How the government lost the drug war in cyberspace

Open Secrets
How the government lost the drug war in cyberspace.
Michael Erard


For 36 years the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) quietly published
a quirky monthly newsletter called /Microgram/ for a small audience of
forensic chemists. It was "law enforcement restricted," which meant you
could obtain it only if you were a law enforcement official, a
government investigator, or a forensic scientist. As far as the public
was concerned, it was a secret. In January 2003 DEA officials started to
make /Microgram/ publicly available via the Web (at
DEA HOTLINK REMOVED),
where it joined a vast sea of information about illicit drugs: how to
get them, how to use them, why to avoid them, why laws controlling them
should be either tightened or reformed.

/ /

/Microgram’/s release was mostly unnoticed, and its reception has been
subdued -- so subdued that even the chemical underground, where people
in years past might have found in the newsletter a wealth of knowledge
about how to synthesize and distribute psychoactive substances, has
hardly noticed it. Yet the seeming nonevent is worthy of attention
because it reflects the government’s recognition that their strategy to
control drug use by controlling drug information has failed.

When it started back in 1967, /Microgram/ was a few typewritten pages in
which chemists shared lab techniques for analyzing and identifying the
drugs that were showing up on the street. Although illicit drug use was
rising, there was little working scientific knowledge about psychedelics
among the chemists assisting law enforcement. Up to that point, the only
drug chemists had worked for the Food and Drug Administration, which was
in charge of protecting the quality of legal drugs, not identifying the
composition of illegal ones. "Many of the techniques used today were
formulated as needed by the people back then," says Tom Janofsky, a
deputy administrator in the DEA’s Office of Forensics. "Because the
techniques weren’t published per se, they were put into /Microgram/, and
the methods were exchanged with the state and local and the other
federal agencies in the field."

At first /Microgram/ went to several dozen people. In the inaugural
issue the editor wrote that if he didn’t receive feedback, the
newsletter might not continue. But /Microgram/ was a hit with its
intended audience. By 2003, 8,000 people within the DEA and 1,000 others
were receiving it.

/ /

/Microgram’/s/ /existence was such a well-kept secret that it never
developed a following in the chemical underground. "I really doubt that
people in and around the illegal side of drug dealings even knew of the
existence of /Microgram/," says Alexander Shulgin, a former DEA-licensed
chemist who is considered an underground icon for his do-it-yourself
manufacture of designer psychedelics. "For me it was a source of
infrared spectra of drugs, and methods of synthesis and access to
physical properties." /Microgram/ was so secret, Shulgin adds, that
scientists were directed not to cite it in academic papers but to say
the information came from "personal communication." (This is standard
for citing all restricted publications.)

Over the years /Microgram/ published job announcements, reviews of lab
instruments, and articles reprinted from academic chemistry journals.
But its core offering remained interesting little stories from the front
lines of drug interdiction, written in detached prose and published
anonymously.

Even today, the savvy smuggler or illegal drug chemist might find useful
counterintelligence in /Microgram/. The December 2003 issue notes that
drug-sniffing canines have failed to detect bales of marijuana sealed
inside honey and wax, which suggests a workable method for getting weed
across the U.S.-Mexican border (or a potential trap). If you’re into
selling psilocybin mushrooms, a careful reading of /Microgram/ suggests,
you should avoid coating them with chocolate, because virtually every
law enforcement agency in the country is on the lookout for candy.
Brainstorming methods for smuggling large amounts of heroin or cocaine?
/Microgram/ tells the fate of cocaine dissolved in canned liquids,
embedded in the linings of plastic mugs, impregnated in a clear silicone
caulk, and packed into decorative wooden globes, lotion bottles,
candles, and pictures.

These tidbits were not widely available until recently because the DEA
did not want to give ammunition to its enemies. "There was some
synthetic information and some investigative techniques that we didn’t
want the bad guys to get ahold of," says the DEA’s Tom Janofsky. Another
reason to keep /Microgram/ under wraps: Defense lawyers might have found
its descriptions of drug analysis useful in their cross-examinations of
government witnesses. Once the chemical underground went online, though,
the lockdown on /Microgram/ became irrelevant.

