The War on Drugs has failed. According to all available indices, it is no longer defendable. Vast expenditure on drug law enforcement has resulted in increasing levels of overall drug-use and lowered drug prices. 2011 is the 50th anniversary of the 1961 UN Convention, which lies at the root of the criminalizing approach to drug control. Now is the perfect time to re-evaluate our approach.

Of all regions in the world, Latin America has perhaps been the most affected by the unintended consequences of global prohibition. Huge criminal markets have at times turned countries such as Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico into nigh-on war zones. Drug enforcement and eradication in one Andean country has displaced production into neighboring countries and back in turn, in an ongoing cycle. The criminalization of drug control has seen the numbers of those incarcerated for drug offenses (even the possession of minor amounts for personal consumption) rise to levels that overwhelm judicial systems. Currently there are over 10 million people in prison worldwide.

However, Latin America, as the region that has suffered the most, is now leading the way to an open and frank discussion of drugs. Recent declarations from certain politicians show a much greater understanding of the problems than those coming from some of their Western counterparts. In Peru, former President and current presidential candidate Alejandro Toledo declared himself open to full decriminalization. Whilst he nuanced his argument a few days later, the declaration itself shows that Latin American governments are becoming increasingly progressive in their nature. The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, led by former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, has declared its outright opposition to a “misguided and counter-productive war.”

The most significant declaration of all, however, may well be that of current Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. Santos is head of a country traditionally felt to be one of the US’ major allies in the War on Drugs. However, President Santos has declared himself open to a discussion on alternative approaches that may reduce both the risks and harms associated with illegal drugs. A recipient of major US aid, Colombia cannot turn away directly from Plan Colombia, but Santos’ comments show that Colombian drug policy may be slowly turning against the whirlpool of US foreign policy.

A fellow Andean country, Bolivia, has recently seen more and more countries support its proposals to reform the international prohibition of chewing the coca leaf. Flexibility and cultural sensitivity are vital within approaches to drug conventions. Drug control regimes should be respectful of human rights and take account of different cultural norms in societies around the world. There must be the freedom for individual countries to work out what is best for them. The one-fit-all model has shown itself to be highly destructive.

Various countries such as Portugal have shown how successful a change in policy can be. They have demonstrated that the decriminalization of use and a commitment to provide health and rehabilitation programs as alternatives to incarceration, together with a sustained educational program, can diminish the harms associated with drug-use. Both Hungary and the Czech Republic criminalized use in 1999. However, studies showed that this policy had been a disaster and brought more social costs than benefits. Consequently, both countries reversed this policy (in 2003 and 2010 respectively). We cannot let such lessons go unheeded. We must learn from these examples.

It is time for a new approach. The 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, with its zero-tolerance approach, was written in a very different context to today, both socially and politically. A rewriting of the UN Convention would enable us to move forward from the present impasse. Individual countries should have more freedom to be able to decriminalize the personal use of drugs and, should the country so wish, to legally regulate certain substances, such as cannabis, thereby being able to control and label their content, and tax them. This would have the advantage of saving vast sums on the continuation of the coercive approach, as well as raising substantial tax to implement an educational and treatment approach to drug-use. It would also solve the problem of hundreds of billions of dollars going into the hands of criminals each year.

The Beckley Foundation Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform 2011-2012 is proposing such a model.

2011 is the 50th anniversary of the 1961 UN Convention, the 40th anniversary of the UK Misuse of Drugs Act and the 10th anniversary of the Portuguese drug decriminalisation. There has never been a more appropriate time for change.

From Wired Magazine

It’s in the middle of a grassy field, shiny sedans behind gleaming glass walls. Right next door is another luxury car dealership selling a variety of other high-end European rides. It’s as if the sheer magic of wealth has shimmered the glass-and-steel buildings into being.

In fact, expensive cars choke the streets of Râmnicu Vâlcea’s bustling city center—top-of-the-line BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes driven by twenty- and thirtysomething men sporting gold chains and fidgeting at red lights. I ask my cab driver if these men all have high-paying jobs, and he laughs. Then he holds up his hands, palms down, and wiggles his fingers as if typing on a keyboard. “They steal money on the Internet,” he says.

Among law enforcement officials around the world, the city of 120,000 has a nickname: Hackerville. It’s something of a misnomer; the town is indeed full of online crooks, but only a small percentage of them are actual hackers. Most specialize in ecommerce scams and malware attacks on businesses. According to authorities, these schemes have brought tens of millions of dollars into the area over the past decade, fueling the development of new apartment buildings, nightclubs, and shopping centers. Râmnicu Vâlcea is a town whose business is cybercrime, and business is booming.

At a restaurant in a neighborhood of apartment buildings and gated bungalows, I meet Bogdan Stoica and Alexandru Frunza, two of just four local cops on the digital beat. Stoica, 32, is square-shouldered and stocky, with a mustache and prominent stubble. His expression rarely changes. Frunza, 29, is tall and clean shaven. He’s the funny one. “My English will improve after I have a few beers,” he says. We sit at a table on the edge of a big courtyard, piped-in Romanian pop music blaring.

Stoica and Frunza grew up in Râmnicu Vâlcea. “The only cars on the streets were those made by Dacia,” Stoica says, referring to the venerable Romanian carmaker. Access to information was limited, too: Weekday television consisted of two hours of state-run programming, mostly devoted to covering the dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu. “We had half an hour of cartoons on Sunday,” Stoica says.

In 1989, a revolution that began with anti-government riots ended with the execution of Ceauşescu and his wife, and the country began the switch to a market economy. By 1998, when Stoica finished high school and went off to the police academy in Bucharest, another revolution was beginning: the Internet. Râmnicu Vâlcea was better off than many towns in this relatively poor country—it had a decades-old chemical plant and a modest tourism industry. But many young men and women struggled to find work.

No one really knows how or why those kids started scamming people on the Internet. “If you find out, you let us know,” says Codruţ Olaru, head of Romania’s Directorate for Investigation on Organized Crime and Terrorism. Whatever the reason, online crime was widespread by 2002. Cybercafés offered cheap Internet access, and crooks in Râmnicu Vâlcea got busy posting fake ads on eBay and other auction sites to lure victims into remitting payments by wire transfer. Eventually, FBI agents in the US and Bucharest started to get interested.

In the early days, the perpetrators weren’t exactly geniuses. One of the first cases out of the region involved a team based in the neighboring town of Piteşti. One crook would post ads for cell phones; the other picked up the wired money for orders that would never ship. The two men had made a few hundred dollars from victims in the US, and the guy receiving the cash hadn’t even bothered to use a fake ID. “I found him sitting in an Internet café, chatting online,” says Costel Ion, a Piteşti cop who had been working the cybercrime beat. “He just confessed.”

But as in any business, the scammers innovated and adapted. One early advance was establishing fake escrow services: Victims would be asked to send payments to these supposedly trustworthy third parties, which had websites that made them look like legitimate companies. The scams got better over the years, too. To explain unbelievably low prices for used cars, for example, a crook would pose as a US soldier stationed abroad, with a vehicle in storage back home that he had to sell. (That tale also established a plausible US contact to receive the money, instead of someone in Romania.) In the early years, the thieves would simply ask for advance payment for the nonexistent vehicle. As word of the scam spread, the sellers began offering to send the cars for inspection—asking for no payment except “shipping.”

The con artists got even sneakier. “They learned to create scenarios,” says Michael Eubanks, an FBI agent in Bucharest. “We’ve seen email between criminals with instructions on how to respond to different questions.” The scammers started hiring English speakers to craft emails to US targets. Specialists emerged to occupy niches in the industry, designing fake websites or coordinating low-level confederates.

Internet scammers and their underlings have turned Râmnicu Vâlcea into a hub of international organized crime.
Photo: Nick Waplington

By 2005, Romania had become widely known as a haven for online fraud, and buyers became wary of sending money there. The swindlers adapted again, arranging for payments to be wired to other European countries, where accomplices picked up the cash. A new entry level evolved, people who’d act as couriers and money launderers for a cut of the take. These money mules were called arrows, and their existence elevated Râmnicu Vâlcea to a hub of international organized crime.

