 Mephedron, or as the media calls it, Meow Meow, is a stimulant drug. It was one of the first legal highs that became widely popular as party drugs in the end of the 2000s. It is chemically similar to the catenone compounds found in the cut plant of Eastern Africa. After most European countries banned it, it was replaced by other legal highs. Mephedron was first synthesized in 1929, but it was forgotten for decades. In 2004, it was rediscovered as a recreational drug by a psychedelic researcher who calls himself Dr. Z. He gave an exclusive interview to Drugreporter in New Zealand. Your best known is this color, it's Mephedron. Yes. How did you discover this substance? Can you tell us the story? Yeah, in Israel, catenone was legal at the time because we have a large Yemenite community that chews cat leaves and we didn't want to spoil that cultural heritage, and that has been preserved actually until today. So I realized that it was legal, so I made some on my own. I found it to be a better alternative to say what was the cocaine that was circulating in Tel Aviv at the time, and I said, well, this should be available to everyone. The authorities made it illegal after two or three years, and I took the catenone skeleton and started imagining substitutions. So we changed a little bit here, changed a little bit there, and then from that very large set of possible analogues that you can make, I found the ones that it is possible to make, and the ones that it is possible to make inexpensively and cleanly. And then you make them, one after another you make five grams of this and that and that and that, and then you try them, and you're right in calling it a discovery because you don't know in advance what it's going to do or if it's going to do anything. You only know after you've tried it, and then if you find something, if I find something I like, I scale. What do you think why Mephetron became so popular? That doesn't have very much to do with me. It was because the Chinese imitated the process that I invented to make it. Then brought the price down and increased availability. I was very happy about that actually, I didn't mind. It achieved my main goal. Also the media didn't understand what they understand today, that when you warn about a drug you make it very, very popular. The media is a little bit more responsible today, and they don't give me free advertising like they did back in those days. So the media created the popularity of Mephetron. It informed everybody in the public that there is a legal, good drug called Miao Miao, and that created a huge demand, and when there's a demand, and you have suppliers that can also supply, there's supply. The whole thing left me far behind after the first year. Did you get into trouble because of your inventions, like with the police? I've never broken the law. I take very, very special care to only create substances that are legal where they are created and where they are shipped. That's the point behind legal highs. How was your first personal experience with Mephetron? How did it work on you? I find that it works pretty much the same on most people when they're all under the same influence. They all converge to the same kind of behavioural characteristics. So they all look alike. One of the most fundamental understandings is that chemicals change you and you are changed under the influence. We were meant to live life without exterior influences. That's why we like them so much because when they do come, they're like, whoa, I just received something for nothing. That's if you believe what you're experiencing. If you believe your emotions, you shouldn't believe your emotions if they're chemically induced. If you fall in love with a girl because you took ecstasy, don't marry her because when you're not on ecstasy, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. So I was taught not to believe what I feel. And that makes you an expert skeptic. So it turned out that I stopped also believing what other people feel. Do you agree with Timothy Leary who told that these substances can change the way how societies are working? Ecstasy poses new problems for us these days. We evolved as an animal to exist in a certain environment. We don't exist in that environment anymore. We have internet and planes and toilet paper. We didn't evolve to go to have corporate workplaces. With suits and schedules and timetables, there's more stress today on an individual. There's a fundamental difference where many of the people you meet, they're strangers, but you don't have to be afraid of them. We didn't evolve to be able to tackle these entities and these challenges. And if you are in a situation which is not normal for you, you might need to revert to tools that are not normal for you. So in order to work 36-hour shifts or take the stress of just normal life or be able to study a lot, you need some mind-altering tool in the very same way that the computer is a tool that helps us think. Use an unnatural solution to an unnatural problem. How did your story begin? What made you believe that you should invent and design new substances? I'm a neo-schulginist. I read Pekal and Tikal. I understood that it was possible that you need to be brave and knowledgeable in order to test these substances on yourself, that there's a methodology. I cried after realizing this, put the books aside, rolled up my sleeves and started doing it. The answer is Sascha Schulgin basically in his books convinced me that this is a good thing to do. He also gave a reason and the reason is that it is an incredible scientific tool if you want to understand consciousness. A neuron can be a meter long and a synaptic left will be on average 30 nanometers wide. It's really, really hard to study. Psychoactive substances can very, very specifically switch off or turn on subnetworks of the brain. Mind-altering substances are to brain science. What, say, night vision glasses are to the study of nocturnal fauna. Do you invent these substances only for scientific experiments or was it your intention that like millions of young people