The Children of Admiral Shulgin

[Оригинал на русском]

And now for some­thing com­plete­ly seri­ous. We have man­aged to chat with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Russ­ian “shad­ow phar­ma­col­o­gy”, a group of pro­fes­sion­al chemists who had once been aca­d­e­m­ic sci­en­tists engaged in devel­op­ing and test­ing exper­i­men­tal drugs. A sweet cake of sto­ries about the sci­en­tif­ic phar­ma­co­log­i­cal under­ground, indus­tri­al-scale DOB syn­the­sis, Russ­ian mar­ket of psy­choac­tive sub­stances, numi­nous chem­i­cal expe­ri­ence, and weird future brought by the good Doc­tor Cali­gari.

Please tell us about your­self: what do you do, how have you come to this, what is your pur­pose?

Dr. Cali­gari: The St. Peters­burg phar­ma­ceu­tic under­ground divi­sion we belong to is every­thing that remains of the free infor­mal group called Orc-Tech. It appeared sev­er­al years ago on the base of the Lomonosov Moscow State Uni­ver­si­ty of Fine Chem­i­cal Tech­nol­o­gy. Now this gath­er­ing, which once con­sist­ed of about twen­ty peo­ple, has fall­en apart, and most par­tic­i­pants have left shad­ow phar­ma­col­o­gy to deal, for exam­ple, with ana­lyt­i­cal work for the Insti­tute of Micro­bi­ol­o­gy of the Russ­ian Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.

Why was it called Orc-Tech? First of all, because of our method: we had to car­ry out reduc­tion under high pres­sure in cham­pagne bot­tles, ice coat of eth­yl­ene gly­col was replaced by a per­son stick­ing a flask into the snow out of a ground floor win­dow, then we went to a local shawar­ma fast-food spot and all but put this flask onto the counter, etc.

Now, only two of us remained in Orc-Tech. My assis­tant is a bio­chemist grad­u­at­ed from the depart­ment of gen­er­al chem­istry, an award-win­ning stu­dent and so on. Each of us has their own sto­ry, but I am going to focus on myself for now.

I have a high school degree in Drug Tech­nol­o­gy. After the uni­ver­si­ty, I joined post­grad­u­ate stud­ies in Tox­i­col­o­gy at RSCAC (Russ­ian Sci­en­tif­ic Cen­ter of Applied Chem­istry). By the way, I am a mem­ber of the Mendeleev Russ­ian Chem­i­cal Soci­ety. For about four months, I worked in a lab on cre­at­ing new types of drugs. I used to deal with exper­i­men­tal anti-can­cer drugs, nootrop­ics, anti­de­pres­sants, and many oth­er types of drugs.

Here’s a bit about anti-can­cer drugs. While I worked there, we devel­oped two semi-active com­pounds which worked on some tis­sue sam­ples and did not work on oth­ers. The idea was to deliv­er cal­ci­um to can­cer cells. As a result, the cell mem­brane becomes rigid and can then be cut out. Can­cer patients often expe­ri­ence hyper­cal­cemia, i. e. increased lev­el of cal­ci­um in the blood. If the amount of cal­ci­um is too much, the cell may get apop­to­sis or necro­sis. Necro­sis destroys the cell mem­brane and releas­es the con­tents of the cell into the inter­cel­lu­lar space. Tumor reg­u­la­tion with the help of cal­ci­um is quite a pop­u­lar idea, but it is com­mon­ly done the oth­er way round: ion chan­nels are closed in order to pre­vent its infu­sion into the cell (when there’s lit­tle cal­ci­um), and the lev­el of cal­ci­um is increased a bit in t‑lymphocytes and oth­er cells which kill can­cer cells. Iron­i­cal­ly, can­cer cells actu­al­ly con­sume more cal­ci­um because they divide, and they gen­er­al­ly ben­e­fit from hyper­cal­cemia. It was also dis­cov­ered that they have mech­a­nisms which reg­u­late chan­nel amount and car­ry­ing capac­i­ty so as not to over­dose on cal­ci­um.

In short, the sub­stance was quite con­tro­ver­sial. I would not have men­tioned if not for an episode of its con­sump­tion by a human. A girl I knew, who had been diag­nosed with a stage 3 tumor, effec­tive­ly stole a sam­ple of the sub­stance from the insti­tute. We did not real­ly know the lethal dose at the moment, and I was men­tal­ly bury­ing both her and myself, as I would prob­a­bly be held respon­si­ble. How­ev­er, after a while, I learned she’d start­ed to get bet­ter. Might have not been this lucky.

At the same time, I had my own busi­ness for the analy­sis and pro­duc­tion of Cialis, referred to as Via­gra in com­mon par­lance, though they are dif­fer­ent drugs with dif­fer­ent active com­pounds. Once, I had an acci­den­tal con­flict with the police. As a result, some of the sub­stances being ana­lyzed were con­sid­ered explo­sives. It was most­ly about ace­tone diper­ox­ide extract­ed from a sam­ple of can­dle heli­um. The result is an ini­ti­at­ing explo­sive which is not used for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es because of its insta­bil­i­ty and volatil­i­ty but is quite pop­u­lar among ter­ror­ists of all kinds. The case also fea­tured metal­lic mag­num. In addi­tion, a les­bian girl worked in my team who had par­tic­i­pat­ed in the protest actions of 2011–2012.

As a result, for 50 mg of a sub­stance with bad explo­sive prop­er­ties, I end­ed up on pro­ba­tion for 3 years, accord­ing to arti­cle 223 of the Russ­ian Crim­i­nal Code, and was kicked out of post­grad­u­ate research. It turned out to be dif­fi­cult to find a job with such a back­ground, not only in my line of work, but even in a McDon­ald’s. In order not to die from star­va­tion, I had to invent quite sophis­ti­cat­ed income schemes. I will not go into the details: sapi­en­ti sat. For the last few months, me and my col­league have been reor­ga­niz­ing the com­pa­ny: we have received a cou­ple of legit­i­mate orders for indus­tri­al clean­ing com­pounds, win­ter addi­tives to diesel, and even for elec­trol­y­sis.

