Today’s Brain Chemical May Be Tomorrow’s Street Drug
If you had a nickel for every cliche that’s been launched during our current War on Drugs, you could buy all the coca fields in Colombia and still have enough left over to snap up all the crack in Los Angeles. Talk is cheap. The drugs are cheaper.
While you won’t find the Harvard Business School doing any case studies on it, the marketplace for illegal narcotics has spawned an industry that’s innovative, technologically sophisticated and incredibly sensitive to market forces. The sociologists can pontificate all they want but let’s be blunt: Technological innovation, in the form of inexpensively synthesized crack cocaine, created our current drug epidemic.
Cheaper than pure cocaine and safer than freebasing, crack delivered the right high at the right price. Its success encouraged further innovation. Now coke processors pop their junk into microwave ovens and sell the result as “Instant Gratification.”
Following traditional corporate models of product diversification, narcotics technology is even becoming cocaine-independent. A new generation of synthetic amphetamines--called ice in Hawaii and crank elsewhere--is materializing in forms that are as cheap and as powerful as crack.
“The effects of amphetamines are indistinguishable from the effects of cocaine,” says Dr. Solomon Snyder, director of the Johns Hopkins Medical School neuroscience department and one of the pioneers in psychopharmacology, the chemistry of the brain. “A lot of drug users probably couldn’t tell the difference. If cocaine were pushed off the streets it would seem a logical step” for the drug cartels to move into this emerging technology.
The ingredients for these synthetic amphetamines are readily accessible and, while some knowledge of organic chemistry is necessary, you don’t need a Ph.D. As the crack market proves, it’s not just that there is a tremendous demand out there for these cheap and powerful intoxicants, there’s also what economists call Say’s Law: Supply creates its own demand.
Innovations create new markets. That’s why these psychoactive narcotics are destined to become as pervasive as nicotine and alcohol.
On one level, this shouldn’t be surprising. All throughout history, mankind has aggressively sought chemical stimulation. Our mythologies are rife with bacchanals and magical potions that modify minds. “We have to finally face who we are,” says UCLA psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel, author of a recent book titled “Intoxication.”
“We are intoxicant-using creatures. The problem is, nobody wants people in crack houses, shooting galleries or killed by drunk drivers.”
On another level, the technology is evolving to a point where we are almost certain to discover chemicals that can evoke euphoria, delight and intense pleasure more safely than cocaine and amphetamines do today. The major drug firms such as Merck and leading universities such as UCLA and Johns Hopkins are exploring the frontiers of psychoactive drugs.
Does that mean that they are working on “pleasure pills” and the somas of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”? Absolutely not. But it means that, as a byproduct of this research, we will glean new insights into the chemical workings of the brain that could be packaged in illegal forms. Today’s basic research could well become tomorrow’s hot street drug.
“As chemicals are discovered that have various effects on the brain, if some of the effects are euphoric, then it is something that people may well try to synthesize,” says Hopkins’ Snyder.
He hastens to add: “Illicit drug developments are not particularly linked to fundamental research. That hasn’t been the case in the past and it does not appear to be the case in the present.”
The future? “That’s improbable,” he asserts.
But is it really improbable that people will attempt nearly any means to carve out a piece of an $80-billion-plus annual global marketplace in illegal narcotics? On the contrary, I think it’s unlikely that the narcotics marketplace won’t try to turn these research chemicals into street drugs. There’s just too much money involved.
Determining Safety
Right now, crack defines the image of drug use in America. It’s easy to see the violence and devastation it wreaks. How can one look at a crack baby and not be moved? But what impact would a new generation of kinder, gentler and safer mood-altering chemicals have on the war on drugs? What happens if these new drugs are seen by the media and the masses as more benign? It’s easier to wage a war against a scourge than a pleasant diversion.
Of course, the “experts” all said cocaine was relatively harmless too, notes Dr. David F. Musto, a medical historian at Yale. The state of the psychopharmacological art isn’t good enough to accurately determine safety, he argues.
What’s more, says Musto, social trends--not technological innovations--shape the marketplace. “The trend that we’re now undergoing is against taking mood-altering substances. History suggests that we have reached a turning point in this drug epidemic and there will be an increasing wariness about drugs,” Musto says.
And yet, the old saying that “generals are always fighting the last war” keeps running through my mind. There’s no question that today’s drugs are horrible. Legalizing them won’t make them any less horrible--the law doesn’t change their chemistry. But if tomorrow’s drugs can offer safer highs and less radical addictions, what kind of warfare do you wage against them?
“The lesson to be learned is that there will be no lack of intoxicants in our society,” says UCLA’s Siegel. “We’re not now waging a war on drugs but a war against cocaine, one drug. We have a ‘Silent Spring’ of intoxicants coming up.”
