 Good afternoon and welcome to the first of the John Jay College Office for the Advancement of Research's spring book talks. Each semester the Office for the Advancement of Research sponsors at least two book talks, one featuring John Jay faculty member who's recently published a book and the other featuring an external scholar, journalist, or other storyteller who we want to expose our faculty and students to. In this case we are doing the latter. Today's featured author is Mike Power. Mike is the author of Drugs 2.0, The Web Revolution that's changing how the world gets high. Mike is a freelance investigative journalist for British newspapers and organizations including The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, Reuters, Matter, The Sunday Herald, Drug Scope, and The Big Issue. He works as a freelance correspondent in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly Columbia, exploring the links between civil conflict, human rights, and the drug trade. Mike's book, Drugs 2.0, is a groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which the internet is changing the development, distribution, and consumption of drugs. It's published by Portobello in the UK and that version is available in the US through amazon.com and other vendors but the American edition, the expanded and updated American edition will be published by St. Martin's Press later this year, October and that will be available through those outlets as well. The book documents the emergence of legal highs and it was the first book to investigate the Silk Road which is the billion dollar online drug bizarre which was closed in October 2013. So welcome and please give a hearty round of applause to our guest Mike Thank you very much. So good afternoon and welcome to this this talk. The title of the talk is the same in my book that's Drugs 2.0. I started writing this book about five years ago I was at the time I was living in Columbia in Latin America and I was looking into the I'll just get my microphone in a good spot and let you guys come sit down as well. Okay so I should actually let you know at this point that we have a situation where my finger is the clicker for the slides so I will actually be giving a click like this each time I want to go forward and back. This is the book Drugs 2.0 and it's it was the first book to cover the emergence of legal highs. These are drugs which schedule up by chemical manipulation. It was the first book to cover the dark web the Silk Road and Bitcoin. So really the reason I started to write this book was because I noticed that drug culture in about 2009 was changing and by culture here I mean three things and the way that people were acquiring drugs the kind of drugs they were buying and the industry. So all of these things were changing and technology seemed very connected to this. So 25 years ago when I was in university which is a terrible admission 25 years ago there was only really full drugs anyone did. They were ecstasy cannabis amphetamines and LSD. Cocaine was kind of a rock star's drug. Heroin was kind of associated with innocent deprivation. That didn't apply to us. So at that time the drug market was kind of limited and there wasn't really very many drugs available. So after university I was working in Latin America and whilst in Latin America I became interested in the drug store Daniel. So I was working in Colombia and I became interested in the civil conflict. I was covering a series of war crimes. The Colombian government was killing young civilians and dressing them in gorilla uniforms and claiming that they were FARC gorillas. They were gorillas killed in combat but they weren't they were innocent young people much like yourselves. So it seemed to me that there was a story to be investigated and the more I investigated it I looked into this story and I found that the this is this is people protesting in Bogotar against the government killing and the government killing of the young innocent civilians. As I was there I decided that I could only understand the civil conflict by understanding the drug story. The Colombian drug story was very important at that point. At the time Colombia was exporting 600 tons of cocaine a year. So at 600 tons that was 60 percent of the of the global supply and both the FARC gorilla and the paramilitary armed groups they were funding their fight with the cocaine industry so I thought I should visit a cocaine plantation. So at the time the United Nations was trying to to destroy the cocaine industry by uprooting the plants and the next three slides show that one. So off we are going through the jungle and here's a coca plantation this is cocaine and at the back is the place where the cocaine is processed and so as we go to this plantation we start to uproot the cocaine this is the United Nations attempt to shut down the cocaine industry. So there we are there's a guy he was extremely careful to keep me in his view all day the next one shows people actually uprooting the coca and as we did this I walked into the next field and there was a guy this guy Jose a cocalero and I said so what will you do now that we've destroyed your livelihood we've destroyed your field what will what will you do and he said I'll go into the next field as soon as they go I'll be planting more coca in the next field and I said well tell me why he said well this bush grows back in nine months and it produces leaves every 60 days rice so 25 dollars a hundred right it takes five months of hard work and then needs to transport it by river. Coca pace goes for $1,000 a kilo and the plant needs no attention and he asked me what would you do and I asked you what would you do if you could increase your salary by a factor of 60 tomorrow what would you do so I realized at that point that by artificially inflating the price of cocaine or rather coca it's just such an inflated level that it was you know we were not there was no