The Internet and the advent of the Web opened a new front in the war on
drugs. During the last decade government agencies and anti-drug groups
have staked out virtual turf, competing for eyeballs with drug law
reformers, drug culture archivists, harm reduction activists, and
commercial sites selling drug paraphernalia. The biggest prize in this
online battle is the attention of the young. Government officials and
social conservatives worry that information about drugs will sway
impressionable youngsters into using them. Critics of the drug war see
adolescents as naive users for whom a lack of accurate information is
the greatest danger -- and also as potential supporters of reform.

It has been difficult to tell who’s winning in cyberspace. The widely
used metrics of success for commercial Web sites -- hits, page counts,
unique visitors -- don’t necessarily have the same meaning in this
highly contested terrain. As we’ll see, visitors to freevibe.com, a Web
site produced by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and funded
by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, are just as
likely to be culture jammers as teenagers looking to "get the facts on
drugs."

Then again, federal officials seeking to justify their $13 billion
anti-drug budget request for 2005 have an interest in exaggerating the
threat posed by the Internet. "Many websites, newsgroups, bulletin
boards, and chat rooms promote the drug culture by providing a wide
variety of information on drugs and drug paraphernalia," warned a 2001
report from the Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence
Center. "Many of these websites openly promote drug use, others
glamorize the drug culture and thereby implicitly promote use and
experimentation."

Some frustrated lawmakers have turned to suppressing online information
about drugs by criminalizing it. In 1999 the Senate passed the
Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, which would have made it illegal
to distribute information, in print or online, about manufacturing or
selling controlled substances that would be illegal. (The bill was
killed by the House, then tucked into the Bankruptcy Reform Act with the
Internet provisions removed.) For the most part, recent DEA activities
have been aimed at curbing online sources for illegal drugs such as GHB,
a tranquilizer, and other chemically similar substances, as well as
using Web crawler and data mining technology to identify and prosecute
illegal Internet pharmacies selling prescription drugs. Simple
monitoring is another tactic; in 2002 a D.C.--based nonprofit, the Drug
Reform Coalition, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request and
found that the DEA had monitored the Web sites of 75 drug reform groups.

Proposals to punish people for drug-related speech reflect the
desperation of government officials confronting a network of drug
information that is more sophisticated, resilient, far-reaching, and
self-correcting than ever before. Prior to the early 1990s, most
unofficial information about drugs circulated via a loose network of
underground publications, photocopies of notes and scientific articles,
and word of mouth: Dealers talked to buyers, users talked to each other,
and prison mates swapped tales. This is how users learned what
substances and what combinations to try (or avoid). It’s also how
underground chemists learned their trade. But the network was limited.
New pills or types of substances would hit the market before information
about them did, and the network didn’t always reach as far as the drugs.
There were hardly any mechanisms for correcting bad information, and the
drug culture was susceptible to propaganda.

"Time was when authority figures could safely tell ‘white lies’ to ‘keep
us safe,’" says John Robinson, a site administrator for Bluelight
(www.bluelight.nu), a "harm reduction" site that features reports about
MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) from all over the world. Robinson cites a
story that started circulating around the time that the DEA first moved
to ban MDMA in 1985: It was said that Ecstasy contained heroin, a rumor
stemming from the accounts of early MDMA users who said the drug was
like a combination of cocaine and heroin. That claim, says Robinson, was
hijacked by governments for use as propaganda, and now "it is one of the
central myths we have been trying to destroy on the Internet with
Bluelight."

Earlier examples of urban legends about drugs include the claim that you
can smell methamphetamine on a user, that smoking peanut skins or green
tea will cause a high, and that so-called "red rock opium" contains
opiates, which people try to smoke with marijuana. Today anyone with an
Internet connection can readily find debunkings of these and other
stories intended to scare people away from drugs. According to various
sites, "red rock opium" is a form of "dragon’s blood incense," which is
made from daemonorops draco resin. Another myth concerns the "Chewbacca"
technique for manufacturing methamphetamine (so named because a person
called "Chewbacca-Darth" is credited for it), which involves such a
delicate preparation of two sensitive precursors that it would be
difficult to pull off even in a professional laboratory.

The current editor of /Microgram/, Bob Klein, acknowledges that the
government allowed drug myths to circulate. "A lot of information
[passed among drug users] was flat-out bogus," he says. "A huge amount
of material circulating around the chemical underground," such as
smoking dried banana peels or making amphetamine from chicken feed, "was
just bullshit. And the government wasn’t going to correct those
misconceptions for obvious reasons."

