that might be harmful when used irresponsibly. Either that or they want a piece of the action.

It's quite possible to use ordinary food and vitamins irresponsibly, with great physical and psychological harm. So naturally some people want to play the "give me a cut or go to jail" game with those substances as well.

It seems that these people won't be happy until every human activity is either prohibited or mandatory. Freedom is not an option with them.

So now you have the insane situation of bureaucrats racing to ban new things, and "meta-chemists" racing to devise new things that haven't been banned yet. What a waste.

hristov• 16 years ago

Sorry to break it to you but the drugs you are taking are not safe.

dkersten10• 16 years ago

Neither are a lot of prescription drugs.

dkersten10• 16 years 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• 16 years 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

dkersten10• 16 years 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.

olalonde2• 16 years 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

michael_dorfman• 16 years 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• 16 years 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

slouch• 16 years ago

salvia has a reverse tolerance -- you might as well switch to sniffing paint if you consume it regularly.

mannicken2• 16 years ago

I wouldn't call Salvia high a high. It's more like a very intense psychedelic trip, to my knowledge, comparable with DMT and stronger than acid or shrooms. People buying Salvia as a replacement for pot are in for a big surprise :)

bryanh• 16 years ago

You can see the actual products the have for sale here: 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_v2• 16 years 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) 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).

JonnieCache2• 16 years 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-c...

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

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