chance of ending the the the sort of cocaine industry by pulling up the plants by the roots it was it was it was effective and so at that point I decided that I wanted to look into the drug story more deeply and back in the UK I started to investigate the ecstasy trade now ecstasy is still very popular in the UK it's used by half a million people a weekend but in about 2008 2009 there was absolutely no MDMA there was no ecstasy in the UK man I started to look into this and wanted to know why I was finding that at the same time as the kind of the the cocaine industry was inexplicable to me this was also inexplicable what was happening in the UK in 2008 that there was no MDMA available on the streets and so I started to investigate them I'm a journalist after all so I looked back into the history of MDMA and there's Alexander Shulkin the man who resynthesized in the 1960s he was an American chemist he's still alive he made the drugs and then he he actually sampled them and tasted them himself recorded his experiences and one of the drugs that he created was or rather recreated was MDMA ecstasy now ecstasy here's his first ever hand-drawn kind of recipe for this for this drug this is the the first modern day synthesis of MDMA now that's right so I looked into it and in this notebook you can see if you go to the next shot you'll see how this drug is made in the modern era or rather where the base materials for it come from this is a distillery of saffron and if you go through maybe the next three slides we'll see this is in Cambodia what you can see here is a in the next one what you can see here is a distillery so saffron is an essential oil this is the oil which is made into MDMA or ecstasy or molly as it's called in the U.S. saffron is on the international watched precursor list you can't buy it unless you go to Phnom Penh then you can buy an awful lot of it from these guys you make it by stripping the the roots from the yellow camphor tree and then you steam the capture the oil and you sell the the resulting the resulting oil to Dutch chemists now in 2008 the United Nations again had made an attempt to control the global market in saffron and the global market in MDMA and they banned all of the saffron they could find they banned seven billion dollars worth back to the sewer now this this this had an unintended consequence in the United Kingdom and in Europe this burning of 33 tons of saffron changed the drug market completely it changed the drug industry in the UK for a couple of years almost irrevocably what happened then how it changed that oil would have been sent to laboratories in in Holland this is one in just outside Belgium and this is where the drug is produced in clandestine laboratories it would have been sent to places like this which is a a mobile MDMA laboratory to make the drugs so this is this is the kind of the kind of resourcefulness that the Dutch chemists have um so really at this point there was also there was a huge MDMA drug there was no MDMA in the UK so you have half a million people in the UK alone who can't get their drug choice and another shortage at that time in the UK was marijuana and Vietnamese gangs in the United Kingdom discovered that by spraying glass beads onto marijuana that they grow the Vietnamese criminal community in the United Kingdom control the hydroponic indoor marijuana sector they started to spray marijuana with glass beads which were invisible and kind of were just very slightly heavy and slightly visible and they kind of made it look like very high quality glistening marijuana however it was very harmful to the lungs and so people started to get fed up of it and this stuff that the spice drug came to the market which was a legal high a version of a version of a a chemical invented for for medical purposes repurposed for the illegal drugs trade semi-legal drugs trade rather so you have this situation where you have no MDMA in the United Kingdom and cocaine at the time became very very impure the cocaine was impure because well there'd been the credit crunch so with the collapse of the international financial system the pound value had also dropped by 25 percent now to buy cocaine you need pounds or you need dollars so if you want to buy dollars well suddenly everything was 25 percent more expensive so the cocaine quality in the UK plummeted the ecstasy was non-existent and so into the market stepped the new drug and the drug was called methadone now methadone was a drug which according to users felt very similar to MDMA ecstasy or cocaine it was a stimulants it was a euphoric intactogen and it helped well it helped a lot of Chinese people make an awful lot of money because the drug was made in China as you can see in this laboratory and we managed to I was doing an undercover investigation at the time for newspaper and we managed to get into the laboratory and we met the owner and he showed us his facilities and at this time in the UK it was you know it was a very it was a very unusual time the drug market where normally in the years preceding the rise of methadone methadone came to the market and it was suddenly the most well the fourth most popular drug in the UK within a couple just within a couple of years but it was legal this is the key thing it was a legal drug and it was sold on the internet for about 10 pounds a gram that compares to 100 pounds a gram for quality cocaine or 50 pounds a gram for MDMA so you had a situation at the time where you couldn't buy cocaine or ecstasy of any quality but you could buy a legal high you could buy this drug and the government had no idea what to do they had no way legitimately or rather legislatively how to handle this and to give you some numbers around that period in 2009 24 new drugs came to the market and then in 2010 when methadone was ultimately banned we had 41 new drugs come to the market in 2011 there were 49 new drugs in 2012 we had 73 new drugs and in by