Open Secrets

How the government lost the drug war in cyberspace.

Michael Erard from the October 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

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 www.usdoj.gov/dea/programs/forensicsci/microgram/journals_index.html).

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.