Many arrows were Romanians living in Western Europe and the US; some were youngsters from Râmnicu Vâlcea who had moved overseas expressly for the job. They’d go to wire transfer offices to collect remittances from victims, then turn around and wire that money—minus a commission—to Râmnicu Vâlcea or to other arrows in the network. The system served as a kind of firewall, making it much more difficult for law enforcement to track the masterminds.

Back home, the local police were starting to realize they needed people on the cybercrime beat full-time. Frunza, who’d studied informatics in high school before attending the police academy, was working drug cases in Bucharest when he decided to come home. He ended up joining Stoica on the hunt for online con artists. The two learned that suspects expect leniency from the police because their crimes target only foreigners. “The guys will often say, ‘I am not stealing from our countrymen,’” Frunza says. “But a crime is a crime. You have to pay for it.”

Nowadays, Stoica and Frunza occasionally find themselves investigating a childhood acquaintance or, conversely, running into known criminals in social situations. Frunza used to play on the same soccer team as a suspect who was under surveillance. Those connections have helped the two cops pose a formidable challenge to the industry.

A little after 11 pm, Stoica hushes our conversation and tells me to turn around and check out a table across the courtyard, where a small group of flashily dressed young men has just arrived with two blond women who seem barely out of their teens. The men are all under investigation. “It’s a small city,” Stoica says.

The sudden appearance of luxury car dealerships among the grass fields marks the entrance into Râmnicu Vâlcea.
Photo: Nick Waplington

Defining the town center of Râmnicu Vâlcea is a towering shopping mall that looks like a giant glass igloo. The streets are lined with gleaming storefronts—leather accessories, Italian fashions—serving a demand fueled by illegal income. Near the mall is a nightclub, now closed by police because its backers were shady. New construction grinds ahead on nearly every block. But what really stands out in Râmnicu Vâlcea are the money transfer offices. At least two dozen Western Union locations lie within a four-block area downtown, the company’s black-and-yellow signs proliferating like the Starbucks mermaid circa 2003.

Driving past a block of low-rise buildings with neatly trimmed hedges, Stoica notes a couple of apartments owned by people currently under investigation. “I don’t know if the people of Râmnicu Vâlcea are too smart or too stupid,” Stoica says grimly. “They talk a lot to each other. One guy learns the job from another. They ask their high school friends: ‘Hey, do you want to make some money? I want to use you as an arrow.’ Then the arrow learns to do the scams himself.”

It’s not so different from the forces that turn a neighborhood into, say, New York’s fashion district or the aerospace hub in southern California. “To the extent that some expertise is required, friends and family members of the original entrepreneurs are more likely to have access to those resources than would-be criminals in an isolated location,” says Michael Macy, a Cornell University sociologist who studies social networks. “There may also be local political resources that provide a degree of protection.”

Online thievery as a ticket to the good life spread from the early pioneers to scores of young men, infecting Râmnicu Vâlcea’s social fabric. The con artists were the ones with the nice cars and fancy clothes—the local kids made good. And just as in Silicon Valley, the clustering of operations in one place made it that much easier for more to get started. “There’s a high concentration of people offering the kinds of services you need to build a criminal scheme,” says Gary Dickson, an FBI agent who worked in Bucharest from 2005 to 2010. “If your specialty is auction frauds, you can find a money pick-up guy. If you’re a money pick-up guy, you can find a buyer for your services.”

Stoica and Frunza both complain that they’re fighting an unstoppable tide with limited resources. But they haven’t been entirely unsuccessful—in fact, the 2008 case that first revealed the anatomy of Râmnicu Vâlcea’s fraud networks stemmed from Stoica’s investigation of a young entrepreneur named Romeo Chita.

Stoica says Chita started out as an arrow in the UK, and he was good. He moved up the ranks and eventually hired a few friends to establish his own ring. The Romanian authorities began investigating him in 2006, when he started buying new cars every few months and going to clubs every night with no apparent source of legitimate income. Chita launched an Internet service provider called NetOne, which authorities believe he was using as a shelter for fraudulent activity. When cops wanted to identify his customers, Stoica says, Chita usually told them that NetOne didn’t keep records.

Western Union signs have multiplied downtown like the Starbucks mermaid circa 2003.
Photo: Nick Waplington

In January 2008, an informant gave Stoica the cell numbers of two men working for Chita. The police tapped the phones, and the next day one of the men sent Chita a text message with money transfer control numbers—unique numeric sequences required to pick up cash. Stoica and his team followed up with surveillance of Chita and his associates, which established what Stoica calls “the money circuit,” the route through which the funds flowed from victims in the US to Chita and others. Prosecutors now allege that the operation turned into something a little more sophisticated than the usual Râmnicu Vâlcea scam. For example, the case against them details a con known as spear phishing—sending email to US companies that appeared to be from the IRS, the Department of Justice, or some other agency. Through Trojan horses attached to these emails, Chita’s group could obtain the companies’ bank account numbers and passwords. Allegedly, they even hired people in Las Vegas—Stoica says some were homeless—to open fake corporate bank accounts and receive the money.

The same month that Stoica began pursuing Chita, a police officer stopped a car for speeding in the Westlake suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. About to write a ticket, the cop noticed some drug paraphernalia in the car and arrested the two men inside. A further search turned up eight cell phones, two computers, fake IDs, two dozen money transfer receipts, and $63,000 in cash. The pair turned out to be Romanian and eventually confessed to being arrows for an organization authorities traced back to Chita. They had spent most of January driving around the Midwest, picking up money from various Western Union and MoneyGram locations. Their confessions led to more wiretaps and surveillance in the US and Romania over the following months, uncovering a network of at least two dozen accomplices.

That summer, Romanian authorities and FBI agents conducted a series of raids on both sides of the Atlantic. Chita spent 14 months in custody before being granted a provisional release pending the completion of his trial, still pending. On an org chart filed in Stoica’s office, Chita’s photo remains at the top.

Class Café is an inviting coffee shop with a terrace that overlooks a quiet street. It’s nearly empty when I walk in—just the owner behind the counter and a young couple at a corner table.

Stoica discouraged me from attempting this meeting, but I wanted to know what an alleged kingpin looks like. I ask the owner if he knows where Chita is, and he offers to call him. After a brief phone conversation, he hangs up and tells me that Chita is in Bucharest. I remind him that Chita isn’t allowed to leave Râmnicu Vâlcea under the terms of his release, and the owner smiles. He spends a few more minutes on the phone, then hangs up again and asks me to sit. Chita is on his way.

I take a table on the terrace. During our tour of town, Stoica had pointed out Chita’s silver Mercedes on the road, so I ignore the green Jaguar that drives up until a man in Bermuda shorts, canvas shoes, and a white T-shirt climbs out, enters the café, and approaches my table. He introduces himself as Chita’s brother, Marian. He licks his lips nervously and fidgets with an iPhone. “Chita’s coming,” he says after lighting a cigarette and making some phone calls. “But he’s a little drunk.”

A few minutes later, Chita walks around the corner and ambles into the café. Boyish, dressed in shorts, a light-blue polo shirt, and flip-flops, he looks more like a college student than a criminal mastermind. Despite the reputation of Râmnicu Vâlcea’s underworld as relatively free of violence, he has brought along some muscle—a young man in dark glasses with a big tattoo on his arm. The bodyguard slams a beer bottle down on the table and flexes his hand, as if getting ready for a boxing match.

Chita shakes my hand dourly and sits down next to me, looking away. Two other men join us. The young couple from the corner comes over to greet Chita with fawning smiles and handshakes. They clearly recognize him, too. The café owner gets up and leaves. As he walks away, he looks at me gravely and says, “Good luck.”