I have been par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in psy­chophar­ma­col­o­gy for quite a long time. How­ev­er, it has nev­er been a pri­ma­ry direc­tion of my research, but mere­ly a per­son­al inter­est at the junc­tion of psy­chi­a­try, neu­ro­phys­i­ol­o­gy, and chem­istry. It was not even Shulgin’s books that inspired me for syn­the­siz­ing psy­choac­tive com­pounds, but Neu­ropsy­chi­a­try by Dobrokho­to­va. It was effec­tive­ly the first mono­graph in Rus­sia ded­i­cat­ed to the psy­chi­atric stud­ies of neu­ro­sur­gi­cal pathol­o­gy. IIRC, Dobrokho­to­va also dealt with left-hand­ed peo­ple, bilat­er­al asym­me­try, etc.

The his­to­ry of your project: the first com­mu­ni­ties, block­ings, why are you not afraid to show your faces, what kind of inter­net safe­ty advice could you give to those will­ing to con­tact you?

Dr. Cali­gari: The lat­est years have yield­ed us enough inter­est­ing cas­es, or life­hacks, in the area of psy­choac­tive drugs pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion. We had a sud­den urge to pub­lish them in the pub­lic domain, and not into some Tor net­works but two clicks away from any begin­ner psy­cho­naut in Rus­sia. This is how we cre­at­ed our Vkon­tak­te com­mu­ni­ty as the place to pub­lish our pod­casts, for­mu­las, slop­pi­ly dig­i­tized half-rot­ten lit­er­a­ture from aban­doned once-clas­si­fied facil­i­ties, etc. The goal was mere­ly edu­ca­tion­al: to con­vey real­ly inter­est­ing find­ings to the mass­es, to pub­lish them in some way, and to spell out the phar­ma­ceu­tics of clas­sic com­pounds. It is impor­tant because offi­cial media sell com­plete bull­shit in most cas­es, and we want the soci­ety to have an ade­quate opin­ion at least about clas­sic sub­stances.

We filmed our first video and post­ed it to Vkon­tak­te. With­out adver­tis­ing of any kind, we quick­ly achieved about 100 first view­ers. As we had next to no job at the moment, it only took us a cou­ple of weeks to pub­lish most of our old ideas. So the first sea­son was almost final­ized. I think the group was blocked just because of a sto­ry about the won­der­ful prop­er­ties of lop­eramide, which con­curred with some cas­es of care­less use of this phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal mix­ture by school kids. At least, some local news report­ed some­thing along the lines. But the Vkon­tak­te admin­is­tra­tion did not real­ly tell us any­thing clear­ly, and we didn’t want to con­verse with them too much either. We cre­at­ed oth­er com­mu­ni­ties sev­er­al times, and they got blocked after achiev­ing 300 sub­scribers. As a result, these activ­i­ties are semi-sus­pend­ed now.

You are curi­ous why we don’t hide our faces. Have you ever heard the sto­ry of Uncatch­able Joe? Actu­al­ly, we had an idea to film this thing in Guy Fawkes masks or with paper bags on our heads. But we are not just drunk­ards or junkies but for­mer sci­en­tists, too, and sci­ence is, as one of my friends said, like homo­sex­u­al­i­ty – once you are in, you’re in for life. More­over, because of many rea­sons, it is dif­fi­cult to incrim­i­nate us in any­thing worse than pro­pa­gan­da. If one is real­ly deter­mined, it is easy to throw some drugs into anyone’s pock­et and imprison them with­out any spy tricks. But we are not worth anoth­er star on the cop’s shoul­der loops. For that, one has to arrest a big lab­o­ra­to­ry pro­duc­ing drugs for sale and con­fis­cate a large vol­ume of goods, which we phys­i­cal­ly can­not have, as much as some­one may wish for that.

Recent­ly, we have man­aged to offi­cial­ly reg­is­ter our insti­tute with the help of my for­mer sci­en­tif­ic super­vi­sor, who escaped from the coun­try after RSCAC was van­dal­ized by the city admin­is­tra­tion. It is reg­is­tered in a banana repub­lic with its legal address in a bun­ga­low fifty meters from the water. They sent me a pho­to: even the elec­tric­i­ty is sup­plied by a gen­er­a­tor. The name of this struc­ture is Inde­pen­dent Psy­choPhar­ma­col­o­gy Research Insti­tute (IPPRI). There will be a web site in a while with offi­cial con­tacts. Mean­while, every­one inter­est­ed can con­tact us via Vkon­tak­te, GMail… the most active para­noids can use a ser­vice called privnote.com. In the­o­ry, we need this insti­tute to sim­pli­fy some pub­li­ca­tions in the future, to par­tic­i­pate in some grant pro­grams, etc. In prac­tice, it was meant to facil­i­tate the pur­chas­ing of some pre­cur­sors and equip­ment, but turns out we live in the wrong coun­try. In Rus­sia, even if you are three times as legit as any oth­er sci­en­tist, even pur­chas­ing sim­ple ace­tone in quan­ti­ties of more than 10 liters may be an issue, let alone a hygro­scop­ic sub­stance like sodi­um per­chlo­rate. It is either per­ma­nent­ly out of stock, or they will knock on your door one day for a pro­phy­lac­tic chat. At the same time, if you know par­tic­u­lar places online or IRL, any school­boy can pur­chase almost any sub­stance with­out any titles or doc­u­ments.

The first order via the insti­tute came from Ger­many – sim­i­lar folks there exper­i­ment­ed with sub­stances which, in the­o­ry, should help in the case of radioac­tive con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. The idea was as fol­lows: the active com­pound of this pill, tetraphenyl­por­phyrin (an ana­logue of nat­ur­al por­phyrines with some impor­tant prop­er­ties of hemo­glo­bin and chloro­phyll), was sup­posed to cap­ture heavy radioac­tive iso­topes into the cen­ter of a cell, form­ing a com­plex. A prob­lem popped up with pur­chas­ing ben­zalde­hyde for the syn­the­sis – even with all nec­es­sary doc­u­ments, even 5–10 ml of it, because the sub­stance is active­ly used for amphet­a­mine pro­duc­tion in two reac­tions. As a result, it was eas­i­er to pur­chase bit­ter almond oil, which is 99.95 % ben­zalde­hyde, and extract it with hydrol­y­sis. The fun­ny thing is that phenyl­ni­tro­propene, which is even more pop­u­lar for amphet­a­mine pro­duc­tion in just one reac­tion, is still easy to buy almost in any drug­store. Any­one who buys it in big quan­ti­ties most like­ly uses it for this pur­pose.