October of 2013 there were 56 new drugs registered for sale in Europe that makes 243 drugs and if you think about that in relation to the United Nations single convention on psychotropic substances the United Nations international global rule and treaty only bans 233 so we have more legal drugs for sale than we have illegal drugs and so this story fascinated me and I thought I should pursue it and these companies very quickly they very quickly diversified and if we can go through the next two slides they diversified and started to make new drugs and at that point I thought that perhaps I should test my own hypothesis and I thought that as well as writing about it I should actually try to see if what I was writing about was true and so I invented a new drug a completely new drug that was a legal drug that would be legal it would probably be illegal in the United States but in the United Kingdom it was completely legal and the reason I did that was because I wanted to explore and to kind of I wanted to look back I could see the drug culture was changing so I thought when was the first time that drugs and culture became entwined and to me that seemed to be when the Beatles first came to prominence now I'm from Liverpool if you're trying to place my accent and so the Beatles so it was an interesting story for me if you think about it drug culture only really became kind of popularized and in the mainstream view around about the 1960s the mid 60s when the Beatles first well it's okay let's leave it they took another drug for that and this is in 1962 and then they go off to Hamburg to to to play in the Star Club and here they are a year later the Beatles in this photograph are holding tubes of a drug called prelidin now prelidin was a a diet pill it was a diet pill that was used by many people you know it was used by all sorts of people from Trimacopolta to you know Marilyn Monroe even JFK used it apparently and if you look at the kind of the user base of all of those kind of drugs I mean in the United Kingdom in 1962 there were two million prescriptions for pet pills now before we kind of look at that a scans let's look at the statistics for say Adderall in the United States but the United States in 2010 which is the latest figures I could go prescribed 84 tons of Adderall now Adderall is just an amphetamine that's a drug active at 20 milligrams but you know 84 tons of it were prescribed to the United States it's not really prescribed in the UK or in much of Europe so I decided that it would be an interesting an interesting and diverting way to explore the change in the drug market and to explore the change in the in the way that the drugs are being brought into the United Kingdom in Europe by doing it myself for a feature so this is the chemical structure of fenmetrogen and in my investigations and through the writing of drugs 2.0 I I came across a guy who I refer to in this instance as Captain Beefheart he is an online entity who has instructed me and told me how to make the drug legal so I wanted to make a drug that would be legal and still be active as a stimulant and I wanted to do this to prove that this was possible and to prove how the drug market has changed so I'm going to go through the next three sides very quickly one two three and the next one and the last three slides where the laboratory that made this drug for me they synthesized it for me it took I kind of I wanted to to set it up in the most implausible way so I contacted the company and I told them that I wanted to make medicine for dogs you know I said I'm a veterinary surgeon I want to make a medicine for dogs and I want you to send it to me in the UK now this was obviously a lie because fenmetrogen is a very famous stimulant but the guy in the factory didn't really seem to mind and he he decided to send it to me you know he sent it across and here it is a bag of five grams of white powder now I didn't know what that was so there was only one thing for it I had to test it but not in the way that you might imagine I tested it using laboratory so we can go to the next shot and the drug in fact had actually worked and it was the correct drug we were there sorry back on so at the time I was thinking of the which drugs I was going to modify and I decided on fenmetrogen but I could have decided on LSD that was in fact one of the most famous drugs the Beatles ever took um but fact being strange in fiction while I was writing this story the legal highest market in the UK came out with these two drugs this one and the next one these are legal versions of LSD sold on the internet to anybody with a credit card of any age any time any place anywhere you can buy these drugs you can buy them on your phone they're delivered to your house and the police can't stop you now I don't say that in celebration I don't say that in I'm not gloating or happy about that it's just a description this is a documentary of what's happening in the drugs market and how it affects criminal law criminal justice harm reduction how it affects rehabilitation how it affects people's pleasure all of these different things are connected in the drug market and so we can even bring this closer to home and bring it into the United States in the last few months we've had the kind of molly MDMA ecstasy call it what you will it's all the same thing has grown to prominence in the United States now that's what you think but actually what my researcher shown we can go to the next slide let's look at the difference between those two molecules on the left we have MDMA and on the right we have another drug called methylone the only difference is that methylone until April last year was completely legal in the US or nearly legal semi-legal in the gray MDMA completely illegal now you can buy methylone by the ton from China you can buy by the kilo from China for two three thousand dollars and then you can sell it as MDMA in the US fifty thousand dollars