Râmnicu Vâlcea has become the Silicon Valley of online thievery— a place where the clustering of operations makes boot-strapping a criminal start-up easier.
Photo: Nick Waplington

The tattooed man leans toward me ominously. “Were you sent by Barack Obama?” he asks. I say that I wasn’t, and everyone but me lights cigarettes. Marian, getting increasingly jumpy, demands to know my true agenda. Finally, I spell my name and tell him to search for my stories on his iPhone. He Googles me and shows the screen to his brother. Everybody relaxes a bit, and I silently give thanks for wireless broadband.

Marian asks the young couple to translate for Chita, and they agree to stay. Chita has them tell me to stand, then he pats me down, asking if I’m wearing a wire.

“What do you say to the charges against you?” I ask.

“They are fake,” Chita says, in English.

Marian adds, “It’s all bullshit.” For clarification.

Chita continues with his defense in Romanian, and the couple translates enthusiastically. “He doesn’t even know how to speak English, so it is impossible for him to post ads or exchange email with buyers,” the young woman says. “He doesn’t even have an email address,” she says. “How can he do fraud on the Internet?”

I press Chita about the wiretapped conversations, but his tattooed bodyguard interrupts loudly. “You go back to your hotel room, we send you some nice pussy,” he says, raising his hand for a high five that I feel obligated to meet. The two men beside him laugh, and Chita takes a final drag from his cigarette before rising from his chair. He’s in no mood to discuss the evidence. “This interview is over,” Marian says.

They saunter out of the café and onto the sidewalk, looking surprisingly banal for guys accused of organized cybercrime, enjoying the good life with little effort or risk. Officials have dismantled a few fraud rings in recent years—there were just 188 arrests in all of Romania in 2010—but scores remain in business.

I am left with the friendly couple that helped with the translating. The young man says he’s heard about Chita from his friends and has seen his name in the papers. He tells me he has just received a diploma in engineering from an institution in Bucharest and is now looking for a job here in Râmnicu Vâlcea, his hometown. “I haven’t found anything yet,” he says. Thinking about Marian’s Jag and Chita’s Mercedes, I wonder if he’ll consider a job as an arrow. It’s like Frunza told me at the restaurant: “You arrest two of them and 20 new ones take their place,” he said. “We are two police officers, and they are 2,000.”

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee (yudhijit@gmail.com) is a staff writer at Science. He wrote about decoding a spy’s messages in issue 18.02.

However initial alarm wore off when officers realised the 10 or so bears did not behave aggressively and were in fact docile and tame.

Police believe dog food was used to attract the animals onto the farm in British Columbia.

But they say the bears may have to be put down if they have become accustomed to living around humans.

Two people were arrested in the raid.

The five police who went to the farm near Christina Lake, close to the US border, to dismantle the marijuana plantation were amazed when the bears loped into view.

“They were tame, they just sat around watching. At one point one of the bears climbed onto the hood of a police car, sat there for a bit and then jumped off,” said Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Fred Mansveld.

In Canada, feeding bears is illegal as it leads to bears associating food with humans and increases the likelihood of bears coming into towns and cities to look for food.

Conservation officers are deciding the fate of the bears

Inside City Hall in Oakland, Calif., Jim Wilcox explained his plan for a commercial marijuana farm. “My idea was a Silicon Valley of cannabis,” he told the city council recently. “An office park for pot.” The council has approved the creation, licensing and taxing of four such medical marijuana farms inside Oakland city limits.

Four hundred miles to the south in Los Angeles, it’s a completely different story. After four years running the Pure Life Alternative Wellness Center, Yami Bolanos fears her medical marijuana dispensary will be shut down. “The patients are the ones that are getting screwed royally by the city council.”

Los Angeles is cracking down hard on the number of “collectives”, which have grown like weeds in the last few years. By some estimates, there were 700 medical marijuana dispensaries a few months ago, more pot outlets than Starbucks in LA. A new law will reduce that number to 182. “The sale of marijuana has never been approved by voters,” says Los Angeles Assistant Attorney Asha Greenberg. “Cities have the ability to restrict the numbers of collectives.”

This tale of two cities reflects a divergence of opinion in California over the future of what may be its largest cash crop. Voters will decide in November whether to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes.

The State Board of Equalization estimates that pot in California is worth $15 billion a year. Taxing it could bring in $1.5 billion in much-needed revenues. But that’s based on current prices. A Rand study suggests that if the November ballot measure passes, prices could drop 90 percent to $38 an ounce, while consumption could increase as much as 100 percent.

Jane Wells
CNBC Reporter

The November initiative, called Proposition 19, would allow California residents 21 years or older to grow marijuana at home for personal use, in an area no larger than 25 square feet. It would also allow adults 21 and older to possess and transport up to an ounce. Finally, it would allow local governments to license, regulate, and tax commercial growers and sellers. Like alcohol, sales to anyone under 21 would be banned.

“Look at all the people that are being killed in Mexico every day, as well as the home invasion robberies and other things that come from the inflated price that’s caused by prohibition,” says Richard Lee, who authored Prop 19. Lee runs Oaksterdam University in Oakland, a school which teaches people how to grow medical marijuana and run a dispensary.

Lee says the benefits of legalization go beyond sales tax revenues, and include “ancillary benefits such a tourism, jobs, and hotel rooms and transportation and food that would go along with the cannabis industry.”

“They will probably two, three, four to one outraise us financially,” says Covina police chief Kim Raney, leading the No on Prop 19 campaign, “but I think our message will be clear. I think our message will be the truth, and I think the voters in the state will understand that.”

What is clear is that Prop 19 will again put California’s marijuana laws in direct opposition to the feds. Because of that, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office says it’s impossible to know how much money the state might bring in.

The LAO says savings to correctional facilities “could reach several tens of millions of dollars annually,” and a new jobs-creating industry could let the state “eventually collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually in additional revenues.” But with the federal government poised at any moment to snuff out any legalized pot business, “the revenue and expenditure impacts of this measure are subject to significant uncertainty.”

Public opinion polls have delivered conflicting results on the initiative’s chances for success. “I think in November, (voters) will realize the consequences and devastation that this act will have on their communities, and I think the voters will turn it down,” says Chief Raney.

Richard Lee’s pro-Prop 19 group has hired an Internet fundraising company used during the Obama campaign, and its Facebook page has well over 130,000 fans. The political battle will be fierce, and opposition may come from unexpected sources. “Two groups that have come out against (Prop 19) are growers who don’t want to pay taxes,” he says, “and the cops who want to keep getting the forfeiture money and seizure money, and job security from it.”

MINDSET
I was born in Washington State on the edge of Western exploration in the New World in
the summer of 1971. I came of age in and around the communal rooms of AA, NA, ACA,
Alanon and Alateen throughout the Pacific and Mountain West. My father is 33 years
sober. His father died 14 years sober in 1982.

I too wrestled my psychospiritual demons through alcohol and Cannabis which gratefully
led me to the rooms of AA and NA where, at the age of 14, I declared myself an
alcoholic and an addict. I delved headlong into the 12 Steps and promptly saw that I had
wrapped myself in a shame-bound identity (‘ism’ – internalised shame manifested). Upon
recognising this, I had the promised spiritual awakening of the twelfth step. I then sought,
via being of service to other addicts and alcoholics, to maintain this awareness.

Eventually, I came to a point where I just didn’t feel I belonged in AA. I felt that what I
had come to learn had been learned. I was no longer afraid to be alive nor was I willing to
hide. I had recovered from my shame-bound self. In short, I got tired of pretending that
there was something wrong with me, I had become a spiritualized being living a
predominantly joyous and fulfilling life.

So, on October 31st 1993, on the eve of my 8th AA birthday, I ended my inflexible ‘once
and always’ identification with alcoholism and drug addiction. This came about in an
“All Hallows Eve” ritual which had a ‘spiced wine’ component. I had requested of my
partner that my wine be heated to remove the alcohol. This was done.

