Home | Community | Message Board

MushroomMan Mycology
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Bridgetown Botanicals Bridgetown Botanicals   Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   Left Coast Kratom Buy Kratom Capsules   North Spore Cultivation Supplies   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   Original Sensible Seeds Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds   Kraken Kratom Kratom Capsules for Sale

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
OfflineYthanA
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Male User Gallery

Registered: 08/08/97
Posts: 18,774
Loc: NY/MA/VT Borderlands Flag
Last seen: 20 minutes, 45 seconds
Drugs unlimited: how I created my very own legal high
    #19062579 - 10/31/13 10:17 AM (10 years, 2 months ago)

Drugs unlimited: how I created my very own legal high
theguardian.com

The reason so many new drugs are appearing is because we keep banning them. It's time for a change of approach.

How easy is it to invent and manufacture a recreational drug that does not break any UK drug laws? I just spent the last two months doing exactly that – and the answer might surprise you.

Since 2008, the emergence of legal highs has wrong-footed policymakers, parents and police. These drugs imitate the effects of cocaine, amphetamines, MDMA and cannabis. They are popular, legal to take and supply, and their use is growing. Barely a week goes by without a press or TV report of a death, or major psychological consequences, as a result of using them. These reports often claim that it is a trivial task to take a banned drug and, with a little molecular trickery, get a Chinese lab to produce a new, legal version.

Most stories about legal and illegal drugs in the mass media are at best hysterical and inaccurate, and at worst simply untrue, so I decided to put this particular claim to the test.

The market in legal highs is growing. In 2009, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction's early warning system discovered 24 new drugs. In 2010, it found another 41; in 2011, another 49; and in 2012, there were 73 more. By October 2013, a further 56 new compounds had already been identified: a total of 243 new drugs in just four years.

Or rather, make that 244, because as part of a two-month investigation for the online science and technology publisher Matter, I just devised a new, legal drug, had it synthesised in China, and delivered to a PO Box in central London. It is a close chemical cousin of a substance that was well-loved by some of the world's most famous musicians, and, it's rumoured, by John F Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Truman Capote – but was banned decades ago.

There's a bag of it sat in its courier packaging on my desk as I write. There's also a sample at Cardiff University, where Andrew Westwell, a brilliant chemist at the WEDINOS project, a Welsh government-funded initiative that tracks and identifies new drugs. He has analysed it and proved its authenticity and guessed at its likely effects if taken: a stimulant.

All it took me was a few dozen phone calls to Shanghai, a gmail account, a bank transfer, a PO Box set up in a false name, a few emails to contacts on web forums that gave me the synthesis and the modification and the name of a friendly laboratory, and a bit of reading. Job done.

In its latest World Drug Report, the United Nations acknowledges: "While new harmful substances have been emerging with unfailing regularity on the drug scene, the international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon."

There are now more legal drugs on sale than were even dreamed of when the first global drug laws were written: the 1961 and 1971 UN drug conventions proscribe just 234. They were written when the Beatles were still performing, in an age when the internet did not exist.

As Australian medic David Caldicott told me, "If you treated any illness with the same antibiotic for 50 years, medical people would be stunned if resistance hadn't developed." New strains and mutations call for new medicines.

So if new drugs are the problem, what is the answer?

The response of UK governments, of all stripes, has been wholly inadequate. The Conservative/Lib Dem coalition introduced Temporary Class Drug Orders (TCDO) in November 2011, which allow drugs to be temporarily controlled for a year and then banned once the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has pondered their harms.

This law has done nothing to slow down chemical innovation. Since the NBOME-series of hallucinogenic drugs was banned this summer under a TCDO, a new family of equipotent hallucinogens – about which we know even less – has come to market, known as the NBOH-series of drugs. When 6-APB, an ecstasy-like drug was banned, 5-EAPB came to market. After methoxetamine – a ketamine derivative – was banned, a distant, inbred cousin from a far-flung branch of the chemical family tree, diphenidine, has come on sale. For every synthetic cannabinoid the authorities have banned, a half-dozen more have popped up, all of which are less understood by doctors than cannabis.

There is simply no let-up. In the time it took to write my last story about legal highs, five new drugs came on the market. Each of them will be banned, as will the legal high that I have just commissioned. A new modification will fill the gap within days.

It is not an especially simple or trivial matter to untangle the UK's drug laws and find a drug that can be sold legally, but it can be done with a little effort, as my investigation showed. It can, however, be a hugely profitable affair. Who cares about the consequences for users' health? Certainly not the vendors of these drugs, who dodge the law by saying they are not for human consumption.

The real issue is this: we are confusing cause and effect. The reason so many new drugs are appearing is precisely because we keep banning them. That approach worked in the 1960s and 1970s, and even perhaps until the 1980s. But in the internet era, it is impossible to control this market. More laws equals more drugs. If I, a journalist who until recently knew nothing of chemistry, can commission a new drug in a matter of weeks, so can many more people. And they will.

