The War on Bath Salts

The War on Drugs is at it's most absurd point. And It's hard to believe it could get more absurd than it is now, but I trust that it will. There exists a gray-market website to buy 'common drugs'(you know, grass, orange sunshine, cocaine, all that hippy shit) that accepts anonymous electronic currency to bid in eBay like auctions. Of course, the DEA is trying to shut 'em down.

Meanwhile, there's been a post 2000 BCE influx of Research Chemicals. Previously called Designer drugs; the most mainstreamed of which is MDMA, or Esctacy. It started with one guy, Alexander Shulgin, who simultaneously worked with the DEA(and recieved a Schedule I license out of the deal), and spent the rest of his life creating and writing books about and using analogs of Schedule I and II drugs(mostly psychedelics, the typical choice of the scientist), and then got raided by the DEA for it. He was fined, but not imprisoned, and still retains his license. He's 86 today.

They're called Research Chemicals, and not Designer Drugs, because every bag of powder you can buy legally online from a European lab is marked Not for human consumption. That's all it takes to skirt the law there. The Research Chemical gray-market operated relatively under-the-radar from 2000-2008 when mostly cannabis-analogs and psychedelics were being offered online and through 'smoking blends' in head shops. Then-

Stimulant users ruined everything like usual.

My interest in this issue peaked when a drug analog I was interested in appeared. I was ready to attempt to buy this research chemical, which was not fit for human consumption, when I had one of those bad-trip 'Is this what it's come to?' moments. I thought- Just because I'm too much of a coward to drive down to Mexico and buy Ketamine from a Veterinarian, I'm considering buying a brand-new drug over the internet from what may or not be a European Laboratory?

This Research Chemical absurdity ought to illustrate the obvious failure of drug prohibition to the powers that be. Since new drug analogs can be and are being synthesized and distributed all the time; any idiot can realize that a game of whack-a-mole is starting up. First they schedule 'the love drug', then 'bath salts',and then what's next? There's no end in sight to the drugs that can be created, distributed, and outlawed. And yet Australia has already jumped the gun and banned all drug analogs of illegal drugs- even ones that haven't been made yet.

I see a future in which synthetic drugs are illegal until they're made legal. A world in which a well meaning scientist and an underground chemist and a senior-citizen psychonaut could accidentally or purposefully produce a 'drug analog' and be locked up for doing so, before anyone knows the effects, benefits, or possible medical use of the substance.

That's bad. Every thinking person knows the war on drugs is futile. I, for one, never expected it would interfere with science like it's threatening to do now.