As we journeyed through the ritual, I pondered the rigid way in which I had insisted on
having the alcohol removed from my ‘sacrament’. I had recalled seeing a heart-rate
monitor flat-line. Life had pulse, it had cycles, and a flat-line meant only one thing:
death.

In a flash, I realized the most important insight: Life is transformation. Life is a cycle of
death and rebirth, renewing itself each day. Upon recognising this, I declared to my
companions in a choked up teary-eyed expression, “I am recovered.” My future
uncertain, my world of illusion shattered, I ventured forth into unfamiliar territory. The
ritual had worked.

2
About three weeks later, a friend of mine, John, was coming to visit me in Idaho. He and
I had met in Yosemite Valley, California, at an AA meeting. We had been sober and
travelled together for six years; he had ended his tour of AA with much the same
realization as I had. We chose to celebrate his arrival by drinking our first beer together.
Absolutely nothing happened, we didn’t foam at the mouth or go into fits of obsessive
compulsive behaviour, nothing.

Another three weeks passed and John and I rented the video, The Making of ‘A Brief
History of Time’ by Stephen Hawking (Hawking, 1992). As it started John said, “Oh hey,
did I mention to you all, I have some Liquid LSD that ‘the Lorax’ made.” I knew ‘the
Lorax’ was a mad, old-school chemist and I trusted and respected him. I had also heard a
few stories of peoples’ spiritual adventures with LSD, peyote cacti and ‘magic’
mushrooms; not least of which were told by many ‘Deadheads’ I had known whilst being
a ‘clean and sober Wharf Rat’ on Grateful Dead tour. I also knew that Bill Wilson, the
co-founder of AA, had consumed LSD with spiritual intent (Wilson, 1984). With all this,
I was curious.

SETTING
On a cold night in December of 1993, I ingested approximately 250 micrograms of LSD.
Although, I was borne into a global ‘War on (some people who use some) Drugs’, I was
unaware that I had just ingested the forbidden fruit, or at least the modern-day variant.

I ‘tuned in’ somewhere in the midst with Stephen Hawking philosophizing about the
origins of the universe. About an hour or so in, I wanted to go outside. After discovering
that I could still don my foul weather gear, tie my shoelaces and otherwise perform with
dexterous ease, I stepped out for a snowy night-time walk through the woods to the
lakeshore; damn, the world was breathlessly bright and I awoke into a childlike wonder!

INSIGHT
Several hours later, whilst it lightly snowed on my face where I lay buried in the pea-
gravel of the lakeshore, I recognised ‘I’ was still and yet my experience was vast:
complete absorption; self had vanished. This was my first glimpse of a possible ‘Land
without Evil’.

Two hundred years earlier William Blake wrote, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1793), “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses
discover’d the infinite in everything”. Transformed by my ineffable LSD experience, I
knew what he meant; there was no going back.

In less than eight hours I had been shown a rare glimpse of the power of the human mind
to shape reality. I saw that my limited neurotypical consciousness was only one plane,
level or aspect and that there were infinite new things to discover. I found new
perspectives on birth, death, and the nature of mind and consciousness as the field of
creation. The experience of the oneness of all things replaced the myth of separation.
Perennial wisdom dawned and my heart burst forth in praise, gratitude and love, rooted in
a mindset of compassion for self and other.
3
INTEGRATION
In absorptive reverie, I began to integrate these insights whilst a deep desire welled up
within me to study consciousness and its intersection with mysticism, the creation of
religious belief systems and man’s place in this great biosphere. Some hours later, I was
roused by the bells ringing out at the local community college a mile across the water; I
had never noticed them before. It was time to go to school!

Later that morning, still reeling from the profound transformations of the previous 13
hours, innocent, humbled and hungry for wisdom, I went down to the local community
college and, in tears, I begged them to let me in. I was 22, I had not graduated high
school and I was determined to do what ever it took to understand what had just
happened to me, to validate my experience and to find others who had tasted these
forbidden fruits.

At school I refused to hide. I boldly declared to anyone who would listen that I was intent
on studying psychedelics, psychoactivity, consciousness and its interconnection with
religious belief systems. Several professors, friends and family attempted to steer me
from my path concerned that I would end up in prison. They were right but I was willing
to pay the piper if the monkey showed up with the cup; indeed, Martin Luther King Jr.
had said (King, 1963):

“[A]n individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly
accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community
over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”

Here, those in power had drawn a line in the sand on the shores of a Rubicon which I had
already crossed; so, I knew and accepted my possible futures and pasts. Hell, after
promising certain death, all God could think to do was throw Adam and Eve out of the
Garden for eating the forbidden fruit. If that is the worse that can happen, so be it.

In school I learned that not only has mankind been intentionally consuming psychoactive
substances to alter mental functioning for a proverbial eon or two, we also consume
plants rich in alkaloids as an important source of nutrition and energy for survival,
particularly in stressful environmental conditions. This suggests an evolutionary purpose
for ‘drug’ taking and illustrates our symbiotic relationship with plants evident in our
shared chemical communicants.

I also learned that in the last twelve thousand years or so there has evolved a priest-class
hell-bent on maintaining control of these substances as a way of enforcing the artificial
divide between orthodox and heretical experience (Council on Spiritual Practices, 1997).

I recognised this artificial divide as the crux of the ‘War on (some) Drugs’ that continued
an ancient ‘pharmacratic inquisition’ which had begun sixteen hundred years earlier
when Alaric’s Goths sacked the sanctuary at Eleusis ending a two thousand year old
Mystery religion which centred on the ingestion of a sacred potion, the kykeon; where
individuals permitted to imbibe saw ‘ta hiera’, ‘the holy’ (Ott 1993, 1995). It has been
4
suggested that the kykeon is derived from the Ergot fungus, Claviceps, which grows on
many cereal grains, synthesises the biochemical precursor of Lysergic Acid
Diethylamide, LSD, and, is the source of Ergotism also known as ‘St. Anthony’s Fire’
(Ruck, Wasson & Hofmann, 1978; Schultes, Hofmann & Rätsch, 1979, 2001).

COMMITMENT
On learning this, I made a commitment to myself that I would synthesise Albert
Hofmann’s ‘Problem Child’, LSD (Hofmann, 1979). I had completed the requisite
undergraduate chemistry courses, so, I knew I was capable of synthesising most
psychedelic-type drugs, but I was not yet ready; I was experiencing the adage “when the
student is ready the master will appear”. So, after some pedagogical meandering and
whilst continuing to experiment with various psychedelic compounds, I fixed on
biochemistry and medical anthropology as the paradigmatic backdrop upon which I
would unite my conscious studies and psychospiritual development.

ACTION
Central to therapeutic efficacy, as described by an interdisciplinary Medical
Anthropology, is the power of declaration either made by the sufferer or the healer that is
listened by the sufferer with credibility or faith (Csordas & Kleinman, 1996); this
especially holds in the magico-religious context outside of Western Biomedicine and
married nicely to my insights from AA’s 12 Steps, the use of psychedelics, meditation
and the personal empowerment paradigm I had engaged in as a participant of Landmark
Education. Crucially, I was able to apply this to myself.

As I matured and my insights began to consistently manifest in new ways of being which
produced measurable results, I engaged in lively philosophical transactions within the
scholastic community and followed my intellectual curiosity until, after 11 semesters, the
public funding ran out.

Conveniently, during my last school semester, I managed to talk the Anthropology
department Head into giving me a grant and credit to attend the spring 2000
Entheobotany Seminar in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. All I had to do was present a slide
show, talk and a paper when I got back.

