MY JOURNEY, FROM MIKE POWER TO JOHN BUCKLEY, from investigative journalist to drug designer, started six weeks earlier. To understand exactly how access to designer drugs has changed—to see exactly how easy it is to commission, purchase and import powerful new compounds that are beyond the reach of the law—I decided to get one made myself.

I chose to focus on the Beatles’ drug, phenmetrazine: a nod to the cultural significance of Prellies and their illustrious user base. How easy would it be to get a legal version made? What procedures would it take, what roadblocks would be put in the way?

I phoned a contact with expertise in chemistry and asked if he could think of a simple molecular tweak that would produce a new version of phenmetrazine that would be totally legal. Yes, he said. The change would be trivial. What might its effects be? “A fantastic anorectic if you want to lose weight, and an effective stimulant.”

The search began for a laboratory that would make a one-off sample. I decided that I would present myself as a legitimate broker for a UK-based pharmaceutical firm. Taking on my new identity, I posted a buying request for the drug on various public websites that broker deals between individuals and small pharmaceutical manufacturers. Dozens of emails came back. Not all of them were genuine.

Some of these early responders were blatant scammers: Cameroon and Ukraine do have chemical industries, but those who work in them tend not to be able to offer large amounts of totally new, extremely rare drugs the very next day. My search headed to India, where three firms offered to synthesize the drug for me. On closer examination, though, none of them seemed up to the task—and they were all asking for very large sums of money, well beyond the actual value and difficulty of the compounds we were requesting. One priced the job as high as $10,000.

After weeks of constant searching for a decent lab, one of my contacts sent me the URL of a site in Shanghai that, on the surface of things, has nothing to do with legal highs, analog drugs, or any gray-market activity. They sell organic chemicals on international markets to people in many industries, and offer pharmaceutical drugs to legitimate importers.

But insiders in China who prefer to remain anonymous say there is little accountability or oversight of the chemical industry there. Once they are licensed, operators are seldom monitored, a scenario that has led to dozens of high-profile public health scares, including 300,000 children falling sick as a result of melamine being added to milk, and so-called “date rape” drugs appearing in Australian children’s toys.

I made an approach to the lab during Chinese business hours, and I heard back within an hour. “First, can I know the application of this compound your client use?” asked the person on the other end. “I just want to make sure it is legal application. We can do custom synthesis of this simple chemical surely. But if you can give synthesis route, it will be very good for us and we can save some time for this project.”

I replied, “We are doing basic animal research into the compound’s putative analgesic properties. Based upon its expected effect on monoamines, we believe it will have fairly potent analgesic effects, whilst causing minimal cardiovascular strain. Our intention is to use it as a proof of concept for a new type of analgesic for dogs.”

My online identity for this character and for his company are bare bones: nothing but a webmail address. My cover explanation is that I am designing a painkiller—yet phenmetrazine, the clear progenitor of this recipe, is not known to have any analgesic qualities. To anyone who cares to look, my story is blatantly false. But the lab does not seem to care.

We agree on a price and discuss quality control standards. The lab eventually agrees to send over data that will, they say, confirm they have created a drug with the makeup I require. The report will be based on high-pressure liquid chromatography, which chemists use to match a sample to library of known compounds, and nuclear magnetic resonance, which can reveal the structure of a molecule, regardless of whether it has been studied previously.

Next we agree payment—a few hundred dollars. Rather than an untraceable cash transfer such as Western Union, or an anonymous crypto currency such as Bitcoin, we opt for a simple bank transfer. Delivery is agreed by a well-known courier firm.

Two weeks later I receive another email. The compound is ready, though it is currently a liquid. Purity stands at around 93.7 percent; to purify it to 98 percent will reduce yield. I’m happy to accept that loss, as it will never be consumed. I request that it be salted into a solid, powder form using hydrochloric acid. I receive the qualitative data from the firm by email. The NMR readings feature the long, jagged peaks that suggest the existence of the drug. Now that it meets the stringent purity demands of “my client,” I agree: it’s time to ship it.

But how? Technically, we are doing nothing illegal, so we needn’t smuggle it, or even disguise it. At this stage, though, I have no guarantee beyond the lab’s word that they have carried out the work as instructed; they could easily send me an illegal drug instead of the one I have asked for. And while the point of this substance is that it is legal to bring it into the UK, this is not a mainstream importing job. I cannot help feeling the paranoia of a novice: what screening do customs officers and law enforcement do to track unidentified substances that are being sent across their borders?

I ask for an Material Safety Data sheet, standard paperwork that should accompany any chemical sample in the post. They do not have one—unsurprising, since the chemical is so rare. The unspoken truth hangs in the complicit silence between us: we both know this a modification of an illegal drug, and that it is designed for recreational, not medical purposes.

To get around this, the lab offers to send it hidden in a book: an unusual offer from a company claiming to make and distribute entirely legal substances. But I know that one of the most common ways that small-scale smugglers are detected is when a drug is packed inside an object too cheap or trivial to be posted internationally. Who aside from a rare books dealer would spend $100 sending a book from China to London? Instead, I tell the chemist to simply mark it as documents, to be delivered to a London postal dropbox that I have set up in the fictitious company’s name.

The package of drugs the author designed

Over the next few days I scan the courier’s site nervously watching the package’s progress from Shanghai and out of the country. Paranoia affects would-be drug designers and importers as much as users: after all, while they usually operate legally, their cat-and-mouse game happens at the fringes of the law, not the center—labeling them as not for human consumption—for example. But a few days later my package arrives in the UK, ready for collection.

A legal highs vendor would now offer the drug privately to a select number of influential bulletin-board posters, and ask them to review the drug online. Building hype, creating a market, they would then start selling the compound, but the process of testing and legislating means the British government would be powerless to intervene for at least a few months—perhaps even up to a year. They could sell this drug for $130 a gram, or, to make more money, press it into tablets.

Instead, I send it by registered mail to Andrew Westwell, a medicinal chemist at Cardiff University, who will analyze its contents.