what's important about that is that the two drugs have a slightly different effect the drug on the right is harsher drug it makes your heartbeat it makes you sweat it makes you put you in you know a stimulated and agitated state and what my researcher shown is that a good deal of the MDMA or molly in the in the US is actually so it's actually methylone it's been sold under false pretenses that is about 50 grams of methylone and that is a couple of grams of MDMA if you can go back on can you see the difference between them I'm not sure you could in a nightclub I'm not sure you could in a bag at a party or anything so this is what's going on in the 10th of April last year that drug was banned but then the Chinese laboratories they just very quickly came up with a new drug dimethyl same drug very slightly different so what we have is this situation where we are serially banning drugs and each time we ban a drug a new one takes its place it replace is replaced so that's the kind of legal high story and that's that part of my book so as I was writing it I was investigating into the the marketing online drug deal and interestingly enough I found that the very first thing ever bought and sold on the internet the very primal act of e-commerce the first thing that a human being ever bought or sold each other online was actually a bag of marijuana so there's really not that much new under the sun the very first thing it was back in 1971 when students from MIT and Stanford connected the cross art net and they sold they sold each other drugs it was the first thing they wanted to do there's something about the internet that makes drug dealing easy and it makes it quite attractive for people so as the story continued I was the first journalist to write about the silk road now there's the silk road back in I think that was back in 2012 and you can see on there that the prices of the drugs the silk road is a dark web website it's hidden it's a hidden service on an anonymous network on the internet this site was created by very very skilled coders who were ideologically opposed to the the market to prohibition of recreational drugs you can see on there that the prices are in nothing dollars but in bitcoins and it's interesting if you look at the prices of things there there's like 10 bitcoin today that 10 bitcoin price would actually be four thousand dollars the price of bitcoins is actually increased by a factor of about 400 in the space of a year so the silk road was a kind of an experiment in selling selling legal and illegal drugs across the internet anonymously using the anonymous cryptocurrency bitcoin so let's see the next slide and there's a listing there's an ant of mdi and at that time that was being sold for a couple of hundred dollars you could buy it you could have it delivered to your house and of course it was illegal but you could do that without much real danger of being captured so this seemed to me to be an evolution of the online drugs market from the very early days and then through the kind of the legal hires this seemed to be the next sort of generation this was the evolution and obviously it didn't last very long and in when was it it was October the second last year the site was closed and the owner was captured and jailed um that's a longer story that than we have time for today and if you want to find out about it you can you can read it in my book so again what what kind of tickled me what what amused me was that a month later the site was back online and the site is still online this is from this morning so I logged on this morning gone to the Silk Road and if I wanted I could have bought 200 milligrams of DMT the world's most powerful psychedelic a gram of pure flake cocaine for 108 dollars or if we get some Peruvian I fancy the change for 99 dollars so we have a situation where as each you know as each attempt to kind of change the the to shut down the drug markets and to stop people from buying and selling drugs there's always a new way to do some but I think it's kind of it's kind of interesting to look at the effect that stories and journalism like mine have and it's quite counterintuitive so here we have a Google Trends graph from March 2010 now in March 2010 there were four stories in the press on this day on this particular day you can't see the date in this in this graph on this day in 2010 two young people died in the UK so they died from taking methadone and the internet response was that vertiginous climb in search queries not for methadone death or methadone safety or for buying methadone so on the day that the news reports were coming in that people were dying from the new legal hands people have to buy them people wanted to buy them so as educators and as journalists and as storytellers I think that we need to be we need to be mindful of that and so let's look again at the next graph here we have the Silk Road URL in October 2013 on the day that the site was closed search traffic climbed to that high point massively high so in an in a kind of internet era in a connected age everything we do is it kind of influences each other and it pulls and pushes in one direction or the other so these are the kind of these are the these are the ramifications of the of the web revolution that is actually it's only it's only really been going down I think for about three or four years but I think it will continue to grow and I think we need to kind of ask what does this mean what what's the impact of this I mean this is the description we have the rise of legal highs we have the rise of dark web drug markets what you know what are the impact of these things and I think it's good to kind of look back and if you want to look back to one of the first times when when drugs really were kind of taken on maps let's look at Woodstock in 1969 in Woodstock there were half a million people there were half a million people and they were taking drugs but only