use it for recreational purposes too? Yeah, it was. It was, that came from inside. Every substance that I really enjoy. I don't feel right about enjoying it alone. It doesn't make sense to me. I think that if something is really good, it should be available to everyone. It has to be good, it has to be pure, it has to be cheap. That's the understanding that drove me to do what, say, Alexander Schulgin never did do, which is to really make large amounts available. It's a very different process to make five grams and to make five tons. Why do you think that you have to produce tons of these substances and don't you think that this will be ruining many people's lives because they don't know the limits and they don't know anything about your real intentions to experiment on your neurons and scientific value of all this? I think that prohibition makes people react to the availability of a substance like an opportunity. So they say, okay, come on, let's get it as much as we can, as fast as we can before they make it illegal. That's terrible. If it's available all the time with information available about it, then people don't approach it as an opportunity. I think that when they do approach it as an opportunity, it's a bad thing. If all of Europe did not criminalize methadone, I think that what would happen was that people would say, yeah, I can take methadone whenever I want, the prices would go down, the quality would go up, the opportunity and the need to take it this weekend and that weekend because maybe it won't be around very soon, we won't be able to enjoy it. That wouldn't be there anymore. And people would use it only when it really gives them benefit. So they want to be able more open at a club and more awake. They want to have better sex. They want to have better focus. They want to feel a little bit good because maybe they've been having a hard day. They want to take the stress away. Of course they wouldn't use it when they need to go to sleep or when they have a big day the next day or when, you know, and even if they do use it to escape, after a while a sensible person says, this is just an escape. I'm not dealing with my real problems. People grow up, they mature, they use, maybe they abuse and then they say, okay, enough. They don't have a chance to do that when they're jumping from opportunity to opportunity. By most people use methadone as a party drug, a lot of people inject it and while heroin is injected three or four times a day, methadone is injected 10 or 15 times a day. So drug users who use methadone, they need more clean needles. But in the same periods, governments spent less money on distributing needles among drug users. So that resulted in skyrocketing of HIV among drug users. What do you think about that? There was no funding for needles. Somebody decided that they don't want to help junkies anymore. That doesn't have very much to do with me. It's not a money issue. It doesn't cost anything. They're saying what they think about junkies. It's a problem with HIV and needles. I have to tell you that I think about what happens to drugs in a no regulation scenario. And that's the kind of thing that happens. And I think that no regulation and so when anything is allowed and prohibition, when nothing is allowed, they're very, very close, very, very close to each other. I think that when a drug is legal, it doesn't mean that you should use it all the time as much as you can. No, it's like you should save it for when it's useful. The whole idea is to make people's lives better, not worse. If you take something that has potential to be beneficial and use it in a way which is detrimental to you and your health and the people around you, then you've screwed up and we want to try to help each other to do that as seldom as possible. We want to try to help each other to do good things as often as possible. I think that legal highs can first and foremost provide a legal alternative to illegal drugs so that people can abuse legally and safely. And this is really funny because the authorities want to say, no, no, no, there's no such thing as using legally. There's no such thing. If you use it's illegal, we're going to put you in jail and you're going to suffer. And a lot of people that use drugs, they're like, but don't I suffer enough? I use drugs because my life is shit. So what is your answer to make it even more shit? What I feel is that you're kind of frustrated with this prohibition system. So is it like a strong motivation for you to like destroy the system or at least to show that it doesn't work and to provide alternatives to people? Everybody's frustrated by the prohibition system. If I was less of an idealist and more of a business person, I would love the prohibition system. Prohibition takes my products and makes them 10 times more valuable. If I was a really good businessman, I would invent a chemical, send it to all the newspapers and all the politicians to make sure that it becomes illegal as fast as possible. While that is happening, I would have large storage rooms with a few tons of that chemical. Ready for the day it becomes illegal, then the price jumps by 10 times. And I sell it then after the price jumps. And then I make a lot of money and when it's impossible to manufacture and import, I go on to the next one, do it again and again. But I am more of an idealist and less of a businessman. I think that I have been useful in bringing new psychoactive substances to public attention. I think that the synthetic cannabinoids played a much larger part. I think that everything that happened in New Zealand happened because of synthetic cannabinoids, not cathenones. In Europe, cathenones are very famous, but actually in Europe also people use synthetic cannabinoids more. It's kind of like in a James Bond movie, you have lots of action and the sex scene. People generally get excited from the movie because of the action, but when they go home they talk about the sex scene. So in the landscape of new psychoactive substances, the synthetic cannabinoids are the action. And methadone was the sex scene.