Entheobotany is the study of plant entheogens. The neologism entheogen derives from an
obsolete Greek word meaning “realizing the divine within” – the term used by the ancient
Greeks to describe states of poetic or prophetic inspiration – and now used to describe the
entheogenic state which can be induced by sacred plant-drugs. (Ott, 1993, 1995)

In Palenque, I was in an indefatigably good mood as I had found validation of my path
and true community with which to resonate. I was no longer a lone psychonaut. I had
arrived and just in the nick of time. Suddenly, I was immersed in a diverse community of
those who were on the path of the entheogenically inclined. I was ecstatic to say the least.
I took notes and photographed the main speakers for my slideshow. I tried to absorb as
much of the proceedings as I could whilst I sampled a veritable variety of other
entheogenic entities, i.e. psychedelic-type drugs. In so doing, I noticed a number of
5
individual conference participants had subjectively bioassayed 2C-T-7, an entheogenic
phenethylamine substantially similar to the mescaline found naturally in peyote cacti
(Shulgin & Shulgin, 1991).

Recognizing this as an opportunity to further the understanding of 2C-T-7 through
anecdotal experiential accounts and to lend credibility to the scientific methodology of
the subjective bioassay, I transformed insight into action, prepared and administered a
written survey and, with gratuitous grace, the Multidisciplinary Association of
Psychedelic Studies agreed to publish the results in their forthcoming summer 2000
Bulletin, 10 (2).

Upon returning to the States, I knew my life was never going to be the same. I presented
my slideshow to about 50 people from the University, about half of whom where
professors. I received the credit, a serious cheer, and respect. What a confirmation of my
path.

OPENINGS
I wrote up the 2C-T-7 article whilst under the influence of 2C-T-7 and to this day no one
has noticed that I classically forgot to count myself and ‘K-dog’ in the 48 bioassays.
Shortly thereafter an individual who had just renewed his subscription to the MAPS
Bulletin, which had lapsed for some years, got his first new issue.

I received a cryptic letter from him. He told me he had studied for 20+ years the
phenethylamine and tryptamine families of psychedelic-type drugs until the 1986 US
Controlled Substances Analogue Act came into force. He said he had seen my article in
the MAPS Bulletin and thought I might want to communicate; mysteriously, I ignored his
letter.

Later that fall he wrote again. This time more direct and to the point. He was serious. He
wanted to give me his lab and years of research notes. He wanted someone to pick up his
torch. Was the student ready? Had the master appeared? Knowing from direct experience
the profound impact of these molecules to facilitate healing and shatter epistemological
paradigms, I wanted to be of service and thus I was more than willing. So in spring 2001
I picked up his torch and began the slow process of assembling the materials for a
sufficient laboratory.

I recognised my bench practice was limited but I had worked in the biology and
chemistry labs throughout university. I cold-called Sigma Aldrich Chemical Co., danced
through their questions, ordered the chemicals and purchased, via the Web, more used
glassware.

I began by making mistake after mistake until I succeeded finally in making a viable,
purified molecule: 2C-D, another psychedelic phenethylamine. I chose 2C-D because I
had a fantastic recipe and the precursors and reagents to start four steps back thereby
improving my skill and avoiding detection. 2C-D has a very gentle dose-response curve
6
with a fantastically large range. 2C-D is what some have called a ‘pharmacological tofu’
(Shulgin & Shulgin, 1991).

Imbibing my first home-made entheogen was a serious triumph. Even better was sharing
the gift with my friends and family. The results were immediate and over the years many
people have expressed their appreciation of my facilitations of their psychospiritual
transformations. I would thank them for ingesting, remind them that they had done the
work and ask that if they could do but one thing, they could integrate their insights and
transform them into concrete actions which make a difference for humanity.

Unexpectedly, whilst at play in the fields of the Lords, opportunities abounded and my
services were in high demand. I was travelling the world from one conference to another,
stopping off in foreign lands to learn of their people’s drugs of choice; and I saw
intimately how today’s diversion of immense resources away from the everyday needs of
humanity to combat a ‘War on (some) Drugs’ leaves people thirsty, hungry and destitute,
and so they turn with evolutionary predictability to the very drugs the West is purportedly
seeking to suppress.

In December 2001 I attended the ‘Ibogaine Conference’ in London on the eboga plant,
Tabernanthe iboga and its alkaloids. Eboga is an African rainforest shrub of the Gabon
region traditionally used by indigenous peoples of western Africa in low doses to combat
fatigue, hunger and thirst, and in higher doses as a sacrament in spiritual initiation
ceremonies.

Ibogaine is a naturally-occurring psychoactive indole derived from the roots of
Tabernanthe iboga whose pharmacological properties have been researched for over 100
years. In fact, ibogaine was marketed in France until 1970 as Lambarene to promote a
sense of well being. In 1962, Howard Lotsof discovered the efficacy of ibogaine for
treatment of drug dependence and, in 1985, “he was awarded a series of use patents
related to ibogaine’s apparent ability to ‘interrupt’ a wide range of substance abuse
disorders, including those associated with opiates (heroin), opioids (methadone),
stimulants (cocaine & amphetamine), as well as alcohol, nicotine and poly-substance
abuse” (Anonymous, 2003).

At the conference in London I was offered the opportunity and funding to set up and run
a sub-pilot Tabernanthe extraction laboratory in order to isolate ibogaine. I accepted the
offer and immediately began acquiring the necessary materials to conduct laboratory
work. By June 2002 my lab was up and running and I was fulfilling my obligations with a
traditional organic laboratory, including all necessary reagents, enabling me to follow
almost any common organic synthesis or phytochemical research and development path I
so chose. As capital and experience was reinvested, my capabilities and competencies
expanded.

I chose to synthesise the phenethylamine 2C-B for my own psychospiritual explorations.
2C-B had been invented in 1974 by Alexander Shulgin. He introduced it to
psychotherapists around the world, many of whom found it of value in creating a warm,
7
empathetic bond between patient and healer, as its pharmacological action helps dissolve
one’s ego-defences, enabling an individual to contact suppressed emotions and repressed
memories, helping to resolve psychospiritual trauma (Shulgin & Shulgin, 1991; Stolaroff,
1994). In time, my efforts went towards facilitating a reliable pure source of 2C-B for
psychotherapists.

FULFILMENT
Late 2002, I was approached with the express intent of synthesising LSD for a group. It
was my first chance at LSD synthesis and I took the opportunity though in my heart I had
no desire to continue working with this group after completion of the agreement. I was
successful.

Then, in early 2003, I created the opportunity to research the ergot fungus, Claviceps,
first hand. Ergot is possibly the single most important medicinal genus on the planet, as
evidenced by the volume of literature on ergot as well as the current use of over 400
prescription compounds (Kr!n & Cvak, 1999). In fact, it was medicinal ergot research
which facilitated the 1943 discovery of LSD and other lysergamides by Albert Hofmann,
a chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceutical in Basel, Switzerland whilst looking for a
blood stimulant. Prior to it being controlled by international agreement in the 1971 UN
Convention on Psychotropic Substances, LSD underwent thousands of hours of clinical,
laboratory and psychotherapeutic research with many promising results (Erowid, 2005).

Notably, LSD is substantially similar to the psychoactive Lysergic Acid Amide found in
the sacred Convolvulaceae Morning Glory, Ololiuqui, which, until 1955, Mazatec
curanderas of the Oaxaca highlands of Mexico utilized undisturbed for more than three
millennia alongside teonánacatl, the ‘sacred mushroom’ of the Aztecs, Psilocybe
mexicana and Psilocybe cubensis, in healing and divination ritual (Wasson, 1957;
Hofmann, 1971).

I began my research into ergot by learning saprophytic culture techniques for the fungus
but culturing was slow and deliberate work and by May 2003, whilst attempting to
extract the alkaloids from the culture broth, I failed knowing I had neither adequate
facilities nor knowledge for the sterile growth and extraction of ergot; I experienced once
again the adage ‘when the student is ready the master will appear’. I trusted the
‘mutterkorn’ alkaloid.