Policymakers' prime concern should not be which drugs are legal or illegal, but which are the most harmful. Their next problem is how to regulate the market in psychoactive chemicals. That will be more complicated than anyone – even those who advocate radical new approaches, including decriminalisation – dare consider.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineAtrium
Cunt Tickler

Registered: 08/18/13
Posts: 1,284
Last seen: 3 years, 4 months
Re: Drugs unlimited: how I created my very own legal high [Re: Ythan]
    #19062628 - 10/31/13 10:29 AM (10 years, 2 months ago)

That was actually a very good report! I'm surprised this wasn't one of those posts about how we need to be more strict because it's so easy to buy drugs that kill.

Also, I wonder what stimulant it was. Coke? I mean the one that it imitates. Then what is the drug he created? Also WTF? MXE is banned in USA as well?


--------------------
The only thing about Chemistry I like is all the psychedelics that come from it.

The only reason I study Psychology is to have a legitimate excuse to enjoy Chemistry. :tongue2:


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineKingKnowledge
Around
Male


Registered: 03/30/13
Posts: 2,876
Loc: East Coast
Last seen: 4 years, 6 months
Re: Drugs unlimited: how I created my very own legal high [Re: Atrium]
    #19062665 - 10/31/13 10:37 AM (10 years, 2 months ago)

I wish he were explicit, but nice read.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlineegodeathflux
Guttersnipe
Male User Gallery


Registered: 02/02/10
Posts: 3,854
Loc: The Stygian Pits Flag
Last seen: 1 year, 2 months
Re: Drugs unlimited: how I created my very own legal high [Re: KingKnowledge]
    #19062924 - 10/31/13 11:35 AM (10 years, 2 months ago)

I think Capote was into rohypnol.. But that is certainly not a stimulant, I would guess cocaine or speed as it was in the 60's and amphetamines were the only other real stimulant alternative to cocaine to my knowledge.


--------------------

"Atrophic interludes weave through my life far too often, for me to fight the biggest enemies"




"Standing on the corner of 5th and Vermouth"



Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineD.M.T
Shroomery Contaminant
Female


Registered: 10/31/09
Posts: 10,991
Loc: In your brain
Last seen: 4 years, 1 month
Re: Drugs unlimited: how I created my very own legal high [Re: egodeathflux]
    #19063068 - 10/31/13 12:13 PM (10 years, 2 months ago)

He's naming off celebrities that a guy by the name of Max Jacobson (the original "Dr. Feelgood") treated with injections of amphetamine, so I would assume it is an amphetamine analog.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineOk amoismis
metabolizer
Male


Registered: 11/05/10
Posts: 346
Last seen: 5 years, 11 months
Re: Drugs unlimited: how I created my very own legal high [Re: Atrium]
    #19063266 - 10/31/13 12:52 PM (10 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

Jamesdnh said:
Also WTF? MXE is banned in USA as well?




Article's from the UK


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleDebuteMachine

Registered: 09/29/06
Posts: 6,457
Re: Drugs unlimited: how I created my very own legal high [Re: Ok amoismis]
    #19066458 - 10/31/13 09:54 PM (10 years, 2 months ago)

good report


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: Bridgetown Botanicals Bridgetown Botanicals   Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   Left Coast Kratom Buy Kratom Capsules   North Spore Cultivation Supplies   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   Original Sensible Seeds Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds   Kraken Kratom Kratom Capsules for Sale


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke (lengthy but worthwhile read) Demiurge 5,378 2 08/14/03 06:17 AM
by TheHobbit
* Animal Lovers Favor Drug Legalization motamanM 1,940 3 12/27/03 10:49 PM
by Revelation
* Legalize pot, Canadian Senate committee says ThorA 7,584 8 07/28/08 07:46 PM
by Mitchnast
* The U.S. is addicted to war on drugs motamanM 2,879 5 05/21/03 05:17 PM
by Rono
* Study: Marijuana leads to hard drugs TinMan 3,928 11 11/03/03 08:52 AM
by Seraph
* Falls police raid suspected drug lab nerveagent 3,329 10 05/20/04 04:02 AM
by Cow Shit Collector
* WHY DEADLY DRUG IS STILL PERFECTLY LEGAL motamanM 4,061 13 05/13/04 06:38 AM
by Asante
* Experts debate benefits, risks of hallucinogenic drugs motamanM 2,887 1 12/01/03 06:49 PM
by DailyPot

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: motaman, veggie, Alan Rockefeller, Mostly_Harmless
1,948 topic views. 0 members, 10 guests and 0 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.024 seconds spending 0.007 seconds on 14 queries.