Open secrets: how the government lost the drug war in cyberspace

Reason, Oct, 2004 by Michael Erard

It has been difficult to tell who's winning in cyberspace. The widely used metrics of success for commercial Web sites--hits, page counts, unique visitors--don't necessarily have the same meaning in this highly contested terrain. As we'll see, visitors to freevibe.com, a Web site produced by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and funded by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, are just as likely to be culture jammers as teenagers looking to "get the facts on drugs."

Then again, federal officials seeking to justify their $13 billion anti-drug budget request for 2005 have an interest in exaggerating the threat posed by the Internet. "Many websites, newsgroups, bulletin boards, and chat rooms promote the drug culture by providing a wide variety of information on drugs and drug paraphernalia" warned a 2001 report from the Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center. "Many of these websites openly promote drug use, others glamorize the drug culture and thereby implicitly promote use and experimentation."

Some frustrated lawmakers have turned to suppressing online information about drugs by criminalizing it. In 1999 the Senate passed the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, which would have made it illegal to distribute information, in print or online, about manufacturing or selling controlled substances that would be illegal. (The bill was killed by the House, then tucked into the Bankruptcy Reform Act with the Internet provisions removed.) For the most part, recent DEA activities have been aimed at curbing online sources for illegal drugs such as GHB, a tranquilizer, and other chemically similar substances, as well as using Web crawler and data mining technology to identify and prosecute illegal Internet pharmacies selling prescription drugs. Simple monitoring is another tactic; in 2002 a D.C.-based nonprofit, the Drug Reform Coalition, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request and found that the DEA had monitored the Web sites of 75 drug reform groups.

Proposals to punish people for drug-related speech reflect the desperation of government officials confronting a network of drug information that is more sophisticated, resilient, far-reaching, and self-correcting than ever before. Prior to the early 1990s, most unofficial information about drugs circulated via a loose network of underground publications, photocopies of notes and scientific articles, and word of mouth: Dealers talked to buyers, users talked to each other, and prison mates swapped tales. This is how users learned what substances and what combinations to try (or avoid). It's also how underground chemists learned their trade. But the network was limited. New pills or types of substances would hit the market before information about them did, and the network didn't always reach as far as the drugs. There were hardly any mechanisms for correcting bad information, and the drug culture was susceptible to propaganda.

"Time was when authority figures could safely tell 'white lies' to 'keep us safe,'" says John Robinson, a site administrator for Bluelight (www.bluelight.nu), a "harm reduction" site that features reports about MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) from all over the world. Robinson cites a story that started circulating around the time that the DEA first moved to ban MDMA in 1985: It was said that Ecstasy contained heroin, a rumor stemming from the accounts of early MDMA users who said the drug was like a combination of cocaine and heroin. That claim, says Robinson, was hijacked by governments for use as propaganda, and now "it is one of the central myths we have been trying to destroy on the Internet with Bluelight."