two people died one person from heroin overdose and one person from a tractor accident so let's go forward in in town to 2013 and in 2013 a guy called Jonathan Graham and I team manager from Chelmsford England who was at the Brownstock festival in south of Woodstock and Ferris a tiny little hamlet there were just 5000 people present and he uh his is post mortem he was sold a drug at that festival called five EAPB a legal drug a legal alternative to a drug which had been banned just three months before a drug called six APB these drugs all have kind of chemical formula names and so this is the kind of this is the this is the impact of it what I've noticed what's happening is that each time we ban a drug something new comes on the market and it's it's often more toxic and I want to know you know if we as kind of experts analysts and advisors and academics think that is that the way that we should be driving policy every time we make an attempt to change the the drug scene for the better it very often becomes worse and so I think really to conclude what I would say in conclusion is that as we kind of as we go along in this in this kind of century of prohibition every time that we've tried to bring a new drug lord every time that any drug laws existed in in kind of any meaningful way a clear pattern has emerged as each law to prevent drug consumption is made and means the circumvent that law is sought and it's found and those means can be chemical they can be legal they can be social or technological and we stand today at a crossroads formed by those four elements with the web making possible communication between distant strangers and it facilitates the sharing of limitless quantities of information and it enables the distribution of drugs anywhere in the world so where do we go next and when I was preparing this speech I was thinking about the work of jock young the distinguished professional criminal justice and sociology here in the past November and I'm sure that he would have smiled in recognition at the moral panic that has been created over legal highs and the silk road itself now these new drugs that I've documented and I've even created are harmful all drugs are in some way harmful in the case of synthetic cannabinoids they're many times more harmful than cannabis themselves and so you know the synthetic cannabinoids have caused strokes they've caused deaths and that's something that cannabis cannot do if you wanted to kill yourself with cannabis you would need to eat about 700 kilos of it in 15 minutes you cannot kill yourself with it you could you beat yourself to death with it perhaps but you can't you can't do that you can't kill yourself with cannabis but with these synthetics you can so you know from the main the kind of the main message I want you to take away from this is that the drug culture has changed and it is changing it's atomized it's proliferated and there are now more drugs on sale in more ways at this point in human history than ever before now then the uk claims that there were 97 deaths from what we call novel psychoactive substances legal highs the legal drugs we've been discussing today the figure was actually 44 that's another story again that's but this is just 0.3 percent of all the drug deaths in the uk so it really isn't time to sound the moral panic about this but it is important to acknowledge that these new synthetic drugs are in many cases more harmful than the banned drugs that they actually replace and there's certainly more than none and you know that's the perspective from which the best seen you know I wouldn't I after five years of looking into this I wouldn't argue for legalization and I would say that our laws are currently workable I'd say that their counts are productive I'd say that the laws seem to increase harm they don't seem to reduce them we've lost sight of our original goals in creating drug policy we want to surely protect people from harm addiction and death our laws are not achieving that at the moment and I don't argue for legalization I don't even argue for decriminalization right now I think instead we need experimentation observation and regulation we need to control the market in a truly new and novel way because right now we've outsourced the production the distribution the sales and marketing of all drugs to international armed criminal organizations and Chinese pharmaceutical factories and that seems irrational to me you know trying to end the cocaine trade by approving individual plants in Colombia or stocking individual consignments or shutting individual distilleries in Cambodia it just doesn't work it's counts productive and while the law persists the law persists with this irrationally economics it we're not going to solve it I mean I want to know how is cocaine more valuable than gold cocaine costs in the UK $1,500 more or less for an ounce of high quality coke now gold yesterday costs $1,346 these are the economics of prohibition they're irrational now I was working with a great physician a guy called dr. David Colby caught guy in Australia he's working me on analogy on investigations and he offered me a great analogy he said let's see drugs as an illness and let's see prohibition as an antibiotic if you treated any illness with the same antibiotic for 15 years medical people will be stunned if resistance hadn't developed so instead of that instead of that prohibition I would argue that we need a system that experiments with new approaches one which regulates the production and distribution and the sound of mood altering drugs and one that approaches this this challenge with rational non-moralistic and a completely fresh mindset and that really is the work for people with a fresh outlook people who dare to challenge the status quo those who dare to think the unthinkable and make other people think it too in short it's people with open and inquiring minds people very much like yourselves