Having kept the faith, in late 2003 another opportunity to work with Ergot alkaloids
arose. I was given a mass of dark resinous material purported to be ergotamine tartrate
(ET) which had undergone a botched conversion to lysergic acid (LA) an intermediate in
the production of ergot alkaloids as well as other lysergamides. I was entrusted with the
goal of sorting out what had gone wrong and hopefully recovering enough LA to cover
the costs of the original starting materials.

I struggled for several months trying to unwind what was possibly a futile effort. I
utilized all spare monies I had and even began borrowing capital to help the project
possibly bear fruit. I was confounded by not having adequate qualitative analytical
8
equipment and reference standards for the LA and ET as they are available only with a
Home Office licence or purchased from the black market. I had neither connection.

Eventually, I was able to confirm that the original material indeed had ET in it but I was
unsure if it had been adulterated as the individual who handed me the black resin had
acquired the original material without a certificate of analysis. So, using every extraction
technique I could dream up, my only way of knowing if I had actually extracted LA was
to attempt to synthesise LSD with it and then test the final product via the usual method
of the subjective bioassay.

I failed repeatedly in my attempts at extraction and synthesis and had to find a method
that was not extremely sensitive to water, light or other resinous materials. By January
2004, I felt that I had synthetic process enabling me to proceed. Eventually, the first week
of February 2004, I succeeded. In ordinary circumstances, I might have been awarded a
novel synthesis patent; instead, I was-awarded a twenty-year prison sentence.

CLOSURE
So, why did I do it? There is no single pat answer. The simplest: my love of learning. The
veiled: for my ego, for the attention, to feel special, to be loved, etc. The flippant:
because I could. With hindsight: civil disobedience, academic and religious freedom in
the study of the mind, and an expression of equal rights. The most accurate: my desire to
share entheogenesis with others, to wake humanity up from the penumbral dream-world
of materialist delusion, to help end the blatant injustice and rape of human dignity that
occurs within the context of a “War on (some) Drugs”, to seize the world stage and help
create a forum for the cooperative and conscious stewardship of Mother Earth and all her
relations.

REFERENCES
Anonymous (2003) Ibogaine: Treatment Outcomes and Observations. Bulletin of the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 13 (2), 16-21. www.maps.org

Boire R G (1999) On Cognitive Liberty, Journal of Cognitive Liberties, 1(1), 7-13.
Davis, CA: Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics. www.cognitiveliberty.org

Council on Spiritual Practices (1997) Entheogens and the Future of Religion. R Forte
(Ed.). SF, CA: Council on Spiritual Practices. www.csp.org

Csordas T J & Kleinman A (1996) The Therapeutic Process. In: Medical Anthropology:
Contemporary Theory and Method, Rev. Ed. C F Sargent & T M Johnson (Eds.).
Connecticut: Praeger Publishers.

Erowid (2005) LSD Timeline.
Available at www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_timeline.php

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Hardison C (2000) An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays.
Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 10 (2), 11-13.
www.maps.org

Hawking S (1992) The Making of ‘A Brief History of Time’. Paramount Home
Entertainment.

Hofmann A (1971) Teonanacatl and Ololiuqui, two ancient magic drugs of Mexico.
Bulletin on Narcotics, Issue 1, 1971: 3-14.
See: www.unodc.org/unodc/en/bulletin/bulletin_1971-01-01_1_page003.html

Hofmann A (1979) LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism,
and Science. Publisher: J.P. Tarcher, Inc.

King Jr M L (1963) Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. Open Source.

Kr!n V & Cvak L (1999) Ergot: the Genus Claviceps. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
Publishers.

Ott J (1993, 1996) Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic drugs, their plant sources, and history.
Occidental, CA: Natural Products Co.

Ott J (1995) The Age of Entheogens & The Angel’s Dictionary. Occidental, CA: Natural
Products Co.

Ruck C A P, Wasson R G & Hofmann A (1978, 1998) The Road to Eleusis. William
Daly
Rare Books.

Schultes R E, Hofmann A & Rätsch C (1979, 2001) Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred,
Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. Vermont: Inner Traditions Publishing.

Shulgin A & Shulgin A (1991) PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley: Transform
Press.

Stolaroff M J (1994) Thanatos to Eros: 35 years of Psychedelic Exploration. Berlin:
GAM-Media GmBH.

Wasson R G (1957) Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Life, 42 (19), 100 et seq.

Wilson B (1984) ‘Pass it on’: the story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message
reached the world. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Inc.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND COCAINE

By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/

Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street chemists, grocers and general stores. It was hailed as a miracle of modern medical science, a panacea for all manner of minor ailments – but also, increasingly, as a dangerous and addictive novelty, a social menace and even a new ‘scourge of humanity’. During this period of the cocaine boom – in retrospect, the euphoric high before the crash – its impact on the public consciousness is vividly illuminated by the enduring literary character who emerged from its golden age: Sherlock Holmes.

From around 1885 to the beginning of the twentieth century, cocaine was both soft drink and hard drug: mild tonic preparations and strong pharmaceutical solutions coexisted side by side. The most famous and successful of the tonics was the range produced by the Corsican entrepreneur Angelo Mariani, who had begun in the 1860s to produce a stimulant wine for the French market by steeping coca leaves in sweet burgundy. ‘Vin Mariani’ was the first brand to penetrate the new market in Europe and America, and was rapidly accompanied by a wide ancillary range of therapeutic preparations. By the late 1880s these included Pâte Mariani (cocaine lozenges for catarrh), Thé Mariani (a concentrated coca tea recommended for long walks), and Pastilles Mariani (for coughing fits).

But one of Mariani’s lesser-known competitors was to eclipse his fame in the long run. John Pemberton, a small-scale Atlanta druggist, began to supply a ‘Peruvian Coca Wine’ in the mid-1880s; when the city of Atlanta adopted alcohol prohibition in 1886, he removed the alcohol and produced a gloopy syrup masking the bitter active ingredients of coca leaf extract, cocaine and cola nut, a natural caffeine source. He christened it ‘Coca-Cola’, and in 1891 he was bought out by a marketeer called Asa Chandler who set up ‘The Coca-Cola Company’, promoting the ‘nervine tonic’ as a cure for ‘headaches, hysteria and melancholia’ and pushing it with slogans such as ‘the intellectual beverage’ and ‘the Temperance drink’ (which, in a sense, it remains – the bar-room alternative to alcohol). Chandler took Coca-Cola’s sales to over a million dollars a year by the end of the century, and provoked a flurry of copycat products with names like Koca Nola, Celery Cola, Rocco Cola, Wiseola and even Dope Cola.

We might expect the ‘ethical’ pharmaceutical suppliers to have furnished a more sober alternative to this kind of hucksterism, but the promotion of cocaine by the Big Pharma of the day, especially the multinational Parke Davis, made their advertising look bashful by comparison. The 1885 Parke Davis catalogue offered cocaine in powders, solutions, tablets, lozenges, even cigars and cheroots, all accompanied by copy claiming the drug to be ‘the most important therapeutic discovery of the age, the benefits of which to humanity will be simply incalculable’. Their range expanded to include toothache drops, cocaine-impregnated bandages, haemorrhoid remedies and, from the 1890s, asthma and catarrh inhalers which made use of cocaine’s vasoconstrictive properties to dry up the nasal passages by spraying more or less pure cocaine straight up the nose. Statements that cocaine ‘can supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent’ ran alongside ads for hypodermic injection kits – smart pocket-sized steel cases styled like large Zippo lighters and containing cocaine, morphine and miniature needles. What the pharmacists and patent hucksters had both discovered was that you could sell cocaine for almost any treatment which came to mind, and the customer would very likely feel better after using it.

It was against this background of medical hype and shock of the new that Sherlock Holmes, and his distinctive cocaine habit, were first presented to the public – by a doctor who had brushed against the drug repeatedly in the course of his medical career. But although the appeal of Conan Doyle’s detective would endure for generations, the edgy thrill of cocaine was soon to take on a darker image, and Doyle’s later revisions of its role in Holmes’ lifestyle provide a barometer of how the public mood began to turn against the ‘cocaine vice’ during the 1890s and beyond.

