In the olden days, buying drugs wasn’t always this easy.
Even if you knew where to find them, they were often sold by
scary criminals lurking in stinking alleyways,
gagging to rip you off for stuff that barely got you high at all.
But what happens when
all of the barriers that stop people buying drugs
suddenly vanish overnight?
This is the story of how a party drug that was dirt cheap, totally legal,
thunderously powerful, and as easy to order online as pizza
came from nowhere and changed getting high forever.
Welcome to the rise, fall, and enduring legacy of mephedrone.
Like celebrity children or Satan,
mephedrone has tons of different names.
These days, to British wreckheads like this,
it’s known as M-Cat or Meow-Meow.
A more telling name for it, though, is Plant Food,
which is exactly what the potent stimulant was sold as
when it first arrived in the UK in the late 2000s.
Mephedrone isn’t really food for plants,
and it’s not meant to be used as bath salts either,
even though that’s what it was originally sold as in the States.
But it was sold that way to exploit loopholes
so that, for a little while at least,
mephedrone use would remain both rampant
and perfectly legal.
M-Cat enjoyed this “live fast, die young” lifestyle
wherever it went.
From Israel to Sweden, Estonia to Singapore,
China to Germany, and Russia to the US,
its popularity briefly exploded
before the authorities rushed to outlaw it.
But these small windows were all it needed
to earn its place in drug history.
Because while it was legal,
mephedrone was so easy to get off the web
that it introduced a generation to the wonders of buying drugs online.
And since people started buying their drugs online,
they’ve never looked back.
This dealer is showing us how he operates on the dark net
or the dark web,
a hidden part of the internet not listed on normie search engines
that you need special software to access.
How do you think the dark web has changed the drug industry in the UK?
Crazy.
You can now purchase drugs like you can purchase a **** microwave.
But before mephedrone was banned,
sites didn’t bother burying it in this shadowy underworld,
they just sold it on the regular internet.
In rough terms, mephedrone’s boom lasted from 2008 until 2011.
And in the years leading up to it,
there was a global drought of traditional party drugs
like cocaine and ecstasy
because after the turn of the millennium,
the war on drugs had come to the jungles of South America
and South East Asia,
and law enforcement had destroyed acres of the crops that
were vital to keeping the world’s caners supplied with coke and E.
But as has been proven time and time again,
reducing the supply of drugs
doesn’t do anything to stop people wanting them.
Swanning in to fill the gap came a plethora of substances
that were so new they were yet to be banned.
These so-called “legal highs” were cooked up in secretive Chinese labs,
and included future household names like Spice and Flakka.
Alongside them came the Ace Face of the late 2000s legal high scene,
a powerful synthetic cathinone called mephedrone.
In the UK, mephedrone became especially popular with students,
clubbers, and rural teenagers.
If you’re not already acquainted, here are some basic pointers.
Number one, it’s a potent stimulant.
Number two, it smells awful.
Number three, it’s a powerful aphrodisiac.
This meant that at the height of its popularity,
there were a lot of horny people
staying up for days and nights on end,
trying to have sex with each other while reeking of cat piss.
By the start of 2010, mephedrone was flying high in the UK.
It polled as the fourth most popular drug among
readers of the club culture magazine Mixmag.
And at the University of Manchester,
well over half of students said they’d tried mephedrone.
In the tabloids, it was causing outright hysteria.
One famous, but entirely untrue headline screamed,
“Meow-Meow Made Man Rip His Scrotum Off.”
The drug was a regular sight and smell in the clubs, pubs,
and house parties of cities and university towns.
People would feed it to each other in spoons,
too high and the M-Cat too plentiful
for anyone to care about rations or spillages.
And then just like that,
this cat-piss utopia was cut down in its prime.
A British government ban landed in April of 2010.
Legal highs, of course, have been seen as somehow safe,
and our message is quite clear that they aren’t safe,
that they cause harm.
That’s why we need to get the evidence
to make sure that if we need to take action,
we do so.
Nowadays, the cocaine and ecstasy drought that mephedrone exploited
is well and truly over.
Traditional drugs are back with a vengeance,
more abundant and far purer than they’ve ever been before.
And where do you think you’ll find them?
That’s right.
All the old classics are now available in the online marketplaces
that mephedrone first introduced to the world.
And if anyone can now use the internet
to buy whatever drugs they want,
it follows that anyone can use it to become a drug dealer, too.
Even these guys.
We’re in the house now, where the pill press is,
but we don’t want to be too loud because the parents are downstairs.
-Hello. -Hello. How’s it going?
Yeah, alright.
We look sick.
Bruv, turn your phone on silent, it’s a **** identifiable ringtone.
I can’t because of these **** gloves, bruv.
Are you using your tongue on the touch screen?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I’ve literally never seen anyone use an iPhone
with their tongue as a finger.
How does it taste?
Like MDMA.
For many dealers, the internet has made life both easier
and less dangerous.
But some in the online drugs market didn’t get so lucky with the police.
In the years after mephedrone had peaked,
the realm was ruled by the notorious dark web portal Silk Road.
This annoyed the FBI, who finally shut it down for good in 2014
after arresting its founder,
a free market libertarian named Ross Ulbricht.
Ulbricht, who was said to use the online alias “Dread Pirate Roberts,”
was destroyed by the courts.
He got a double life sentence plus 40 years,
with no chance of parole.
But maybe it's not surprising they were so upset with him.
Prosecutors stated that Silk Road was used to facilitate drug deals
worth nearly 214 million dollars.
In 2020, the black market for drugs on the dark web continues to thrive.
And a recent development in the UK has made it even easier to get high.
Dealers have started selling drugs on mainstream social media apps
like Instagram and Snapchat,
sometimes to children.
What are you guys selling tonight?
Some flake, some Cali, some weed.
Different types of weed.
And what’s in there?
-That’s sleigh, that. -Coke?
Cocaine, yeah.
I’ve seen kids doing them about 12 years old and that.
Things like that, like really young ages.
Doesn’t matter, it’s their choice to go out on Snapchat.
Mephedrone was the catalyst that moved the drug market online,
setting up a battle the war on drugs may never be able to win.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.