The post-modern world

Duncan Fallowell

So it is done. The maverick syndicate which supplied over half the world with its LSD requirements has been smashed. This hermetic chemical has been wiped off the face of, well, a country retreat near Carno in Wales, where a chemist of spiritual persuasion, Richard Kemp (thirteen-year sentence), developed a new technique and manufactured a product of far greater purity than was thought possible. And now the Home Office knows how to do it too. So do a number of policemen. In fact, after all this publicity, almost anyone could find out how to do it if they were sufficiently determined. Kemp's girlfriend, Dr Bott (nine-year sentence), who also wanted to save the world, was besides a member of the British Goat Society and won prizes at local agricultural shows.

Mr Justice Park invited the undercover Julie team into the Bristol Crown Court and, intoxicated by the glamour of the event, publicly commended them for their year-long operation which, the judge said, involved sacrifices of a kind to be expected only in wartime. He also referred to 'the special relationship' between the police and the defendants, many of whom made straightforward confessions as a result. There were no gun fights, no beatings up. Despite involving considerable quantities of money and severe penalties, the affair is characterised by a remarkable lack of viciousness. For the winning team, Detective Constable Alun Morgan designed a special Operation Julie tie. It bears the emblem of 'a silver circle of eleven clasped hands, representing the eleven police forces involved, and inside the circle is a sheaf of rye, the cereal from which derives the basic chemical for LSD manufacture, ergotamine tartrate. It could easily be taken for the emblem of some quasi-religious society ennobling LSD to sacramental status, as did Timothy Leary's defunct Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Has the cracking of an international heroin gang, or gun-running racket, or pornography ring, or forgery empire, ever had this curiously equivocal effect on a band of detectives?

Their drop-out rate has been high. Of the twenty-six detectives in the original undercover team, six to my knowledge have already resigned from the force. The ostensible reason is lack of appreciation for their efforts by the powers-that-be: quibbles about pay and expenses, being transferred against their wishes, etc. All of which suggests an unwillingness to return to being mere policemen after a year of exposure to a more thrilling world, not simply in terms of action (the police have plenty of that if they need it). There is something about the very name LSD which always stirs up mysterious things.

Drugs have played a central role in the corruption of the Metropolitan Police; hard drugs, that is: the expensive ones which can make it more profitable to stay in the force than drop out of it. On the other hand, LSD is probably the cheapest drug on the black market and not widely used at the moment' No local catchment area could provide ae LSD market substantial enough to supplY the profit for supporting a police pay-off system. The Kemp group's dealings ran into

millions of tablets and thousands of pounds only because they were suppliers to the world. In the drug business this is maximme risk for minimum profit:hence the lack of interest from the underworld of organised crime with whom at no point could the Kemp group be connected by police inves" tigations. Even were LSD to become hugelY popular, it is too easy to make these days' required in too low a dosage, and of such 8 non-addictive nature (it stops producing any effects at all after a few days intake and an interval of a week or more is required before the system again begins to respond increased dosage accelerates this immon' ity), that it appeals little to the professionally criminal mind. Mr Ennals, our Secretary of State for Social Services, has announced that heroin/morphine addiction is past its peak. At the end of 1976 only 1,881 people were known to be having treatment for narcotic addiction. Heroin, the ultimate blank, has recently lost its chic. It was popular among the middle-class Beats who found it the quickest route down to the world of shanty slime and rotten banana skins, which at the time seemed an important place to go because jazz was supposed to come from there and at the time jazz seemed important too. And when, finally, the Beats them' selves became popular in the 'sixties, they brought the romance of heroin with their. Now it is no longer outré to stink on a bed running with lice and stare at a wall of cod(' roaches for eighteen hours on end under a naked light bulb without blinking once. Every day. Year after year. It is not eve' smart in Tangier any more. Mr Ennals went on to say that the problem of the 'seventies is multiple drug abuse. This suggests to me a distinct movement away from addiction (which is a deplorable state because it is enslavement). Obsessive use of just one particular drug is dangerous because the temperament will be closed off from counterbalancing influences. The use, of a variety of drugs implies a degree 01 irregularity and detachment from each that is much less in the nature of an addicting and much more in the nature of an indulgence. While multiple indulgence is certainly not without perils, it does prove the existence of a personality still capable Cl making choices. And although some combinations can be fatal, these are quicklY learned for that very reason.

One can explore, change or experiment with oneself quite easily, and always could. Whether you end up a drunkard, or Plato or both at the same time, simply depends on who you are. Inevitably drugs will be used for this, among many other things. And there is no way of preventing it. A society in

Which a physics student has already made a Miniature atomic bomb, at home, will present few difficulties for the private synthesis uf drugs.

