News in this year's Global Drugs Survey that internet drug dealing was on the rise will have alarmed, surprised or intrigued many people. But the very first thing bought and sold on the net was a bag of marijuana – over 40 years ago.
In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.
Through the 70s, 80s and 90s, all manner of drugs, both legal and illegal have been sold online. In 2013, some people are asking: why even break the law when you could just commission a Chinese lab to synthesise a synthetic marijuana substance (technically, a cannabinoid receptor agonist) that's shown in laboratory conditions to have some of the same effects as marijuana? The law has struggled to keep up.
By simply examining drug laws, it is child's play, one clandestine chemist told me, to work around those strictures and create a legal drug: one that is chemically similar to a banned substance but is not itself proscribed. Even easier is to examine published medical research papers for anything showing increased locomotor activity, or activity at the serotonin or dopamine receptors, since they will be likely to work, in some way or other, as drugs.
And if they've only been tested on rats, who cares? Young people are queuing up to be guinea pigs.
Of the 73 new chemicals that were discovered last year 50 were cannabinoid receptor agonists, often developed for use in legitimate pharmaceutical research known as "structure-activity relationship" tests. The endogenous cannabinoid system has profound effects on mood, appetite, blood pressure and many more essential functions. Firms such as Stirling Winthrop and the labs of John William Huffman at Clemson University in the US produced hundreds of these drugs in their legitimate search for non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. But they escaped into the grey markets in 2008 and a moral panic began – guaranteeing their increased use.
Today, the number of new drugs available is accelerating at such a rate that police and toxicologists can't even identify what they are, because they have no reference samples available to compare them with. And all across the net, there are millions of drug deals taking place.
As William Gibson said: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."