Now a host of Web sites can nip misinformation before it circulates,
creating what is in effect a real-time, worldwide peer review process.

For instance, on April 20 mystryman, the moderator of a message board at
Bluelight, posted the warning that a drug called 5meo-dipt, known as
"Foxy," was being sold as Ecstasy in Florida. The posting referred to a
discussion thread at another site, beaniebaby.com, as well as a link to
pages about 5meo-dipt at one of the most comprehensive sites for drug
info, The Vaults of Erowid (www.erowid.org). Another topic on Bluelight
was the availability of LSD around the United States, in Cincinnati,
Toledo, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis. "It’s totally possible that there
IS acid in florida, but It’s also possible that you won’t find any,"
wrote toxiku. (All eccentricities of style and spelling from Internet
posts are preserved throughout this article.)

As in pre-Internet days, drug users continue to share their experiences
with each other, but when these discussions take place online they’re
available immediately to a wide audience that can respond quickly. On
February 26, 2004, at pillreports.com, nine people from around the U.S.
and Canada had posted reports on seven varieties of Ecstasy pills,
describing them (sometimes with photos), rating them, and discussing
their effects.

A poster known as OICU812 had this to say concerning a small, round,
pink pill stamped with an envelope logo: "very strong pill i cant really
give an accurate report to how strong one is cause i did 5 over the
night. but man it was so intence and such a rush for at least 12 hours
then the next few days were wacked out 4 sho. all in all they were bad
to the bone to say the least." Another poster, Ongie975, complained
about a pill stamped with a blue dolphin: "Definitely got ripped off and
not too happy about it." Responded Smiley Xer: "Probably more speed than
anything else. Bunk dolphins are going around. Be careful! ~peace."
Doctorj added, "Dolphins do have an interesting rep. I stay away from
them. Peace."

Bluelight’s John Robinson says this sort of exchange illustrates the
evolution within the drug culture of knowledge that ultimately helps to
keep people safe. "We have always tried to walk the line between the
oral culture and the world of academic science," he says. "The Internet
allows us to have an open, anonymous environment where people are able
to speak freely and share their experiences, but it also means that we
can make the effort to support what is said with references."

Other similarly interactive sites serve as the memory of the drug
culture. The largest, most extensive of these is Erowid, which covers a
huge range of substances, from marijuana to absinthe to morning glory
seeds to obscure research drugs such as 5-Meo-AMT. Founded in 1995,
Erowid boasts more than 28,000 visitors a day and some 20,000 documents
related to psychoactive substances, including plants, illicit
synthetics, pharmaceuticals, and "smart drugs." The information includes
basic facts, legal status, chemical makeup, trip reports, spiritual
associations, and references to scientific articles (including some from
/Microgram/).

/ /

/Microgram/’s/ /Bob Klein complains that "many things that would have
been better left buried in obscurity -- like smoking bufo toad skins,
sniffing concentrated cow pie fumes, allowing yourself to be stung by
scorpions, smoking jimson weed or salvia divinorum, drinking cough
syrups, mixing up concoctions of any of dozens of different kinds of
drugs and pharmaceuticals, drinking ayahuasca tea, etc., etc., etc. --
have been brought to light by the Internet, and are therefore
practiced." But contrary to what the anti-drug crowd warns, many of the
posts on these sites hardly glamorize drug use. One writer to Erowid,
for instance, describes a 5-Meo-AMT trip as "the worst decision I have
ever made." After hours of paranoia, nausea, headache, and pounding
heartbeat, he ended up examining his life and deciding "that the current
lifestyle of subtance abuse must end. I have truly been scared
sober....I am writing this urging people to stay away from this
chemical. It is very similar to LSD at the beginning but toward the end
all hell broke loose."

Some of the messages at Bluelight read like a /Consumer Reports/ of
illicit substances. Wrote Mihgzer on March 3, 2004: "There are some
puple gel tabs in america, they taste funny, some people liked them,
some people got sick and said they thought it was 5meoamt." But most
postings do contain genuine warnings. Mystryman warned people about the
appearance of purple pills containing Para-methoxy-amphetamine, or PMA,
in Maryland and Pennsylvania. "Not much to say but, these chemicals can
make you die low doses. PERIOD!!!!" Rejoined .dR spgeddi, "australian
bluelighters are all too familiar with the dangers associated with this
drug. one entry in the shrine is dedicated to a beautiful person who
passed foolishly experiamenting with pma."

