RECREATIONAL PHARMACEUTICALS

Finding New Party Drugs Like K And Ecstasy Won't Be Easy

In the past few months, it's become nearly impossible to buy Ketaset in New
York City's underground drug market.

Made by Fort Dodge, an Iowa-based pharmaceutical firm, Ketaset is a brand
of ketamine, a compound that blocks certain neuroreceptors, causing
hallucinations in high doses and, in lower doses, a fuzzy dissociation --
like the warmth of a couple of Jim Beams. Legally, it's used as an
anesthetic. Illegally, one snorts ketamine because the fuzziness lasts half
an hour and doesn't produce bourbon's four-Advil hangover.

Ketaset's scarcity dates back to August 1999, when the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, acting on preliminary evidence that ketamine
may lead to dependence, subjected its legal purveyors to strict security
rules. But K, as users call it, had already won so many devotees that
traffickers were smuggling off-label brands from Mexico. Today Manhattan
dealers sell a gram of K for $80, up 100% from 1998.

The recent history of K limns a well-established law of recreational drug
use: once users find a substance they like, they will snort or shoot or
drop whatever version is available, whatever the cost. Which is why you
must look to the market to understand the future of drugs used for anything
other than doctor-approved healing.

That market can be divided into three groups: the partyers, who just want
to have fun (and who sometimes become addicts); the shrinks and shamans,
who believe drugs can expand your consciousness; and the scientists, who
suspect that illegal drugs -- or their chemical cousins -- may have
marketable legal uses. These groups are distinct but tightly linked:
scientific research leads to new drugs, which shamans discover and use in
their quests, which often turn out to be as much fun as spiritual.

The use of drugs in party settings eventually leads to government crackdowns.

But as a rule, the partyers don't pursue the new drugs; they tend to find a
potion and stick with it, sometimes until it kills them. Today's popular
party drugs are derived from ancient medicinal herbs: marijuana from hemp,
cocaine from coca leaf, prescription painkillers from poppies.

It's the shamans who aggressively seek out new substances. Recent additions
to the U.S. market include ayahuasco, a plant long used in religious
ceremonies in Brazil for its mind-manipulating qualities, and Salvia
divinorum, a soft-leaved plant native to Mexico that is chewed or smoked
for hallucinogenic effects.

New compounds do occasionally come from underground drug labs or, like MDMA
(ecstasy), are rediscovered after years of being ignored in scientific
literature. In this world, no one is held in greater esteem than Alexander
Shulgin.

Shulgin is a biochemist who once studied psychedelics for Dow Chemical. Now
75, Shulgin has synthesized hundreds of compounds in the smelly lab in the
woods behind his California home. He and his wife Ann, a therapist, have
published two books that are the bibles of underground drug research:
PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and TIHKAL (Tryptamines I
Have Known and Loved). Many of the drugs that have emerged from underground
labs can be traced to well-thumbed copies of the Shulgins' books.

It was they who helped popularize MDMA -- a signal event in the history of
recreational drugs.

Ecstasy is easily the biggest advance since LSD. It changed not only the
party world but the shaman world, where it was used by psychologists who
believed it had therapeutic value.

Since MDMA was banned in 1986, scientists have looked for compounds that
have the same effects without damaging neurotransmitters, as MDMA can. They
haven't had much success.

So today's nonmedical drug research tends to focus on new uses for old
substances. That effort is led by Richard Doblin, who runs the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies out of his Belmont,
Mass., home. Founded the year MDMA was outlawed, the association uses its
$530,000 yearly budget to assist scientists who, with government
permission, study the risks and benefits of a wide variety of nonmedical
uses for psychedelic drugs and marijuana.

Such research is highly political, however, and it can take years for a
research protocol to be approved.

The new drugs that appear on the market usually do so after underground
chemists read scientific papers and decide to cook something up. Scientists
studying how cocaine works in the brain, for example, have developed a
version 100 times more powerful.

The recipe is available in academic journals, waiting to be exploited.

But the chemicals needed to synthesize such drugs are tracked by
authorities, a change from the Shulgins' day. And even if the ingredients
were widely available, the scientific expertise is not. According to David
Nichols, a student of Shulgin's who is now a professor of chemistry at
Purdue, "The underground chemist is typically not going to discover a
completely new psychoactive substance.

The kinds of things that are easy to make, by and large, have been made."