Sure, this is SNAFU: if there is no reagent in store, one has to sub­sti­tute pal­la­di­um-organ­ic reduc­tion via inter­me­di­ate com­plex­es with mix­ing the sub­strate with iron dust in sul­fu­ric acid. In prac­tice, it means that instead of spend­ing months wait­ing for a pack­age from abroad, you just go to a prop­er hard­ware store.

Gen­er­al­ly, a min­i­mal amount of chem­i­cal uten­sils and avail­abil­i­ty of non-obvi­ous pre­cur­sors teach­es a per­son to pro­duce sub­stances any­where. When I was still a stu­dent, I was once dis­cussing the issues of cyclidines neu­ro­tox­i­c­i­ty with my friend right behind the back of the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal acad­e­my prorec­tor and right after recal­cu­lat­ing our allowance in hash bricks. My friend, who had just stopped being an orange cook­ie, had been fol­low­ing the rec­tor like fif­teen min­utes, keep­ing a dis­tance of four meters and con­stant­ly cry­ing out in an artis­tic whis­per: “give me some water, moth­er­fuck­er, I’ve got a ter­ri­ble cot­ton mouth after the fuck­ing tile­t­a­mine”. The rec­tor treat­ed him with under­stand­ing, though not with water. There were rumors that one of the acad­e­my lab­o­ra­to­ries was equipped on the mon­ey he earned by indus­tri­al-scale speed trade in the 90s. And this was a sto­ry mak­ing Wal­ter White just a mod­est chem­istry teacher in com­par­i­son. By the way, tile­t­a­mine is quite a wor­thy sub­sti­tute for ket­a­mine, which was sold in any vet­eri­nary phar­ma­cy before. They banned it only in Jan­u­ary 2014.

How did you equip the lab­o­ra­to­ry, where did you find equip­ment, uten­sils, reagents?

Dr. Cali­gari: It took us very long to equip our own lab­o­ra­to­ry. My job at RSCAC helped me in the begin­ning, before that sto­ry with explo­sives. The sto­ry of RSCAC is spe­cial: it is an irre­place­able loss for Russ­ian sci­ence, and the day in spring 2012 when it was razed to the ground marks the date when we can offi­cial­ly give up on the chem­i­cal tech­nol­o­gy of Rus­sia entire­ly. Long sto­ry short, the land par­cel under the insti­tute was bought by Matvienko’s son, who was the head of VTB-Devel­op­ment until June 2013. First, the insti­tute sud­den­ly found itself in a strict build­ing height restric­tion zone, then some­thing about “haz­ardous pro­duc­tion with­in the city bound­aries” popped up, and then, despite every­one admit­ting the soil there was con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed to a depth of 5 meters, the land par­cel was giv­en away for the con­struc­tion of an élite res­i­den­tial block.

Offi­cial­ly, the insti­tute was moved to Kapi­tolo­vo, to build­ings claimed by fun­gus dozens of years ago and with rot­ten elec­tric facil­i­ties. But almost no mon­ey was allo­cat­ed for the move. As a result, a lot of heavy equip­ment had to be dropped, like large lab­o­ra­to­ry micro­scopes cost­ing mil­lions or even dozens of mil­lions rubles. Just note the degree of absurd: fol­low­ing the offi­cial state­ments that RSCAC is being moved because of envi­ron­men­tal dan­ger, some strange peo­ple appear out of nowhere to throw haz­ardous chem­i­cals out the win­dows, release Fre­on from gas cylin­ders, pour out rock­et fuel, drugs, and tox­ins into the Neva riv­er, smash high-qual­i­ty optics, etc. There was such a mess that all the doc­u­ments from the first depart­ment were lost, occa­sion­al­ly or inten­tion­al­ly. So, despite me hav­ing the sec­ond lev­el of access to secret infor­ma­tion, no one has ever men­tioned it, even when I trav­eled abroad.

Any­way, as a result of this, we have man­aged to acquire for pri­vate use some equip­ment and reagents which had offi­cial­ly been dis­posed of. Some RSCAC stuff was bought/sold by my friends who admin­is­tered the Psy­cho Chemist Vkon­tak­te com­mu­ni­ty.

The last wit­ty obser­va­tion regard­ing this top­ic: exact­ly after the smash of RSCAC and some oth­er key insti­tu­tions, the rock­ets start­ed fail­ing. This could be relat­ed to some lost fea­tures of pyroau­to­mat­ics, rock­et fuel prop­er­ties, etc. How­ev­er, this idea is too strong and dif­fi­cult to prove, so let’s not dwell on it.

After­wards, we bought some things we need­ed for our own lab­o­ra­to­ry, obtained some oth­er things in an old, rav­aged state and then fixed them. Now, we can boast of quartz uten­sils from the Third Reich and oth­er rar­i­ties (a cop­per water­jet pump with Reich stamps had stood in RSCAC for years, and nobody gave a damn), as well as an old but work­ing scan­ning elec­tron micro­scope with X‑ray micro­analy­sis and nuclear mag­net­ic res­o­nance.

Reagents are a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. Some basic and weird things were also tak­en from the lab­o­ra­to­ries where we worked, the rest was pur­chased or lit­er­al­ly exca­vat­ed from aban­doned objects with the help of stalk­ers. It is quite easy to get vital pre­cur­sors if you know some tricks. Drugs are often quite sim­ple com­pounds, and if you go to a hard­ware store, you can think of sev­er­al ways to syn­the­size pop­u­lar sub­stances on the way from entrance to check­out. If you know what you’re doing, the cost of pro­duc­ing a gram of amphet­a­mine does not exceed 2–3 rubles.

