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An old man stoops over a lab bench in his garden shed to the west of London.
“There’s no risk really,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “If you make a mistake then you’ll just make the wrong drug. Perhaps it won’t have the sparkle of ecstasy but it will still be saleable.”
“Ecstasy is really very very easy to make,” he says.
At 72, Tash is probably the oldest raver in town. There’s nothing he likes better than brewing up some psychaedelic drugs and inviting his friends over for a wholesome meal and a chat.
He is one of a growing breed of ‘psychonauts’ who cook their own drugs with off the shelf chemicals. It sounds risky, and it probably is for those without a reasonable knowledge of chemistry, but they love it nonetheless.
Some do it to be mischievous. A few for the love of chemistry. Most do it because they love psychaedelic drugs and prefer to make their own. They see themselves as a small but exclusive club that’s not so very different from a group of friends gathering together to make illicit moonshine.
“It’s almost impossible to stop people making their own drugs,” says Tash. “The instructions are blatantly on the Internet. You’ll need a little knowledge of chemistry but not a lot.
“Of course you could get caught but you can avoid that by not buying chemicals that are monitored by the authorities. That’s easily done because the Internet tells you which ones to avoid. It also tells you how to make substitutes from precursor chemicals.”
Amazing as it sounds, high quality ecstasy can be produced from an assortment of freely available chemicals. An essential oil from a high street health food shop serves as the base raw material. Other ingredients can be made from such things as purified vinegar, baking soda and nail varnish remover.
Even the lab equipment can be bought relatively easily from companies supplying schools and hospitals. The Internet provides all of the information a budding chemist would need. It is not even expensive. A basic lab could be set up in a garden shed for less than £300.
The growing trend towards making backyard ecstasy has begun to alarm the authorities. The police would clearly love to track down and arrest psychonauts like Tash, but their main concern lies with the criminal gangs who are also moving into backyard ecstasy production.
Until very recently, virtually all ecstasy was produced in bulk in Eastern Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands. Hundreds of thousands of E’s were produced in each of these factories every week and then smuggled into Britain.
But according to a recent Europol report, criminal gangs are starting to produce sizeable quantities of ecstasy in the UK. Producing drugs locally allows them to avoid the risks associated with smuggling.
To avoid detection, criminal gangs have begun to ‘downsize’ by building and operating smaller ‘minilabs’ that produce a few tens of thousand of pills per week. These small mobile labs fit in the back of a Transit van and are moved from one factory unit to another every few weeks. A dozen mobile minicabs are far harder to trace than one big static factory in the Belgian countryside.
Evidence of this shift has been unearthed by scientists at Queen’s University in Belfast. They were working on a new forensic tool to rapidly ‘fingerprint’ ecstasy tablets to allow the authorities to pinpoint individual factories and producers.
After honing their new technique, they decided to analyse batches of ecstasy seized in Northern Ireland. What they discovered stunned both them and the police. Out of the 1500 pills analysed by Dr Steven Bell's team, all but one were made by different manufacturers, even though 90 per cent were stamped with the same Mitsubishi logo. Ecstasy, they concluded, was turning into a cottage industry.
“Some could have been made by the same person but to a different recipe,” says Dr Bell. “But overall it implies that there are lots of different manufacturers producing ecstasy".
Dr Bell’s team also discovered that the ecstasy was astonishingly pure and contained no toxic ingredients. The MDMA content varied enormously though, by as much as 500 per cent.
“The variation in MDMA concentrations that we found could themselves be very dangerous," says Dr Bell.
Although the synthetic drugs market is in flux, it still remains a huge international industry. The National Criminal Intelligence Service estimates that up to two million ecstasy pills are consumed every week in the UK.
A United Nations report published in September last year estimated that eight million people worldwide now take ecstasy, a rise of 70 per cent over the past five years. About 125 tonnes of MDMA is now consumed every year, making the combined ecstasy and amphetamines market worth $65 billion.
Although the market is huge, it’s also showing signs of becoming saturated in the UK. Street prices, always a good guide to availability, have been falling for over a decade. In the mid 1990s, ecstasy pills cost about £12. Now a typical pill retails for £2-3. Drug gangs are responding by diversifying into other, more lucrative substances.
Ecstasy is but one type of amphetamine, speed another. There are hundreds of others. The minutest change in the chemical structure of an amphetamine molecule can have a huge impact on its effect. Glue on an extra nitrogen atom or twist a hydrogen and this new ‘designer drug’ may rocket you to the stars, kick the feet from under you, or have no impact whatsoever.
The collapse in the street price of MDMA is encouraging drug gangs to exploit this chemical schizophrenia. To maintain profit margins, the drug gangs have begun producing and ‘market testing’ new psychaedelics.
Over the past year, numerous new drugs have appeared on the market. They are too new to have enticing street names; instead their lengthy chemical names are shortened to abbreviations such as 2CT7 or 5-Meo-DMT. One, 2C-I, appears to be catching on as a dance drug, mainly because it has a similar effect to ecstasy. At £10 a pill, it offers a far greater profit margin than ecstasy but costs about the same to make.
Backyard producers like Tash are also experimenting with new substances. After making a few batches of MDMA, a skilled chemist will learn that slight changes to the recipe can produce a totally different drug. The amateur chemist can then gingerly consume his new drug to gauge its effect.
“You have to be cautious,” says Tash. “You should know your own body and be aware of any changes when you take a new substance. It’s best to start off with a tiny dose. If nothing happens you should rest for three days, then take double the dose. Eventually you should find a comfortable level.
“It’s no different to the way new foods have been tested since the dawn of man. It’s also the way scientists traditionally gauged the effect of new pharmaceuticals.”
There was a similar move towards exploring new synthetic drugs in the early 1980s. It had disastrous consequences. The case of the frozen addicts entered medical lore as the seminal danger of designer drugs.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s heroin was a hugely profitable drug to peddle, but then the price began to drift downwards. Drug cartels responded by developing a cheaper synthetic form of heroin. After much trial and error they discovered a substance that appeared to have the same effect as heroin. Users initially loved it.
“They had a wonderful high for about five minutes,” says Dr Christopher Smith, a neurobiologist from Cambridge University. “Then they realised what was happening to them. Lurking in the background was a substance that chewed its way through their brains.”
The synthetic heroin contained a substance known as MPTP, which rapidly destroyed an obscure part of the brain known as the substantia nigra. This controls movement. Substantia nigra damage leads to Parkinson’s disease. Within hours of taking the new drug, the heroin users became frozen solid and were incapable even of blinking. They were fully conscious and lay in their hospital beds for the rest of their lives staring at the ceiling.
Regular producers of homemade synthetic drugs dismiss these dangers. Amphetamines, they say, are relatively easy to produce and their chemistry well understood. The dangers are minimal, they claim.
But Dr Christopher Smith disagrees: “Let’s face it, people’s garden sheds are not exactly the same as a state-of-the-art synthesis laboratory run by a pharmaceutical company. You only have to make a small mistake for things to go horribly wrong.
“Yorkshire puddings never come out the way you intend so why should ecstasy or any of its derivatives? People assume that because you can get recipes off the Internet it’s as easy as cooking. It’s not.”
Building a chemical weapons factory in your own kitchen
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