As originally conceived by his author, the primary motivation of the world’s most famous fictional detective is cocaine. ‘My mind’, he tells us in the famous passage that opens The Sign of Four, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram…I can dispense then with artificial stimulants’. Part of Holmes’ enduring appeal is precisely that he’s drawn to his profession not to do good, but to stave off boredom. His few – and mostly late – sententious statements about public service and the common good are substantially outweighted by his expressions of coldness and misanthropy, his rhetorical question that ‘Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?’. What distinguishes him from the vast majority of subsequent fictional detectives is that his primary interest is in pleasing himself, and the main reason he bothers to solve crimes at all is to keep his mind active enough to dispense with his ‘seven per cent solution’.

The Sign of Four emerged in 1889, and it’s this first period of Sherlock Holmes stories that is most liberally sprinkled with drug references. In the first published short story, A Scandal in Bohemia, we learn that Holmes ‘had risen out of his drug-created dreams, and was hot on the scent of some new problem’; in The Five Orange Pips, Dr. Watson describes him as a ‘self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco’. But it was the exchange between Holmes and Watson at the beginning of The Sign of Four that established for all time the nature of Holmes’ habit, and Watson’s attitude to it. The story starts in Holmes’ study, with the detective taking a syringe from a ‘neat morocco case’ and injecting it into an arm ‘all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks’. Watson tells us that this has been going on ‘three times a day for many months’, and remonstrates with Holmes about his habit.

Watson’s argument against his friend’s chemical vices reads today like a mischievous pastiche of Victorian medical mumbo-jumbo, but it can be found more or less verbatim in many of the textbooks of the time. ‘It is a pathological and morbid process’, the doctor insists, ‘which involves increased tissue-change, and may at last leave a permanent weakness’. This chilling but nebulous diagnosis is probably very close to what Conan Doyle himself believed (and could have applied with equal conviction to, for example, masturbation). Holmes, however, dismisses it airily, and it prompts him to his famous justification and motive for his career: ‘I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.’

Why did Doyle, in 1888, seize on the cocaine habit as a central plank in the character of his new detective? At the time it seemed to reviewers ‘a curious touch’, but it struck an immediate chord with the public and Doyle continued to thread it through the stories as their success built. It was imitated, too, by other writers: M.P.Shiel’s exotic detective Prince Zaleski, who emerged in 1895, sits in his room full of Oriental antiques where the air is heavy with ‘the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa - the base of the bhang of the Mohammedans – in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to assuage himself’.

Doyle’s intention was to create a bohemian character of acquired and exquisite tastes – a character quite unlike the author himself who, as a practising GP in provincial Southsea, was far closer to Dr.Watson. But Doyle had been immersing himself in the ‘yellow’, decadent writings of Bloomsbury, and met Oscar Wilde at the famous dinner at the Langham Hotel in 1890 when The Picture of Dorian Gray was commissioned: it’s likely that he had Wilde partly in mind while conceiving his ‘pallid’, ‘languid’ detective. Holmes’ distinctive props – the violin, the Meerschaum pipe, the batchelor apartment in the metropolis and the cocaine habit – are all intended to establish him as one of the new bohemians: eccentric, sophisticated, and tantalisingly immune to public opinion. Unlike the masses with their patent coca tonics, Holmes would have taken the trouble to acquire the finest quality of stimulant: his cocaine, we imagine, by mail-order from Merck in Darmstadt and his hypodermic kit not the standard Parke Davis set but the bespoke creation of a chemist in Piccadilly or Mayfair.

The inner Holmes, as well as the outer, was faithfully conceived around the bohemian sterotype. He is solitary, and haunted by an existential darkness: the ‘black moods’ that come over him, his bipolar swings from insomnia or focused, obsessive, day-and-night work to his days and weeks ‘in the dumps’, when he doesn’t ‘open my mouth for days on end’. For a late Victorian doctor like Conan Doyle, this was a familiar medical syndrome associated with the highly-strung, ‘neurasthenic type’, the febrile ‘brain-workers’ who were increasingly identified in the medical literature as a high-risk group for drug abuse. In The Sign of Four, Doyle mirrors these unstable mood-swings by giving Holmes a dual dependence on morphine and cocaine, but morphine is never subsequently mentioned: perhaps he felt that it carried rather too strong a whiff of the pathological drug addict, while cocaine was at most a ‘vice’ or character weakness.

Although in his later autobiography Conan Doyle insists that ‘I had no great interest in the more recent developments of my own profession’, he had certainly come across cocaine at some point in his medical career. He went to study medicine at Edinburgh University in 1876, the same year that the Edinburgh medical professor Robert Christison attempted an early coca leaf trial that he published in the Lancet; Christison selected several students to chew the leaf and, although Doyle was not among them, he was probably aware of the experiment. In 1885 the annual conference of the British Dental Association was held in Doyle’s home town of Southsea, and cocaine anaesthesia was the major new development discussed. Most conclusively Doyle, in an abortive attempt to set himself up as a Harley Street specialist, went to Vienna in 1890 to study ophthalmology, where the use of cocaine for local anaesthesia in eye surgery had recently been pioneered in the city’s General Hospital by Freud’s associate Carl Koller. It was the greatest surgical breakthrough in the discipline’s history, and a major focus of study: Doyle may well have administered it himself during his training.

His profession of ignorance seems particularly disingenuous on this point, since Doyle’s earliest professional interest was in drugs and toxicology. He achieved the feat – as remarkable then as now – of getting his first article published in the British Medical Journal while still in his third year at Edinburgh. It was on the action of a poison called gelsenium, an extract from a jasmine root and an ingredient in Gowers’ Mixture, a neuralgia treatment; Doyle’s experiment included self-poisoning with a substantial dose of 200 minims. His passion for toxicology frequently bleeds through into his fiction: there are several exotic poisons in the Holmes stories, all conceived with a relish for scientific detail. One of them, the hallucinogenic ‘Devil’s Foot Root’ in the short story The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, has even made its way into some medical and ethnobotanical literature, planted mischievously by a Sherlock Holmes afficionado and subsequently taken as real. All this suggests that Doyle was well aware of the existence and properties of cocaine, and was using his professional understanding of it to underscore the character of his mysterious detective.

When the crash came, as with all cocaine crashes, you could see it coming. The euphoric overselling by pharmaceutical companies like Parke Davis was inevitably followed by a backlash that began almost immediately: already in 1887 the British Medical Journal was observing that an ‘undeniable reaction against the extravagant pretensions advanced on behalf of this drug has already set in’. It has since been recognised that the most common pattern of cocaine abuse is not, as with opiates, a lifetime of dependence, but a three to five year binge of excessive and increasing use leading to a crisis followed by one of three outcomes: abstenance, a substitute dependence on opiates or sedatives, or a scaling-down of cocaine use to manageable levels. Nineteenth-century Europe and America binged their way to crisis in a few short years and, horrified at their own reflection in the mirror, fled in panic towards the path of abstinence.

Sherlock Holmes’ career, which ran right through to the 1920s, is an eloquent witness to the eclipse of cocaine’s image as a miracle drug. Concern about its associations with delinquency and addiction built throughout the 1890s, and by 1900 the serious lobbying to control and prohibit it had begun. This was mostly taking place in the United States, where by this stage the Sherlock Holmes stories were being serialised to an enthusiastic American audience in Collier’s Weekly, a magazine that was also in the forefront of the campaign against the ‘cocaine menace’. Doyle had been gradually pruning back references to Holmes’ habit throughout the 1890s, limiting them to the occasional dark reference to his hero’s ‘weakness’; but in 1904, in The Missing Three-Quarter, he closed the unsavoury chapter by stating that Holmes had been ‘weaned’ from by Dr.Watson from the ‘drug mania’ that had ‘threatened to check his remarkable career’.