We express our spe­cial thanks to the Tigo­da vod­ka dis­tillery (which is now closed) in the town of Kir­shi, Leningrad region. Last Novem­ber, Kir­shi was close to becom­ing a Silent Hill, when an out­break at a local fac­to­ry left the town cov­ered by fog and smelling of hydro­gen sul­phide. We had noth­ing to do with that, though! About a year before that, for­mer employ­ees of the alco­hol analy­sis lab­o­ra­to­ry informed us that we may take what­ev­er we want from the ruins. Tak­ing into account that vod­ka pro­duc­tion has always been well-financed, we were able to obtain a large amount of uten­sils by the Simax and Ergon brands, among oth­er things. The lat­ter is more appro­pri­ate for bet­ter spe­cial­ists than us or for posh guys, but nev­er­the­less…

This exact episode was men­tioned by our Eston­ian friend and col­league in his inter­view:

“Hi! A lot of chem. uten­sils close to St. Peters­burg. Well, last ride got us 200 grand worth of stuff, at least 50 fridges, fuck­ing plen­ty of simax. A shit­load of reagents, a lot of mer­cury from the ther­mome­ters, I played with a stick in the fuck­ing pud­dle. Smashed some expen­sive glass stuff for reac­tors tho, about 10 grand each, when we hit some­thing with the car on our way, K. even had to drop the bong, oth­er­wise we’d fly to the ditch at 120 km/h, hard­ly stopped the skid­ding. Found a dent in his Cadillac’s armor, and a long bloody trace where the skid­ding start­ed. Prob­a­bly a deer, very sym­bol­ic. BTW how to enforce adeny­late cyclase the most?”

The uten­sils from Kir­shi were very help­ful, but we should state that Orc-Tech has achieved such good results not because of good equip­ment, but rather despite of it, thanks to capa­ble hands. For exam­ple, the major­i­ty of Shulgin’s syn­thet­ic com­pounds are made by sim­ply replac­ing methoxyl groups on the ring and swap­ping halo­gens. This would be the 8th or 9th grade of sec­ondary school if they gave any prac­ti­cal skills. In addi­tion, there are some, not to say mis­takes, but lim­i­ta­tions in Shulgin’s works enabling the syn­the­sis just in test­ing amounts. Con­trary to this, we basi­cal­ly need two cham­pagne bot­tles, a glass, a con­dom to block the evap­o­rat­ing, and 0.5 kg of hydrochi­non as the main source to get at least 400 g of rough­ly cooked DOB. I have to note that when you see about 500 000 sin­gle dos­es on your table, even low-qual­i­ty DOB pro­duces a colos­sal anti­de­pres­sive effect, and that’s before con­sum­ing it.

If you want to do the same thing in a nice way, you will need: direct refrig­er­a­tor, reverse refrig­er­a­tor, Wurtz cap, a cou­ple of glass­es, plus – essen­tial – knowl­edge of the­o­ry: why a shape of uten­sils is suit­able or not, how it affects vol­ume, etc.

In order to pre­dict process vari­ants, you have to know chem­istry well – bet­ter than you’d need to work in a lab­o­ra­to­ry with mod­el con­di­tions and sen­sors. It is easy to be a Hermione Granger in such con­di­tions, but what is real­ly inter­est­ing is doing it the hard­core way, on a kitchen table, impro­vis­ing and observ­ing unob­vi­ous reac­tions. Imag­ine a cold stair­case, a bowl of hot water, some­thing evap­o­rat­ing out of it. Peo­ple are tired of wait­ing, each of them smokes the third cig­a­rette. But what can you do? Dis­till­ing chlo­ro­form in your kitchen may end in a gas cham­ber for oneiro­nauts.

How is your work orga­nized: where do you get infor­ma­tion, mate­ri­als, how do you car­ry out tests?

Dr. Cali­gari: We have quite a clas­si­cal work process. In some cas­es, it starts with patent search and lit­er­a­ture review. Most patents have nev­er been prac­ti­cal­ly test­ed, they were only pro­tect­ed so that some­one got a high school degree, but there are inter­est­ing ideas some­times. We have a pub­lic library in our city with a lot of use­ful lit­er­a­ture, even in pub­lic access. But in most cas­es, sub­stances are designed from scratch. I mean, sys­tems like PASS are used to pre­dict bio­log­i­cal activ­i­ty, direct dock­ing of recep­tors via a spe­cial OSDD Lin­ux plat­form is used, tests for tox­i­c­i­ty and car­cino­genic prop­er­ties are car­ried out.

For com­plete­ly test­ed sub­stances and for ques­tion­able sub­stances, we define LD (lethal dose) and LD-50 (lethal dose in more than 50 % of cas­es), plus approx­i­mate thresh­old dosage in mg/kg. Notably, hero­in junkies sur­vive inject­ing larg­er dos­es than LD-50 with a high degree of prob­a­bil­i­ty. So, if the lethal dose of methadone for an opi­ate junkie is about 200–250 mg, 30 mg may be enough for lay­man. The same is true for amphet­a­mine. Ther­a­peu­tic dos­es vary between 15 and 30 mg, while the recre­ation­al dosage for a hard­core amphet­a­mine abuser is 500–600 mg intra­venous­ly. Not more, because the heart will expe­ri­ence sys­tolic or dias­tolic shock. It is pos­si­ble, how­ev­er, to use up to a gram per­oral­ly, though we have heard of some total­ly tran­shu­man dos­es.

Impres­sive­ly, most con­fi­dants con­tact­ing us are inter­est­ed in the recre­ation­al prop­er­ties of sub­stances, while we as sci­en­tists are more inter­est­ed in oth­er things – the­o­ret­i­cal areas so gloomy human con­scious­ness seems to have noth­ing to do with them. How­ev­er, users nev­er stop to amaze us. Philip Dick once told either a real sto­ry or urban leg­end, explain­ing some­thing about the drug cul­ture, in his opin­ion:

“In Marin Coun­ty where I live an army dis­ori­en­ta­tion drug was stolen by the Hells Angels. The pur­pose of the drug was to total­ly dis­ori­ent you, but in such a sub­tle way that you did­n’t know you were com­plete­ly dis­ori­ent­ed. They stole it and sold it and every­body that took it liked it. And it just com­plete­ly screws you up so you could­n’t do any­thing. One of the things that it did to you was you lost all of your cen­tral vision and only had periph­er­al vision. So you could see a lit­tle bit but not at all cen­tral­ly, you see. The peo­ple who took it thought it was won­der­ful. They were look­ing for more of it.”