Many of the drug sites appear to be offered in the spirit of harm
reduction. Says the welcoming message at shroomery.org: "This site was
created to help stop the spread of dangerous misinformation related to
magic mushrooms, so that people can make intelligent and informed
decisions about what they put in their bodies." The Ecstasy reduction
site dancesafe.org includes this disclaimer at the bottom of its
home-page: "This website provides health and safety information only. We
neither condemn nor condone the use of any drug. Rather, we recognize
that recreational drug use is a permanent part of our society, and that
there will always be people who use drugs, despite prohibition. The drug
information we provide, therefore, is meant to assist users in making
informed decisions about their use."

By comparison to the old chemical underground, the connections offered
by the online version are vast. Shroomery.org alone provides 25 links to
sites in Scotland, England, France, Brazil, Russia, and elsewhere on the
use of psychedelic mushrooms. It also contains links to 38 marijuana
sites, six Ecstasy sites, and 14 sites dealing with miscellaneous drugs
such as the cough suppressant dextromethorphan.

The 2001 report from the National Drug Intelligence Center counted 52
Web sites providing information on the production, sale, or use of
Ecstasy, GHB, or LSD. An update (which the NDIC promises but has not yet
done) would undoubtedly turn up more. The pro-marijuana site yahooka.com
boasts 5,947 links to sites that, among other things, promote drug
policy reform, discuss cannabis culture, offer marijuana-related goods
and services, and provide growing information. There are links to 1,203
sites in languages other than English, including one in Arabic and one
in Latvian.

This plethora of information has altered the drug war in numerous ways,
some of them predictable. Web sites that sold pipes and bongs were easy
targets for Operation Pipe Dreams, the Department of Justice’s 2003
crackdown on drug paraphernalia merchants, which netted 55 suspects and
led to at least 56 indictments (including one that sent actor Tommy
Chong to jail for nine months). For those trying to avoid that sort of
trouble, the Internet has been a source of advice on how to escape
attention and deal with authorities. The experts at Erowid, for
instance, answer questions about what substances show up on drug tests,
including techniques for beating the tests, as do the message boards at
urineluck.com, owned by Spectrum Labs, a Cincinnati-based company that
makes detoxification products to beat drug tests.

The drug war in cyberspace also has led to goofy attempts at hipness,
such as the government’s aforementioned Freevibe (freevibe.com). The
site, which promises the "lowdown" on marijuana and other drugs, is
mainly an advertisement for other anti-drug efforts, with a few
interactive features, such as a message board that features dramatic
scare stories about older sisters dying from marijuana overdoses and the
like. A news section hasn’t been updated since 2003, and the drug facts
link promises the "latest" research -- from 1999. In the Ecstasy
section, no mention is made of Dr. George Ricaurte, the author of a
/Science/ article in 2002 that was retracted because the substance given
to research animals was methamphetamine, not Ecstasy. However, a visitor
can send an e-mail "Stoner greeting card" ("for when bad things happen
’cause someone was stoned"), which is the only humorous moment in the
entire site.

By comparison to sites like yahooka.com, urineluck.com, or bluelight.nu,
Freevibe is a cultural wasteland. On February 26 two people had posted
their "anti-drug": someone named Dude, who said "my anti drug is the
marines," and Jaden of LBC, who wrote: "My anti-drug? My future lets
face it folks turning to drugs isnt exactly getting rid of your issue or
issues that made you turn to them drugs a whole new set of issues
sometimes the key to helping oneself is through helping others if your
life sucks that bad join the military or do community service helping
others is quite possibly the greatest feeling you can get when you feel
appreciated."

People posting to various pro-drug sites, blogs, and Indymedia sites
criticize Freevibe and discuss ways to jam it. At smokedot.com, a user
named Fiend claims to have sent an essay on writing as his anti-drug,
featuring names of authors who were all drug users; Fiend said Freevibe
posted the essay. At a Portland Indymedia message board, someone quoted
an anti-drug message they’d found on Freevibe: "EyeHeartJesus -- Once I
was asked to smoke a joint rolled in Bible paper. I was totally like ‘No
way buddy, smoking weed is for devil worshipers and Nelly.’ I showed
that guy." Wrote the Indymedia poster, with the handle of "no one in
particular," "Come on, we can do more! It’ll be fun! Try to get the most
outlandishly rediculous thing past the moderators that you can."