This is a narrative twist that destroys the inner logic of Doyle’s world, requiring his hero to forget why he became a detective in the first place. But it mirrors accurately the changing times: cocaine, which originally boosted Holmes’ popularity, had become a blight that might destroy it. From this point on, Holmes would begin to explain his mission in conventional moral terms, and would disown the hypodermic syringe as an ‘instrument of evil’. Collier’s were satisfied, and so was Doyle, who conquered the magazine market in America as he had in Britain – but the original scenario would never be erased. Cocaine would be prohibited across the globe long before Holmes’ final adventure in 1927, but his cocaine habit remains intact in his early and formative adventures, to be enjoyed and reassessed by successive generations.

This article is adapted from Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century. An extended version, including some thoughts on R. L. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, appeared in Darklore Vol. 3 (2009)

Holmes illustration by Paul M. McCall

The United Nations, the European commission and individual states including Britain are flouting international human rights law by funding anti-drug crime measures that are inadvertently leading to the executions of offenders, according to a report seen by the Guardian.

The International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA), a non-governmental organisation that advocates less punitive approaches to drugs policy globally, says it has gathered evidence revealing “strong links” between executions for drugs offences and the funding of specific drug enforcement operations by international agencies.

It says programmes aimed at shoring up local efforts to combat drug trafficking and other offences are being run “without appropriate safeguards” that could prevent serious human rights violations in countries that retain the death penalty.

The report concludes that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime ( “are all actively involved in funding and/or delivering technical assistance, legislative support and financial aid intended to strengthen domestic drug enforcement activities in states that retain the death penalty for drug offences.

“Such funding, training and capacity-building activities – if successful – result in increased convictions of persons on drug charges, and the potential for increased death sentences and executions”.

The report claims there is evidence of “complicity in acts that violate international human rights law”, undermining the Council of Europe’s commitment to abolish the death penalty, the United Nations Charter and UNODC’s stated opposition to the penalty for drugs offences.

The 33-page report lists a series of case studies it says illustrate how efforts to garner convictions for drugs offences across borders have resulted further down the line in executions. International law does not prohibit the death penalty but does limit its use to the “most serious crimes”. The meaning of “serious” is challenged by some states with the death penalty.

Rick Lines, deputy director of the IHRA and co-author of the report, said: “Many people around the world would be shocked to know that their governments are funding programmes that are leading people indirectly to death by hanging and firing squads.” He said agencies and countries were not intentionally funding programmes that led to people facing the death penalty but that it was “a fact” that executions were happening.

The report comes soon after the execution by firing squad of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah, America, that once again highlights human rights concerns about capital punishment. However IHRA’s focus on the persistence of capital punishment in other “retentionist” countries for drugs crimes is likely to resonate this week. Saturday is UN International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, organised to highlight that some states, including China, have always executed drugs offenders to make a public example of them.

An IHRA report published last month revealed that of the 58 states that retain the death penalty, 32 permit it for drug-related crimes. Some use it more readily than others. The estimated overall number of executions including those for drugs-related offences in 2009 was 714, according to Amnesty International, although this does not account for potentially thousands more executions that are not disclosed by China.

Commenting on the IHRA report, Rebecca Schleifer, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said that while UNODC in particular has recently “taken steps in the right direction” to account for the human rights implications of its programmes, its drug enforcement activities, and those of other organisations and countries, continue to “put them at risk of supporting increased death sentences and executions in some countries”.

Sebastian Saville, director of Release, a British drugs and human rights charity, said there was an urgent need for political leaders in Britain and the US to rethink their “disastrous ‘war on drugs’ policy and tacit support for regimes that continue executing people for relatively minor offences”.

A UNODC spokesman welcomed the report for drawing attention to capital punishment, saying it raised “legitimate concerns” about how actions designed to deal with drugs crimes “may indirectly result in increased convictions and the possible application of the death penalty”. He said UNODC had taken “concrete steps” to implement human rights assessments as part of “all drug enforcement activities”. The IHRA report makes a number of recommendations including that European governments, the European Commission and UNODC urgently leverage their influence with countries that retain the death penalty “to restrict or abolish the death penalty for drug offences.”

More at http://www.ihra.net/news

From The Guardian by Maxine Williams

Since August 2009, the extradition request for one man has spiralled Jamaica into a nightmare which has claimed dozens of lives, injured just as many, severely damaged businesses and tourism, provoked a limited state of emergency, discredited the government and traumatised the population.

Christopher “Dudus” Coke, a Jamaican citizen, was charged by a grand jury in the southern district of New York with conspiracy to distribute marijuana and cocaine and to traffic in firearms during a period between 1994 to 2007. The acts described in the indictment violate the laws of the United States. Pursuant to an extradition treaty between the two countries, the US issued Diplomatic Note No 296 on 25 August 2009 requesting Coke’s extradition.

The charges in the US indictment against Coke rest on the evidence of cooperating witnesses and on alleged conversations between Coke and his co-conspirators during the relevant period. The way the US authorities came into possession of this evidence is the central legal ground on which the Jamaican government based its prolonged refusal to comply with the extradition request.

It claims that the extradition order was unlawful because the four warrants issued by the Jamaican supreme court to “tap” Coke’s phones authorised the disclosure of intercepted communication only to the commissioner of police, the assistant commissioner, the head of military intelligence and the superintendent of police and not to any US bodies.

Popular opinion is that this legal objection was simply a means of refusing a legitimate request, amid deeply held fear that bringing down this one man could cause the death – literally and politically – of the government and many of its supporters. The Tivoli Gardens community from which Coke hails is associated with the ruling Jamaica Labour party (JLP) and is in fact the prime minister’s constituency.

The practice of political parties hiring gangs of young men and arming them with guns in order for them to exercise political pressure on community members goes back to the 1970s. These gangs have long since diversified their goals and activities leading Jamaica to be in the unenviable position as one of the top five murder capitals of the world.

What we are now witnessing in Jamaica – since 18 May when the government caved under local and international pressure and sent its security forces to apprehend Coke – is the convergence of thorny local and international law issues. Evidence is generally admissible in criminal proceedings in Jamaica even if obtained by improper or unfair means, making arguments not to arrest Coke unsustainable.

The diplomatic and political fall-outs for the Jamaican government if they did not act were severe. The US issued its Narcotics Control Strategy Report of March 2010 stating that the ruling party’s well-known ties with Coke highlighted the “potential depth of corruption in the government”.

The most favourable interpretation of these events is either that the government was following the rule of law in refusing to act on an illegitimate extradition request or it was deliberately thwarting a lawful request on the moral ground that in so doing, it was preventing the anticipated deaths of many citizens. After all, if the command to apprehend Coke had not been given, more than 70 people who have so far been killed in the search and seizure operation would be alive today.

There is a less favourable possibility. This is that, with little regard for whether the request was valid or not, the government sought to maintain a status quo in which a reputed drug king pin controls a massive swath of territory through terror while providing political support to those in power. When the prime minister, Bruce Golding, finally gave instructions to proceed on the extradition request, he insisted that he was acting on the basis of the concepts of fairness and justice by defending Coke’s constitutional rights as a citizen of Jamaica.

The reality is that this “don” provides the services that the state cannot provide: welfare, employment, and most of all protection. Tivoli Gardens, his domain, is the safest part of Kingston where residents walk openly on the street at night.

There is a power vacuum in Jamaica where certain geographical areas fall under the jurisdiction of the Jamaican state in name only. Once successive regimes have allowed, or at least ignored the vacuum, it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for the state to step back in to fill that space when it is called upon to do so.

The prime minister has now declared that “the time for equivocation is over” and that the state will be reclaiming control of Tivoli and the other “garrison communities“. This is a welcome statement if it leads to the dissolution of these alternative regimes run by dons and their associates, albeit at the cost of many more lives in the immediate future. The utilitarian principle of the right acts or policies being those that bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people may yet be accomplished with the ruling JLP being rewarded for its tardy courage.

Maxine Williams is a lawyer with international and human rights experience