So, the series of Bro­mo-Drag­on­FLY, a full sero­tonin recep­tor ago­nist which has become a leg­end, was syn­the­sized exclu­sive­ly to check how exact­ly a recep­tor gets bound. Park­er, who syn­the­sized the sub­stance in the late 90s, most like­ly did not even think a liv­ing per­son would ever vol­un­tar­i­ly put it into them­selves. An ago­nist is a sub­stance which caus­es ejec­tion of pos­i­tive ions in the sodi­um-potas­si­um pump, an antag­o­nist does the same for neg­a­tive ions. Both “bind” the recep­tor, i. e. “switch off” a par­tic­u­lar group of neu­rons or a brain zone. All these three mod­i­fi­ca­tions of DOB – “flies”, “drag­on­flies” and “but­ter­flies” – may make the mind dis­so­ci­ate so pro­found­ly that the per­son is unable to dis­tin­guish between hot and cold. Their recep­tors don’t know what they should react to. Inter­est­ing­ly, the first thing the mind for­gets is how to react to light, hence pupil dila­tion. Sero­ton­er­gic per­cep­tion in the brain is switched off com­plete­ly, and the per­son­al­i­ty decays tem­porar­i­ly with con­se­quent side effects.

Anoth­er exam­ple is the series of hal­lu­cino­gens called “n‑bom”, which is still active on the black mar­ket. They were cre­at­ed in order to check the behav­ior of rats with bound sero­tonin recep­tors. Many of these rats did not sur­vive this exper­i­ment. I may be wrong, but as far as I remem­ber, n‑boms have been on the mar­ket for some­thing like two years. I saw the first men­tions of them in pub­li­ca­tions 4 years ago. They prob­a­bly appeared in lab­o­ra­to­ries a year ear­li­er. After that, some­one saw the for­mu­las or read the reports and start­ed the pro­duc­tion for com­mer­cial pur­pos­es.

Con­trary to Shulgin’s syn­thet­ic sub­stances, ques­tion­able com­pounds pass the tests on rats. Depend­ing on our needs, we catch the rats or buy them in zoo shops. A lab­o­ra­to­ry mouse costs around 100 rubles. But for the final result, we need some tests on humans. In order not to raise eth­i­cal argu­ments, I will only say that there are more than enough of those who want to get high in St. Peters­burg. We keep strict lim­i­ta­tions: 18+ years old, plus we car­ry out an addi­tion­al inter­view in order to gauge the san­i­ty and health of a vol­un­teer at least approx­i­mate­ly and warn them about pos­si­ble con­se­quences. But at the end, I could give some deriv­a­tives of bom to almost any­one because they are prac­ti­cal­ly safe. OK, the per­son will feel that their hands are cold, but tech­ni­cal­ly it is not impor­tant. We have to test real­ly harsh dis­so­cia­tives on our­selves, most­ly.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is not always pos­si­ble to process and inter­pret results with high qual­i­ty. The group of Shulgin’s testers involved his psy­chol­o­gist friends and san­er peo­ple than we often have to deal with. With 90 % prob­a­bil­i­ty, we meet those who want to get as wast­ed as pos­si­ble or those who want to solve their own exis­ten­tial and psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems. We have a col­league who uses syn­thet­ic cannabi­noids with the exclu­sive­ly pur­pose to esti­mate the phar­ma­co­dy­nam­ics of a sub­stance (right in the act, if he is still able to ver­bal­ize), to describe the process­es in his brain. He is the per­fect tester, but unfor­tu­nate­ly such peo­ple are few and far between.

How­ev­er, despite of all dif­fi­cul­ties, we have by now com­plete­ly fin­ished a series of very inter­est­ing non-clas­si­cal opi­ates, kap­pa-ago­nists, have test­ed a new group of rac­etam nootrop­ics (more pow­er­ful than phe­notropil), β‑Methylphenethylamine, piper­azines… Gen­er­al­ly, such sub­stances have mul­ti­re­cep­tor effects. Not to delve into the details too much, I’ll just say that we have man­aged to get sev­er­al com­pet­i­tive ana­logues of exist­ing psy­choac­tive drugs.

There are some phe­nom­e­na today which require fur­ther, more detailed research, but there is no time for this because the project does not have any finan­cial sup­port. This is why it usu­al­ly ends like this: dur­ing the May hol­i­days, we send a group of testers to a sum­mer house and they try every­thing we’ve cooked dur­ing the long win­ter. This trip was espe­cial­ly cru­el in 2014. Here is a cita­tion of one of these guys:

“On our way, right on the train, all of us took a dis­so­cia­tive sim­i­lar to methox­pheni­dine. For a reg­u­lar per­son, the assumed dosage is 70 mg, so we ate 100 each, not sus­pect­ing how cru­el it could be, and after approx­i­mate­ly 20 min­utes, when some­one said “meh…”, we took 70 mg more. Dur­ing the next 40 min­utes, total shit was going on which I can hard­ly describe. You can prob­a­bly have some idea if I say that the fig­ure-ground per­cep­tion switched off and we stopped think­ing in gestalts. As a result, our observed car­riage space remind­ed a creepy patch­work of babushkas, bench­es, win­dow views, our own fin­gers, air move­ments, wheel sounds, the entire­ty of which was tight­ly packed into some­thing like a sausage or lay­ered pie. In the sum­mer house, we real­ized that some­thing wrong hap­pened to our per­cep­tion of col­ors. Observ­ing the world in shades of grey dur­ing the next sev­er­al days, we tried to smoke our way out of despair”.

Anoth­er equal­ly pow­er­ful case was not long in com­ing: a dif­fer­ent com­rade was brave enough to fry some spaghet­ti under the influ­ence of the syn­thet­ic cannabi­noid 5F-PB22, a full antag­o­nist of CB recep­tors and one of the cru­elest known sub­stances of this group. At some point, he was pos­sessed by an irre­sistible urge to start con­struct­ing a show called Tim­ber Har­vest­ing. Spaghet­ti pieces became logs, and he became the Sawmill King. When he real­ized this, he com­posed a song which became a por­tal to this Tim­ber Har­vest­ing for every­one present. Under the Sawmill, medusas in pink coats guard­ed chem­i­cal weapons hid­den in the depth from dis­em­bod­ied rebels… Accord­ing to this report, they did not man­age to have their din­ner that day.

