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

Reason, Oct, 2004 by Michael Erard

People posting to various pro-drug sites, blogs, and Indymedia sites criticize Freevibe and discuss ways to jam it. At smokedot.com, a user named Fiend claims to have sent an essay on writing as his anti-drug, featuring names of authors who were all drug users; Fiend said Freevibe posted the essay. At a Portland Indymedia message board, someone quoted an anti-drug message they'd found on Freevibe: "EyeHeartJesus--Once I was asked to smoke a joint rolled in Bible paper. I was totally like 'No way buddy, smoking weed is for devil worshipers and Nelly.' I showed that guy." Wrote the Indymedia poster, with the handle of "no one in particular," "Come on, we can do more! It'll be fun! Try to get the most outlandishly rediculous thing past the moderators that you can."

On the other Freevibe message boards, no one had posted for days. Posters cannot talk to each other, and replies to questions come from automailers. The Freevibe officials don't seem to understand that without interaction--or with surveilled and censored interaction--there can be no culture around drug non-use. On the pro-drug sites, by contrast, discussion is constant and users interact all the time.

Young, impressionable minds aren't the only audience for sites like Erowid, Bluelight, and Yahooka. They're also where law enforcement investigators check on what the "bad guys" know--without having to get out of their seats. The Internet "is a good resource to check whether a specific substance is being abused, or for methods of abuse," says Bob Klein. "That's valuable for the really obscure stuff, or weird combinations, or for tracking developing or declining trends."

Such "drug abuse sites" also have proven useful to the medical community. Paul Wax, a toxicologist in Phoenix, says he visits Erowid once a month or so to look up substances that aren't in the medical literature. In one recent case, Wax recalls, "someone came in to the hospital and was acting delirious, saying they'd taken something called tryptanite. I said, 'Tryptanite? I've never heard of it.'" So Wax put the word into Google and pulled up www. ecstacystuff.com/trip2night.html, which described an ephedra and dextromethorphan product. This knowledge saved the patient a trip to the psychiatric ward. "The nurses thought he was crazy," Wax says. "They thought he was a psych patient. Some who didn't know what he was taking might conclude he had some psych problems and needed to go to some facility. But the drugs wore off, and he cleared up."

In 2002 Wax published a paper about recreational drug sites in the academic journal Pediatrics. He described the case of an 18-year-old boy who took several tablets of a hallucinogen called 2C-T-7, more widely known as "blue mystic" Wax found that the standard medical literature didn't contain any information about 2C-T-7 on Medline. When he searched the Web, however, he found extensive descriptions on two Web sites, Erowid and Lycaeum (lycaeum.org).

In his Pediatrics paper, Wax warned that "adolescents, who are often adept at navigating these Internet resources, may be particularly susceptible to these communications." In an interview he is more sanguine about the Internet. "I don't think these sites are going away," he says, "and I'm not an advocate that they do."