Pubdate: Sat, 30 Oct 2010
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: Jeanne Whalen
Note: Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.

In Quest For 'Legal High,' Chemists Outfox Law

ANTWERP, Belgium-When the housing market crashed in 2008, David
Llewellyn's construction business went with it. Casting around for a
new gig, he decided to commercialize something he'd long done as a
hobby: making drugs.

But the 49-year-old Scotsman didn't go into the illegal drug trade.
Instead, he entered the so-called "legal high" business-a burgeoning
industry producing new psychoactive powders and pills that are
marketed as "not for human consumption."

Mr. Llewellyn, a self-described former crack addict, started out
making mephedrone, a stimulant also known as Meow Meow that was
already popular with the European clubbing set. Once governments began
banning it earlier this year, Mr. Llewellyn and a chemistry-savvy
partner started selling something they dubbed Nopaine-a stimulant they
concocted by tweaking the molecular structure of the attention-deficit
drug Ritalin.

Nopaine "is every bit as good as cocaine," says Mr. Llewellyn, who has
lived in Antwerp on and off since the late 1980s. "You can freebase
it. You can snort it like crack." Still, he emphasized, "Everything we
sell is legal. I don't want to go to jail for 14 years."

Mr. Llewellyn is part of a wave of laboratory-adept European
entrepreneurs who see gold in the gray zone between legal and illegal
drugs. They pose a stiff challenge for European law-enforcement, which
is struggling to keep up with all the new concoctions. Last year, 24
new "psychoactive substances" were identified in Europe, almost double
the number reported in 2008, according to the Lisbon-based European
Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, or EMCDDA.

The problem is also touching U.S. shores. A new synthetic drug similar
to marijuana is increasingly popular, for instance. Some states have
started banning it. But many of the other substances and stimulants
vexing Europe are less of an issue in the U.S., according to a
spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

"The legal high phenomenon is very much European," says Roumen
Sedefov, head of supply reduction and new trends at the EMCDDA. New
substances tend to hit Europe before the U.S. and other markets, he
says, in part because European consumers are more accustomed to buying
drugs online. Strong trade links between Europe and southeast Asia,
where many of the drugs are made, also play a role, he said. Web
sites, no matter where they are based, often market new drugs to
Europeans, pricing their wares in euros or British pounds, he said.

European authorities blame mephedrone for the death of three young
people in the U.K. and Sweden in recent years. They say it may have
contributed to more than 30 additional deaths in the U.K.

The products Mr. Llewellyn sells aren't banned substances. Because he
and others market their wares as "not for human consumption," his
business is technically legal. Still, authorities don't like what he's
doing. Drug-enforcement officials are scrambling to spot and ban
harmful new drugs faster. Many have banned substances like mephedrone
and naphyrone in recent months, giving them the "class B" status
assigned to amphetamines and other drugs.

But with their resources stretched, police say the new drugs aren't as
high a priority as fighting "class A" drugs, such as heroin and cocaine.

As he scurries to stay ahead of the law, authorities have put speed
bumps, not roadblocks, in his path. Mr. Llewellyn says Belgian customs
officials recently raided one of his storehouses and seized his
chemicals, threatening to use environmental laws to shut him down. And
he says he may have to move one of his production labs from the
Netherlands because authorities there are planning to outlaw the use
of certain lab equipment without a professional license.

A spokesman for Dutch police said he didn't have any information on
Mr. Llewellyn. Belgian customs didn't respond to requests for comment.

Other than that, however, Mr. Llewellyn's business is cruising along
largely unimpeded. He and eight employees make drugs in a pair of
"underground" labs-one in Holland and a new, $190,000 lab in Scotland.
He hawks his wares online at www.alchemylabz.eu, taking payment by
bank transfer. He advertises some of the drugs by their formal
chemical name and some by nicknames like Euforia or XT.

Mr. Llewellyn says he expects governments to catch wind of Nopaine
soon and ban it. Anticipating the move, he says he's got dozens of
other products ready to go, including a drug similar to the horse
anesthetic Ketamine and something else he claims to be "the closest
thing to Ecstasy that ever existed." By the time officials crack down,
he says, "we are going to bring out something else."

His products sell for about =8020 ($28) a gram, or =804,000 to
=805,800 ($5,500 to $8,000) a kilo. By contrast, a gram of cocaine
costs roughly =8050 to =8070 ($69 to $97) in Europe, according to the
EMCDDA.

Many users buy small amounts of the legal stuff online, while large
wholesalers buy in bulk and sell it on to dealers. They, in turn,
peddle the drugs in nightclubs. Mr. Llewellyn travels frequently to
promote his latest products to the biggest wholesalers, whom he
declines to name.

He and his chief chemist get ideas for new drugs by scanning
scientific literature. They pay particularly close attention to new
papers published by scholars known for researching mind-altering,
psychoactive substances.

David Nichols, a pharmacologist at Purdue University, has been
especially valuable, Mr. Llewellyn says. Through his work studying
brain receptors, Dr. Nichols has developed a range of psychoactive
substances. His papers give a full description of the drugs he's
using, including their chemical makeup. This provides Llewellyn and
others with a roadmap for making the drugs.

Dr. Nichols says he's well aware of this fan club. "The drugs we make
often end up on the black market, and it's very troubling to me," he
says. Particularly worrying is that the drugs are rarely tested in
humans before hitting the street. Random people sometimes write to him
to ask for help in making certain chemicals, he says. He doesn't reply
out of caution.

"When people use this stuff chronically, on a weekly basis-suppose it
produces liver cancer?" he asks. Also of concern are effects on the
kidneys and bone marrow. Most of the designer drugs haven't been
tested in humans at all, let alone in large clinical trials. Dr.
Nichols says he himself only ever carried out animal tests of the
compounds that others are now copying and selling.