Clos­er to the end of all these won­der­ful trips and trans­for­ma­tions, an amoe­ba appeared on the mon­i­tor of one Orc-Tech mem­ber and lived with him for three or four days. By then, he had already real­ized he was done, end­ed up with a per­ma­nent men­tal dis­or­der, had to get used to the amoe­ba, to find a com­mon lan­guage with it, enter into a peace agree­ment… then one day it dis­ap­peared, and he is still not sure what caused the worse trau­ma, as he almost came to love the amoe­ba.

How does the chem­i­cal under­ground of St. Petersburg/Russia/world look?

Dr. Cali­gari: If we talk about “the shad­ow com­mu­ni­ty”, we have to admit with regret that it is becom­ing extinct. I don’t want to con­sid­er the mobs of hip­pies and oth­er out­casts, or peo­ple who have oppor­tu­ni­ties to cook amphet­a­mine on an indus­tri­al scale using a sin­gle tech­nol­o­gy with min­i­mal chem­istry knowl­edge, as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of “shad­ow phar­ma­ceu­tics world”. Bright minds are few­er and few­er, the amount of mind-alter­ing sub­stances invent­ed by today is much big­ger than human expe­ri­ence can absorb. Any final answers to the fun­da­men­tal ques­tions of being most like­ly lie beyond the area of phar­ma­col­o­gy, or rather nowhere at all.

As for kin­dred spir­its from St. Peters­burg , a few col­leagues come to mind: a chemist worth get­ting acquaint­ed with (he will tell you all about the Sovi­et régime, Saigon, real sci­ence, real KGB, and real shad­ow life) and a few oth­ers – a phys­i­cal chemist, a psy­chi­a­trist, a physi­cist, a micro­bi­ol­o­gist. I will not men­tion their names here, they are not pub­lic per­sons.

Speak­ing about Rus­sia in gen­er­al, Orc-Tech and its pre­de­ces­sors have left a bright trace on the Russ­ian chem­i­cal stage. We have col­leagues in Moscow, Mur­man­sk, Nizh­ny Nov­gorod. All of them car­ry out garage research or work in insti­tutes. Our foun­da­tion is mutu­al sup­port: syn­the­sis could hap­pen in one city, spec­trum could be scanned in anoth­er, bio tests could be done in the third, and so on. We don’t even hide our­selves much. So, an idea eval­u­a­tion net­work still exists and con­nects the insti­tutes. But with the coun­try-wide ter­mi­na­tion of depart­ments and labs, even this will van­ish soon enough. Our sovi­et dinosaur can con­firm that the state-wide igno­rance pro­mo­tion pol­i­cy is more dan­ger­ous than any kind of Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion, even in the mid-run.

The part of the mar­ket we hap­pened to inter­act with looks like this. A sub­stance is called for on a forum in the deep Inter­net (or the reg­u­lar one), includ­ing some notes, pro­duc­tion costs, and a wal­let address. It’s more com­pli­cat­ed now that anony­mous pay­ments are banned, but any­way. The sys­tem has its own ten­ders and auc­tions. In the end, the buy­er receives the stash address: for exam­ple, a plas­tic zip lock bag with a mag­net inside stuck to a met­al bench some­where in Avto­vo.

We don’t do this any­more, but as far as we can fol­low, smok­ing mix­ture orders start from 3–4 g, stim­u­la­tors and euphoret­ics from 0.5 g to 1 kg. The aver­age price of 1 g DOB in St. Peters­burg is 16000 rubles, 2CI-Bom – 22000 rubles. In real­i­ty, 1 g of many sub­stances may cost a few kopecks, but you know. A spe­cif­ic atti­tude towards drugs is required. If chem­i­cal edu­ca­tion meets com­mer­cial tal­ent, one can become suc­cess­ful. We can­not do it like this and we don’t want to. We are too used to going crazy about new ideas, to drop­ping some­thing halfway and catch­ing on some­thing else, to using a table glass instead of a chem­i­cal one, to dry­ing sub­stances in reg­u­lar salt box­es, to heat­ing flasks in a microwave and so on.

You might be inter­est­ed in the sacra­men­tal ques­tion: “why is there no LSD in Rus­sia?” It might exist some­where, but in very small quan­ti­ties. There are sev­er­al rea­sons behind this. First of all, LSD pro­duc­tion, which is actu­al­ly per­formed abroad, costs 2–3 times more than DOB, and it would be cheap­er to import it if the mar­ket was not so stuffed with Russ­ian ana­logues. The sec­ond rea­son is it requires a lab with high­er-lev­el equip­ment than, for exam­ple, ours as well as a man with espe­cial­ly capa­ble hands. We have such peo­ple, of course, but the para­dox is that these peo­ple are not inter­est­ed in doing it. Those who are com­mer­cial­ly ori­ent­ed will pro­duce some­thing else because it is cheap­er, sim­pler and the aver­age con­sumer is unlike­ly to rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ence. Those who are into the sci­en­tif­ic com­po­nent have grown out of LSD. As a prac­ti­tion­er, I can tell you that the entire ergo­line series, the LSD series, acts too soft­ly and selec­tive­ly for my taste. DOB or DOI series fuck up your mind in a more inter­est­ing way, quick­ly, strong­ly, and with pas­sion. LSD today is more of a myth, a sym­bol of the Gold­en Age of the 60s, turned into a com­pul­sive idea of more élite con­sump­tion. Of course it per­co­lates occa­sion­al­ly from Hol­land or Ben­gal for a lot of mon­ey or a lit­tle less. Some­body might be mak­ing it here, too, but I don’t see much sense except for cul­tur­o­log­i­cal rea­sons.

If you think that LSD is some philosopher’s stone which will take you to some spe­cial kind of depth hid­den from oth­er sub­stances, then order your­self some salvia extract via Silk Road or what­ev­er. I remem­ber how one of our testers took some X‑20 extract. All he man­aged to say after a strong toke: “floor looks sul­len­ly but don’t laugh because the face dances on the eye­brows”. Then he just fell down to the floor. As he told me lat­er, he turned into a comb, every­one present in the room (only me) turned into its bris­tles, and when they touched each oth­er at non-euclid­ean angles (don’t ask me), new dimen­sions appeared, each of those was dif­fer­ent from the oth­ers; but the most impor­tant law keep­ing this mul­ti­verse togeth­er, equiv­a­lent to our grav­i­ta­tion, was tick­ling.