On the other Freevibe message boards, no one had posted for days.
Posters cannot talk to each other, and replies to questions come from
auto-mailers. The Freevibe officials don’t seem to understand that
without interaction -- or with surveilled and censored interaction --
there can be no culture around drug non-use. On the pro-drug sites, by
contrast, discussion is constant and users interact all the time.

Young, impressionable minds aren’t the only audience for sites like
Erowid, Bluelight, and Yahooka. They’re also where law enforcement
investigators check on what the "bad guys" know -- without having to get
out of their seats. The Internet "is a good resource to check whether a
specific substance is being abused, or for methods of abuse," says Bob
Klein. "That’s valuable for the really obscure stuff, or weird
combinations, or for tracking developing or declining trends."

Such "drug abuse sites" also have proven useful to the medical
community. Paul Wax, a toxicologist in Phoenix, says he visits Erowid
once a month or so to look up substances that aren’t in the medical
literature. In one recent case, Wax recalls, "someone came in to the
hospital and was acting delirious, saying they’d taken something called
tryptanite. I said, ‘Tryptanite? I’ve never heard of it.’" So Wax put
the word into Google and pulled up www.
ecstacy-stuff.com/trip2night.html, which described an ephedra and
dextromethorphan product. This knowledge saved the patient a trip to the
psychiatric ward. "The nurses thought he was crazy," Wax says. "They
thought he was a psych patient. Some who didn’t know what he was taking
might conclude he had some psych problems and needed to go to some
facility. But the drugs wore off, and he cleared up."

In 2002 Wax published a paper about recreational drug sites in the
academic journal /Pediatrics/. He described the case of an 18-year-old
boy who took several tablets of a hallucinogen called 2C-T-7, more
widely known as "blue mystic." Wax found that the standard medical
literature didn’t contain any information about 2C-T-7 on Medline. When
he searched the Web, however, he found extensive descriptions on two Web
sites, Erowid and Lycaeum (lycaeum.org).

In his /Pediatrics /paper, Wax warned that "adolescents, who are often
adept at navigating these Internet resources, may be particularly
susceptible to these communications." In an interview he is more
sanguine about the Internet. "I don’t think these sites are going away,"
he says, "and I’m not an advocate that they do."

This was the informational context in which /Microgram/ went public.
Ultimately, DEA officials say, they recognized that the spread of
information via the Internet had made the law enforcement restriction on
/Microgram/ obsolete, so they decided to end it. "A lot of the
information that was previously sensitive is now very common knowledge
that’s available to anybody," says Bob Klein. "It’s basically made moot
many of the previous reasons for keeping [/Microgram/] law enforcement
restricted." In late 2002, the publication split: /Microgram/ became
/Microgram Bulletin/, the monthly newsletter with the colorful stories,
and /Microgram Journal/, a scientific, peer-reviewed journal aimed at
drug chemists (online at DEA HOTLINK REMOVED).

/ /

/Microgram/ remains so obscure that few drug-oriented sites have linked
to it since it went online. It receives only 7,500 or so hits a week,
mostly from law enforcement. Klein says he expected a deluge of requests
for back issues, but it hasn’t occurred; he suspects that some of the
fringe pro-drug groups haven’t figured out that /Microgram/ is now
available on the Web. (His theory why: "Because they’re doing too much
dope.")

"I think the impact of liberating /Microgram/ will be zero," says
Richard Glen Boire, general counsel at the Center for Cognitive Liberty
and Ethics, a Davis, California-based nonprofit that has mirrored
/Microgram/ on its Web site. (He heard that the DEA and FBI were
collecting the IP addresses of browsers who came to the site, and he
didn’t think people accessing public information should be surveilled.)
Last year Boire unsuccessfully sought the release of back issues of
/Microgram/ under the Freedom of Information Act -- for older issues the
restriction still holds -- but despite that, he says, the now-public
newsletter is mainly "a useful P.R. publication for the DEA, for getting
increased funding and media attention."

Yet some observers of the U.S. government’s information policy are
buoyed by the DEA’s decision, because open publication of /Microgram/
engages a larger pool of scientists and others in forensic science, and
it opens up channels of communication -- for example, between the
medical community and law enforcement. "I think DEA made the
straightforward calculation that in this case the benefits of openness
far outweigh the risks," says Steven Aftergood, editor of /Secrecy
News/, a publication that tracks U.S. secrecy laws for the Federation of
American Scientists. "The release of /Microgram/ is a rare flash of
rationality in government information policy."

