There's a great story in the middle of Drugs 2.0 in which Mike Power, the author, explains how he came to investigate the burgeoning phenomenon of legal highs, a new breed of drugs that have been chemically tweaked to be near-copies of illegal substances.
In 2009, he wrote several stories on a new ecstasy-like drug, mephedrone, for specialist magazine Druglink. The story was picked up by the national press with suitable tones of shock and outrage, but because of the way that Google advertising software works – by generating advertisements from keywords – next to the articles were links to mephedrone web shops.
Right next to articles in the Daily Telegraph and Guardian, which "were demanding swift and decisive government action on the new killer drug menace", were adverts for "mephedrone telephone delivery services, with dealers on motorbikes offering to drop the drugs off at your home or office within a few hours".
Every day we hear about what the internet has done to books, music and newspapers. But there's one massive retail industry that has also been radically transformed by the web but which has gone almost completely under the radar: drugs.
It's a global billion-dollar industry that has been revolutionised by the same forces that have revolutionised everything else and, in this carefully researched book, Power enumerates the ways.
Long before internet shopping was commonplace, when Amazon was still just a twinkle in Jeff Bezos's eye, the first product ever bought online was marijuana, and the online drug industry has developed in step with the internet.
But it's very far from being just a retail operation. It's information that has really revolutionised the drugs trade, and there are some astonishing stories here about academics whose work, published in open-access peer-reviewed journals, has been plundered by street chemists in China, resulting in new narcotics unleashed on the world.
Power interviews an 80-year-old professor emeritus in organic chemistry whose life's work now blows through festival dancefloors – "Spice", a synthetic marijuana.
Punk chemists, DIYers, often chemistry graduates who experiment with creating their own new molecular compounds, sample the output and then report on the effects online. Mephedrone (street name meow meow), for example, was created by an underground chemist called "Kinetic" because, as he explained when he posted the results on a site called the Hive: "I've been bored over the last couple of days."
He took 400mg of his new product and reported "a fantastic sense of wellbeing that I haven't got from any drug before except my beloved ecstasy", and added as a postscript: "Oh, I really just have to say a big 'fuck you' to the UK government and their stupid drug laws since I'm high as a kite and there's nothing they can do."
He might be right about that. After posting a blow-by-blow account of the formula and procedure, mephedrone became one of the most popular street drugs in Britain. And while I'm sure his old chemistry teacher would be impressed by his application and creativity, Drugs 2.0 is a pretty scary read.
"Legal highs" might sound fairly innocuous, nothing more dangerous than a particularly strong cappuccino, or a malt whisky, but in fact they can be anything. New synthetic "analogues" are being devised and then churned out by vast processing labs in China, shipped to Europe and taken by thousands of young people who have little or any clue about what's in them or what effect they might have.
Power recounts a chilling story of one such drug, MTA, that was originally developed by Professor David Nichols of Purdue University, Indiana, copied by a street chemist and ended up on the streets of Britain, killing at least six young people. Nichols tells Power that he believes international drug laws are no longer fit for purpose. He may be right.
Bitcoin, the encrypted online currency, may have been in the news recently because of a spike in its popularity – and value – following the crisis in Cyprus, but it's been a wonderful enabler for the global drug industry. Post-Watergate, everyone knows you "follow the money", but Bitcoins have made that impossible. And the Silk Road – eBay for drugs – is growing in popularity by the day.
There are no answers in this book. Power, a raver in his day, once saw taking ecstasy as an extension of personal freedom; now he sees a drugs industry populated by rogue chemists, super-labs and criminal gangs. Maybe, though, he writes, the web will "strip drug culture of its mystique". Drugs are just "carbon, hydrogen and a few other elements". Transgression is not an element, just a way of seeing. It's us who are the problem, he seems to suggest, not the drugs.