The Spice world could show even more pow­er­ful things to you, but are these worlds worth com­ing vol­un­tar­i­ly?

Which sub­stances or groups of sub­stances are the most inter­est­ing and prospec­tive? Why? What can a psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ence yield in terms of mind expan­sion, con­scious­ness evo­lu­tion, etc.?

Dr. Cali­gari: For the sake of sim­plic­i­ty, we can split the sub­stances which inter­est us in the con­text of this inter­view into two big groups: let’s call them phys­i­o­log­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal. The for­mer are the sub­stances with a low psy­choac­tiv­i­ty lev­el, and the lat­ter – with a high one.

Let’s think why syn­thet­ic cannabi­noids are prac­ti­cal­ly absent on the legal mar­ket when they are strong anal­gesics with­out the dan­gers of opi­oid abuse? The cor­rect answer is they are extreme­ly psy­choac­tive, i. e. they may alter con­scious­ness to such degree that it will sub­jec­tive­ly over­weigh their painkilling prop­er­ties. That’s why one of the most promi­nent tasks of mod­ern phar­ma­col­o­gy is the cre­ation of CB ago­nists which would not be psy­choac­tive and could be used as anal­gesics to fight reg­u­lar pains such as phan­tom pains, post-sur­gi­cal pains, etc. 5HT2a ago­nists are ide­al for intraoc­u­lar pres­sure cor­rec­tion, but they are still psy­choac­tive and can­not be used for glau­co­ma ther­a­py yet because if the patient’s mon­i­tor is occu­pied by a green amoe­ba for three days, the treat­ment effec­tive­ness is dubi­ous. Psy­choac­tive effects are usu­al­ly evi­dent in exper­i­ments on mice and don’t come through to tests on humans.

How­ev­er, we may and we must con­sid­er psy­choac­tive sub­stances as a tool for research­ing con­scious­ness: its evo­lu­tion, its oper­at­ing prin­ci­ples. We don’t think there is an eso­teric com­po­nent. Pure chem­istry, physics, neu­ro­science. Nev­er­the­less, this direc­tion is very prospec­tive for psy­chi­a­try, for the ther­a­py of pho­bias or psy­chotrau­mat­ic dis­or­ders as well as for study­ing nat­ur­al hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry dis­or­ders like schiz­o­phre­nia.

Speak­ing about psy­chi­a­try, the first thing com­ing to mind is empathogens (MDMA and MDMA-like effects). Shulgin’s spouse described a case of a man who was pan­i­cal­ly afraid of flights. After a cou­ple of MDMA ses­sions, he recalled that back in pri­ma­ry school, a piece of bro­ken roof blocked his legs and he couldn’t help his friend, who died squashed right before his eyes. If I am not mis­tak­en, that man was afraid that he would be unable to save any­one in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion again, and that piece of roof remind­ed him, by shape or by col­or, of a plane shown on TV at the moment of that inci­dent.

An empathogen could also be a good method of social­iza­tion cor­rec­tion (for exam­ple, among mil­i­taries expe­ri­enc­ing post­trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der). Good hyp­notics are worth men­tion­ing here, too. Under the influ­ence of such drugs, it is equal­ly pos­si­ble to plant an idea in a person’s mind and to car­ry out a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic ses­sion to replace dozens of use­less vis­its to a psy­cho­an­a­lyst in the reg­u­lar state of mind.

Speak­ing about orga­ni­za­tions, I can name, for exam­ple, the MAPS insti­tu­tion in the USA, which is licensed to use psy­chogenic sub­stances for ther­a­peu­tic pur­pos­es. There are sev­er­al such orga­ni­za­tions in the world and about as many of those who use the same meth­ods non-offi­cial­ly.

Gen­er­al­ly, as far as we can judge, a psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ence, espe­cial­ly one caused by seri­ous drugs like DOI, trypt­a­mines, etc., splits all peo­ple into two oppo­site groups.

The first group starts to some­how under­stand the essence of the process: that the sub­stance which has pen­e­trat­ed their BBB (blood-brain bar­ri­er) is the pri­ma­ry fac­tor. This approach is ratio­nal, sci­en­tif­ic, where the sub­ject research­es phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, builds fac­tor mod­els, com­bines sub­stance prop­er­ties and their own psy­chophys­i­o­log­i­cal fea­tures, infor­ma­tion stored in their own con­scious­ness and its sources, etc. This kind of peo­ple, with cer­tain expe­ri­ence, start look­ing dif­fer­ent­ly on reli­gions and arts: they are guess­ing what kind of herb this artist con­sumed with his tea, or which cac­tus was found by Moses in the desert.

The oth­er group “feels” the sub­stances but has prob­lems with so-called “suf­fi­cient basis”. To explain what is going on, they start invent­ing sophis­ti­cat­ed meta­phys­i­cal sys­tems, start pray­ing to Krish­na or Bud­dha, or to the sub­stance itself (we saw a man who built a sug­ar Krem­lin with infused cubes as a sym­bol­ic strong­hold of pow­er over the coun­try, but this is a sep­a­rate sto­ry), or they take a trip into the yel­low walls of Skvortsov-Stepanov (psy­chi­atric clin­ic), if their psy­che is not strong enough.

Nev­er­the­less, we’d like to men­tion the ear­ly works of Rick Strass­man, ded­i­cat­ed to the research of DMT prop­er­ties, along with some oth­er researchers who stat­ed there are some unex­plored areas of psy­che, sim­i­lar for all peo­ple in terms of their response to dis­so­cia­tive expe­ri­ence. If the dose is large enough, prac­ti­cal­ly every­one, includ­ing us, gets some numi­nous expe­ri­ences of sim­i­lar, prob­a­bly arche­typ­al struc­ture. We are talk­ing about the expe­ri­ence which is most eas­i­ly described in reli­gious terms. This could be relat­ed to our cul­tur­al firmware or, deep­er, to some fea­tures of anthro­po­ge­n­e­sis. It is pos­si­ble that reli­gious expe­ri­ences and, con­se­quent­ly, the reflec­tions of irra­tional views rep­re­sent one of the inevitable tran­si­tion­al stages of con­scious­ness evo­lu­tion. At least, this is what we’d like to believe.