John Robinson of Bluelight also praises the release. "We’ve long
applauded /Microgram’/s decision for full disclosure," he says, "and do
think it is a positive sign." If nothing else, the DEA’s new openness
suggests that drug warriors are starting to see the futility of
promoting abstinence through ignorance.



http://www.reason.com/0410/cr.me.open.shtml

Michael Erard is a writer in Austin, Texas

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

Microgram’/s release was mostly unnoticed, and its reception has been
subdued <!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>

Not any more!

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

If you’re into
selling psilocybin mushrooms, a careful reading of /Microgram/ suggests,
you should avoid coating them with chocolate, because virtually every
law enforcement agency in the country is on the lookout for candy. <!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
bummer

glad to not see our site mentioned by name

[natura]

Wel, I see many wanabeez in this domain ov "Psychedric journalism". and there not so many has nice heart nd mind indeed.

""glad to not see our site mentioned by name""

Yeppiee, my site not at all by name.
Absolute 2nd class is my best policy.

Uuum, BTW it's Johnathan Ott who's started to talk many years ago about how Gov. lost drug war. Any body news bout him recently ? I ve never seen him at any conferences any mo.

Thanks for this info.

Here's the link to the microgram report psilocybin chocolate. Somebody in texas has been busy!
DEA HOTLINK REMOVED

Peace
-AoA

[natura]

Dunno hip ? U ve never before the link via DEA, now it's Okay ?

Anyway, That latest issue of MB is Phunky one,
LOLLIPOPS HEROIN IN NEW YORK, NESTLE SUPLIGEN® CANS LIQUID COCAINE IN FLORIDA, VIAGRA®TABLETAMPHETAMINE IN HUNGARY,,,

[akoutdoors]

i DONT remember who started this page, but that link is gr8 I wunder if the overgrow bust is gonna be on this list @ a later time.

[SharkieJones]

Awsome man. I just put a link on my desktop.

[wayback]

Yeah, I found out about those Microgram bullitens on either Erroid or here. Anyway, that was nearly a year ago and I've read as much released material as available.

Personally, I suggest viewing these readings through other sites than the government. Or maybe I just a parniod mo fo.

Anyway, If anyone has a link to reading real info from before their offical release, please e-mail me a link. thanks.

[WeedyResin]

Originally Posted by wayback

Personally, I suggest viewing these readings through other sites than the government. Or maybe I just a parniod mo fo.

Word that! I smell an alterior motive. Maybe it's just the white powder stuck in my nose hairs!

[Laffyn]

Last year Boire unsuccessfully sought the release of back issues of
/Microgram/ under the Freedom of Information Act -- for older issues the
restriction still holds -- but despite that, he says, the now-public
newsletter is mainly "a useful P.R. publication for the DEA, for getting
increased funding and media attention."

Exactly... what else do we have to fear?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID

[Hippie3]

if RFID chips are your greatest fear
then you are not paying attention.

[rocketman]

Klein says he expected a deluge of requests
for back issues, but it hasn’t occurred; he suspects that some of the
fringe pro-drug groups haven’t figured out that /Microgram/ is now
available on the Web. (His theory why: "Because they’re doing too much
dope.")


Now that is funny shit.........the stereotypes still exist.

[Sidestreet Getaway]

"The release of /Microgram/ is a rare flash of
rationality in government information policy."

rationality? A million monkeys with a million typewriters yadda yadda yadda...
---
Klein says he expected a deluge of requests
for back issues, but it hasn’t occurred; he suspects that some of the
fringe pro-drug groups haven’t figured out that /Microgram/ is now
available on the Web. (His theory why: "Because they’re doing too much
dope.")

Stereotype, yeah. If he really believes that he's an idiot. He must have seen by now, in the online community, how intelligent we really are. Or maybe the dun-duns just refuse to believe we're capable of intelligence.
---
Great read, alligator, thanks.

[Laffyn]

IN the bloodstream, chemical analysis, etc... yup I'm paranoid, no not really!

just referring to my previous reply about RFID and this topic. Sorry if I seem cryptic but it just burns me that releasing classified documentation like MCG is really nothing but a way of saying that we (control freakin noids) are going after all you druggies... just in another way and of course that is a secret.