Mr. Llewellyn and his colleagues make many of their products with the
help of a rotary evaporator-a piece of lab equipment resembling a food
processor that heats and evaporates liquid chemicals, turning them
into powders. To outfit his new lab in Scotland, he ordered
custom-made, stainless-steel equipment from a welder. He says he
didn't purchase the equipment from a commercial supplier because it
would have asked questions about why he was buying gear normally used
for industrial chemical production.

Recent deaths attributed to legal highs like Meow Meow have drawn
attention to the drugs in some parts of Europe. Mr. Llewellyn says he
stopped selling mephedrone when countries started banning it, although
he still scoffs at the idea that the drug is dangerous.

To try to prove his point before European countries began banning
mephedrone, he snorted half a gram of it on one of Belgium's evening
news programs. "I took a gram, cut it in half, put it in a line and I
sniffed it," he says. "They couldn't actually show the sniff but they
showed everything else." Afterwards, he says he felt pleasantly buzzed.

Others have had darker experiences with the drug. One teenager in
central England started using mephedrone last year when he was offered
it at a party. His mother says he was soon addicted, and became
aggressive and wired-staying up for days at a time before crashing and
refusing to get out of bed. He lost his part-time job and got kicked
out of school. After one heated confrontation over Christmas, she
kicked him out of the house.

"It had a massive, big effect on the family. I had a nervous
breakdown," the mother says.

Her son would buy the powder online, or get it from friends, she says.
"It was like he couldn't live without it." After about a year, he
managed to quit the drug, she says. Her son declined to comment.

Many U.K. nightclubs search patrons upon entry and place any
suspicious substances in so-called "amnesty bins" that are regularly
emptied by police. When they see anything potentially new, police
often forward the substance to John Ramsey, a toxicologist at St.
George's, University of London, who keeps a vast database of new drugs.

Dr. Ramsey and his team specialize in identifying new substances, and
have seen a "dramatic increase" in recent years, he says.

"Probably five years ago, the appearance of a new drug was
notable-we'd all get together and talk about it-whereas last month, we
found six," Dr. Ramsey says. A few were similar in structure to
mephedrone and naphyrone, while another was identified as
desoxypipradrol. A stimulant, it is similar to pipradrol, a drug once
prescribed for weight loss and other uses that fell out of favor
because of its potential for abuse.

Police also hear about new drugs from emergency rooms. This summer, a
hospital in northwestern England phoned local police after six people
in a single week reported taking something called "Ivory Wave." They
came to the hospital "paranoid and extremely agitated," with extremely
fast heart rates, says cardiologist Kate Willmer, who helped treat
them. It took four members of staff to restrain one young woman, who
was eventually sent to a mental institution, where she is still being
treated, Dr. Willmer said.

James Brokenshire, minister for crime prevention at the U.K.'s Home
Office, says police are encouraging hospitals to keep them informed
about new drug threats. Law-enforcement agencies also monitor Web
sites for signs of new drugs, and are stepping up visits to head shops
to keep track of what's being sold. Most sellers of legal highs
advertise them as "plant food," "pond cleaner" or "bath salts" not
meant for human consumption, as a legal figleaf to protect them from
any liability.

Narcotics experts say many of the novel drugs are manufactured in
China, where they say lax regulation makes it easy for companies to
produce and export a cornucopia of chemicals. Les Iversen, chairman of
the U.K.'s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which advises the
government on new substances, says customs officials at Heathrow
Airport recently seized a large shipment of white powder from China
that was labelled "glucose" but contained mephedrone.

China also supplies raw ingredients to manufacturers located
elsewhere. Mr. Llewellyn says he buys his raw ingredients online from
Chinese suppliers, who charge rock-bottom prices and ask few questions
about his business. The powders and liquids arrive by plane in
1-kilogram sacks and 25-liter drums and go to a warehouse in Glasgow
before being shipped to his labs.

Chinese officials say the country is taking steps to control the flow
of new drugs. On September 1, China began regulating mephedrone as a
"category I psychotropic substance," which means anyone importing or
exporting it needs a special license. In a written statement, China's
State Food and Drug Administration said it has "strengthened
monitoring of the situation in the country," and is ready to work with
other countries to "exchange information, share resources and jointly
respond to new emerging problems of drug abuse."

Mr. Llewellyn, meanwhile, is unfazed. He boasts that his safety
testing method is foolproof: He and several colleagues sit in a room
and take a new product "almost to overdose levels" to see what
happens. "We'll all sit with a pen and a pad, some good music on, and
one person who's straight who's watching everything," he says.

- Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.

[sidebar]

Designer Fashions

Among the 'legal highs' that have appeared in recent
years:

Mephedrone. Also known as Meow Meow, Drone and M-Cat. Similar to
amphetamines such as speed. It has been responsible for at least three
deaths in Europe. Recently banned in most European countries.

Naphyrone. Also known as NRG-1. Similar to amphetamines. Banned this
year in the U.K.

MDAI. Similar to MDMA, or ecstasy. Still legal in many
countries.

Spice. A synthetic cannabinoid that is similar to cannabis. Sprayed on
herbal leaves and smoked. Recently banned in most of Europe and many
U.S. states.

BZP. Belongs to a class of drugs called piperazines, which mimic the
effects of MDMA, or ecstasy. Piperazines are used in industry to make
plastics, resins, pesticides and brake fluid. BZP was once
investigated as a potential antidepressant, but the work was abandoned
when it was found that the drug had stimulant properties similar to
amphetamines. Now banned in many countries.

SOURCES: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction; U.K.
Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
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