Mistakes will be made by both governments and individuals because, at the frontier, everyone is a novice. The STP scare in the 'sixties demonstrates what can go wrong in the private sector. STP is a Powerful hallucinogen, similar to LSD in structure. An illicit San Francisco 'factory' Produced it in the form of a small green tablet. It was nicely made, it looked very Professional. Unfortunately the manufacturer misjudged the dosage by a factor Often. The small green tablet came on like a supersonic Walt Disney Parkinson's Disease and worked its way up from there. HIPpy Hailers (no one would have believed the police) toured the streets of San Francisco, telling people to avoid this one at all costs. For some it was too late. Errors of this kind among street manufacturers are unusual. More common is that the dosage is Skimped and the raw deal masked by small additions of amphetamines which agitate the hallucinations, thereby conveying the IMPression that the LSD content is higher than it is. Sometimes strychnine is used. Many of the negative reactions to an LSD experience are directly attributable to these unscrupulous adulterations. Given that LSD is here to stay, for better or worse, the community might actually be thankful for Kernp's absolute commitment to unimPeachable purity.

Otherwise, it is a safe assumption that the tower block has caused more mental damage than any drug, that the motor car has More efficiently filled our hospitals, and that scarcely any among our enormous Population of mental patients are in clinics because of LSD. Both the CIA and the KGB presumably now recognise that hallucinogens make people more difficult to Control. Their effects are singular. LSD is now rejected in most countries as a form of Clinical treatment because it relates to areas Which can only be the individual's responsibility. Even those few doctors still licensed to use it in therapy find it almost impossible to. obtain legitimate supplies. But in countries of the Soviet bloc, especially Czechoslovakia and Russia itself, it is not blindly discredited but recognised as an extremely useful tool in parapsychological research if one uses voluntary individuals. The powers-that-be take a more accom,Modating attitude to `down' drugs than to UP' drugs and dislike `mind-expanding' drugs most of all. Tranquillisers and sleeping tablets are still readily available through the

National Health Service; amphetamines ,hardly at all these days. Organised crime favours heroin and has not bothered to dis

Place the now professionalised hippy generation from the cocaine trade which is not

nearly addictive enough and makes people lively, which can be inconvenient. A pop Italian radio station announced last year

that 1977 was going to be the Year of Acid. They were wrong. It was Italy's big heroin

year. Given the increasingly neurotic behaviour of Italian politics, it is conceivable that even the Mafia are getting worried that their traditional genetic grip is in for a shake-up and so are stepping up heroin as future security.

The new punkishness of recent years has seen an upsurge in the use of amphetamines, cocaine and alcohol among young people. Johnny Rotten's drug conviction was for amphetamine sulphate powder. Cocaine, with its very short-term effects (forty minutes or less) and at £40£45 per gram is for the rich. In California it now comes out after dinner with the brandy. Being so expensive, cocaine is invariably adulterated along the route, with amphetamine sulphate (£10 per gram) if the purchaser is lucky, or with anything from scouring powder to pulverised rice if he is not.

CIBA Laboratories are currently testing a new anti-stress drug, Oxprenolol, which is claimed to be superior to the present tranquillisers because it reduces anxiety without sedating the body. It is a member of the group known as 'beta-blockers'. The latest effort to produce a genuine aphrodisiac (a pursuit which reveals how little grasp pharmaceutical medicine has of what makes people tick) is bromocryptine. Tests conducted by Dr Dominico Fonzi of the University of Turin are said to be positive. Licensed drug companies make huge profits from these `wonder' drugs which try to remove all responsibility from the individual's self-cure. Which is why the new blase, hedonistic approach to drugs is in many ways much more realistic. In America the difference between the value of brand drugs needed to fill legitimate prescriptions and the value of brand drugs actually being consumed there reveals a discrepancy of $5 billion. This is achieved by legitimate export and illegitimate re-import. Presumably the drug companies know all about this but pretend otherwise. Angel Dust, known as Hog a few years ago, is making a comeback. It is an elephant tranquilliser which when sprinkled into joints produces a numbing effect similar to Mandrax. It can also stop the heart if the dosage is slightly misjudged. In the psychedelic area my inquiries reveal the existence of a strange new drug, developed in official laboratories, which induces such powerful hallucinations and through all five senses so completely that the images appear to solidify and retain their coherence in external reality. If this new hallucinogen does exist then its effect would be to exteriorise totally one's internal phantasmagorical world. The illegal (and of course the legal) drug phenomenon is extremely complex. It is full of confusions and anomalies. It has its positive and negative aspects. Merely to say that it must be stamped out at all costs is inexcusably naive.

Operation Julie has exposed the inability of many institutions, especially the press, to react knowledgeably and intelligently to important issues. The judge spoke of the ruin the Kemp group brought to so many young lives. Where were they? There would have been no shortage of them if the drug in question were Thalidomide. And the parents suing the Thalidomide company took a great deal longer to win their case. In the same week as Mr Justice Park passed sentences on the Kemp group, Mr Justice Parker ruled in favour of a nuclear dustbin at Windscale whose products will remain lethal for thousands of years. One final irony. The head of the Drugs Squad in London, when interviewed by Time Out in the summer, 1976, said `There is no manufacturing of LSD going on in this country any more.' By then Richard Kemp had already been active for six years.