What does the near future of shad­ow phar­ma­col­o­gy look like to you? How will it influ­ence var­i­ous aspects of life?

Dr. Cali­gari: With the adop­tion of new laws, even “sub­stances assumed psy­choac­tive” will be banned. After this, all remain­ing chem­istry, at least in Rus­sia, will go under­ground. It can­not be called “white lists“. It is bet­ter com­pared to some infor­ma­tion mate­ri­als. For exam­ple, when you write a text – a book, an arti­cle, a slo­gan – pros­e­cu­tors may pre­scribe a foren­sic lin­guis­tic inves­ti­ga­tion, which con­cludes that your text is an extrem­ist one. You will be deemed to have mali­cious intent which you have tried to hide but which was revealed dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion. But as far as I know, you can­not bring your text to a sim­i­lar exper­tise before­hand, to make sure this mali­cious­ness is not there by chance, to check if it is still there if you swap two sen­tences or erase an excla­ma­tion mark. The sit­u­a­tion with chem­istry is sim­i­lar.

I under­stand the log­ic when ban is imposed not to a cer­tain sub­stance but to a prin­ci­ple, a mea­sure of close­ness: on the one hand, I can take a cannabi­noid X, use a cup of cof­fee and 15 min­utes to make 20 oth­ers, i. e. swap the sen­tences, and nobody will be fast enough to check them all and put them on the black list. On the oth­er hand, the cre­ation of white lists will destroy the entire chem­istry. The inter­me­di­ate solu­tion is mean­ing­less, too, because it sug­gests a demar­ca­tion line (allowed/banned) across very com­pli­cat­ed and mul­ti-aspect phe­nom­e­na: it is like split­ting a grey gra­di­ent into black and white.

As a result, whole groups of sub­stances dif­fer­ing by 1–2 alter­nates will be con­sid­ered dan­ger­ous drugs. It is fun­ny that some migraine med­i­cines will be banned because they are derived from dimethyl­trypt­a­mine. Don’t even get me start­ed on lots of anti­de­pres­sants devel­oped as a result of ket­a­mine vivi­sec­tion. At the same time, many non-lethal mil­i­tary sub­stances work­ing like salvi­norin 24/7 may remain not banned at all, where­as a range of non-psy­choac­tive dimethyl­trypt­a­mine deriv­a­tives will be banned accord­ing to the law.

We can­not unam­bigu­ous­ly answer how sub­stance reg­u­la­tion leg­is­la­tion will change in the next few decades. On the one hand, chem­istry can already be con­sid­ered a new lan­guage, get­ting more and more com­pli­cat­ed and cre­at­ing its own abstrac­tions. It will be increas­ing­ly more dif­fi­cult to fight it in Orwell’s sense with­out caus­ing harm to oth­er domains of human life. This is the rea­son for rad­i­cal­ly lib­er­al pro­pos­als about decrim­i­nal­iza­tion and legal­iza­tion intro­duced to the UN. As you prob­a­bly know, we live in the shad­ow of the Sin­gle Con­ven­tion on Nar­cot­ic Drugs, 1961, and the Vien­na Con­ven­tion on Psy­chotrop­ic Sub­stances, 1971. The sub­stances men­tioned there are grad­ed accord­ing to their dan­ger: hal­lu­cino­genic and addic­tive prop­er­ties. The bound­aries of their usage in sci­ence and med­i­cine are out­lined. How­ev­er, these lists men­tion only 150 sub­stances, while there are dozens or hun­dreds of thou­sands of them in real­i­ty now! UN real­izes that force­ful, pro­hib­i­tive meth­ods of solv­ing this prob­lem will only hin­der research and increase the capac­i­ty of black mar­ket. In addi­tion, if the glob­al demand for psy­chophar­ma­col­o­gy will grow, isn’t it bet­ter to har­ness this sys­tem effect for their own needs, to cre­ate new needs and the ways to sat­is­fy them?

If this trend per­sists, every­thing will most like­ly be allowed in west­ern coun­tries in a few dozen years, but under the con­trol of some author­i­ties con­sist­ing more of machines than of humans. LSD and oth­er stuff will be legal­ly avail­able in stores, but cam­eras will always be on in your home. Do you like this future or not? It is up to you to decide.

In the larg­er scheme of things, there is no answer if psy­che­delics and dis­so­cia­tives are good or bad, and there will nev­er be one, as there is no answer if our own rea­son­ing, sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, con­scious­ness are virtue or evil. At the extreme, these sub­stances show us the evo­lu­tion­ary thresh­olds that can­not be crossed with­in an indi­vid­ual life, that are shaped as exis­ten­tial expe­ri­ences. This is a bit­ter wis­dom, a very bit­ter one. Besides, the expe­ri­ence of decon­ven­tion­al­iza­tion caused by them tem­porar­i­ly destroys our idea of the val­ue of hier­ar­chy, social insti­tutes, pow­er rela­tions, etc. This looks beau­ti­ful and utopic, but the tragedy of our exis­tence is that we are all pri­mates, and we can­not sat­is­fy even our basic needs out­side of these struc­tures, at least not in this gen­er­a­tion and not as the entire soci­ety togeth­er. The world where every­one uses psy­che­delics and dis­so­cia­tives is a utopia and a dystopia at the same time. Dystopia, because the human­i­ty is extinct there. Utopia, because this will nev­er hap­pen. Most peo­ple will nev­er use these sub­stances if they are legal­ized or even adver­tised. At least, not more than once. But there will always be an avant-garde, cre­at­ing some­thing new before its time and inevitably sac­ri­fic­ing itself to evo­lu­tion.

The ques­tion where the civ­i­liza­tion moves nat­u­ral­ly, towards more col­lec­tivism or more indi­vid­u­al­ism, does not make sense. It moves in both direc­tions at the same time. It is dif­fi­cult to find a good struc­tur­al metaphor, but the mind will become more com­pli­cat­ed and frag­ment­ed so that some expe­ri­ences of indi­vid­ual con­scious­ness will take the shape of all-encom­pass­ing uni­ver­sal­i­ty, uni­ty, and some of them will become much more iso­lat­ed than now. But please don’t ask if there is an observ­er: there is noth­ing to under­stand here and noth­ing to under­stand it with.

[Оригинал на русском]