As any regular visitor to Coffeesh0p will know, I try and trickle new products onto the site fairly regularly.  The most notable (and most anticipated) products to be added recently are Magic Silver and Magic Gold smoking mixes, but today, I added Koru Instant Energy Strips,  and I’ve got enough samples for 20 people to give away!

Koru Instant Energy Strips are a cool new way to get a much needed caffeine kick. You place one on your tongue and just let it dissolve, which gets the goodness into your blood stream much faster than drinking a cup of coffee. Since they’re so convenient and, well, instant, they’re perfect for just about every situation where you’d like to be a little more alert, without taking something that’ll blow your tits off (like Charge, for example).

So, how can you win some? Firstly, do you meet the following criteria?

1. You live in the UK
2. You’re not pregnant
3. You’re not a child
4. You’re not unusually sensitive to caffeine
5. You don’t mind the taste of mint

If you said “Yes!” to all of the above, all you need to do is leave a comment below. The first 20 people to leave a comment will get a couple of strips to try out. Please don’t leave your address in the comments – I’ll get in touch with you about that.

This week, clubs in Edinburgh have banned legal highs, just in case someone dies! If they catch you getting high legally inside, you could get barred for up to 3 months. That’s the gist of the story, as reported by The Sun and a few smaller news sites. Allow me to read between the lines…

Nothing makes you want to drink more than already being pissed. “Yeah, sure *burp*, I’ll have one more. Actually *hic*, better make it four…” (Of course, by “you”, I actually mean the majority of the drinking population who don’t drink responsibly. If you eat beforehand, alternate between alcohol & soft drinks and stick to a predefined limit each night, then well done you, but read on anyway.) Unfortunately, legal highs don’t have that effect. Users tend to have a much better time without drinking. Either that, or the drink does nothing but give you a hangover, in the case of many legal stimulants.  This would seem to be the real reason behind this latest move against legal highs. Which, I suppose, is fine in principal (you wouldn’t expect to bring your £6 bottle of Tesco Value vodka into a club, would you?), but at least have the balls to admit it. Not coming clean makes them look far worse, because as we all know, alcohol is far more likely to kill you than most other drugs. Actually, I bet more people have died from seizures in clubs because of the loud music and lights than have died from legal highs.

Another reason in the same vein is that some clubs want to protect their illegal drugs trade too. It sounds a bit conspiracy theorist, I know, but some clubs definitely do have their own supply of illegal drugs. You’d think a bunch of geezers covered with bling that hang out by the fucking bar would get kicked out at the first sign of dealing, but every time I’ve been to this particular club, the same guys have been there, looking as shifty as they are reflective. In another club we go to quite a bit, I’ve actually seen first hand a drug dealer go up and ask a bouncer if he’s got any more pills, who then went to ask the guy behind the bar.

And now for a final twist in the story… These days, “pills” rarely contain any illegal drugs at all! That’s right. Thanks to the increasing popularity and availability of piperazines (such as the infamous BZP), acquiring a pill that contains any actual MDMA is nearly impossible. A popular favourite among dealers at the moment is a compound called mCPP (m-ChloroPhenylPiperazine), whose side effects include massive headaches and nausea. It’s about 5 times cheaper for a chemist to make mCPP than MDMA, as none of the precursors are restricted, so now about 50% of all the pills across Europe contain it. It seems this chemical alone is responsible for the tidal wave of sick that now flows from the toilets of decent clubs across the country.

Like I said, this move is acceptable in principle, but I wish they wouldn’t act like they’re doing everyone a favour. Next, they’ll take away our legal right to tap water in order to prevent that dreaded hyper-hydration.

Fortunately though, there’s always evangelical Christianity to turn to, as seen in this week’s episode of Christian Drum ‘n’ Bass:

I don’t usually just repost other news, because it’s boring and lazy, but today is different because we’re actually in the news. This weekend, the cover story of The Observer Magazine was “The Rise and Rise of Legal Highs“, and features not only a few quotes from us, but you can also see my nipples. Intrigued? Read on…

The article itself contains points from some pretty important people, which is actually a massive compliment. It feels pretty good to get quoted in an article alongside Martin Barnes, DrugScope’s chief executive, and John Huffman, the guy that discovered the JWH series of compounds (such as JWH-018). Since it’s such a long article, I won’t post the lot here – just a few select bits. I really would suggest reading the entire article though on the Observer website.

One more thing I have to mention before you go any further. That Mac that the misses is holding is not her Mac. In an ideal world, she would have been holding her far superior laptop, but it would have made for a worse photo. Here we go:

How can you get high without breaking the law? A survey of friends and colleagues. “Smoke nutmeg,” said an actor. “Find a dodgy Starbucks barista who’ll sell you the nitrous oxide cans they use to whip cream,” said a banker. “Ask around for something called Methedrome, or Mephedrone, or Mephedrome,” advised an account manager. “Lick a newt,” texted a doctor, “and don’t ask me things like this again.” One PR directed me towards news stories about Spice, an over-the-counter smoking mixture that was reported to have effects similar to cannabis; a web developer directed me to a recent issue of Mixmag, announcing the new popularity of “analogue drugs” such as Mephedrone (aha!) in British clubs. Something known as “that purple drank” was a favourite of American rappers in the 1990s, an A&R man told me: “I think it was a mixture of cough syrup and Sprite and it made everything move very slowly.” A teacher remembered that a fistful of ProPlus worked when he was younger. A civil servant had tried snorting Dreft detergent, to no effect.

The industry presented a friendlier, more modern face in the home of John Clarke and Jo Hall, recent graduates from Birmingham University, who run an online retailer of legal highs called Coffeesh0p.com. The couple had propped a giant teddy bear next to a waist-high stack of Tupperware boxes containing colourful lotus leaves, powdered toadstool and Hawaiian woodrose seeds; above a chest of drawers stuffed with cardboard envelopes of guarano pills and pre-rolled kratom joints was a poster of Sean Bean in Sharpe.

“It pays the bills,” said Clarke, 22, who started the business three years ago when he was studying for a degree in pharmacology. Today, his customers range from students attracted by the ease of shopping online, to professionals looking for substances that wouldn’t show up on drug tests at work. There was a professor from the local university who made regular purchases; also a photographer, a shop assistant, and a yacht salesman. “We sold to a couple in their 30s last month. It was their anniversary, a weekend without the kids, and they wanted an interesting time. I think you’d be surprised that our customers are not just 18-year-olds wanting to get high. There’s an entire culture of sensible people out there.”

“The not-for-human-consumption thing is probably the worst thing, morally, that we do as an industry,” said Hall. They likened their jobs to running a “naughty Holland & Barrett”, but like my salesman in Edinburgh, the couple have to play a game of avoid-the-tide with legislators: legal highs need to be effective enough to attract a market, but not effective enough to attract the eye of the Advisory Council, which becomes aware of substances when they show up in amnesty bins at clubs, or when users report to treatment centres with problems, or when the tabloids start making a stink.

In the days leading up to my visit, news had broken that two more legal substances – BZP, a stimulant similar to ecstasy, and GBL, a derivative of GHB that had caused the death of a student in April – were to be brought under the Misuse of Drugs Act alongside Spice. “It was a blow when magic mushrooms were banned in 2005, but the industry survived,” said Hall. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed.”

“Sitting at home, smoking a joint of Spice and watching Sharpe. Doesn’t sound like much of a crime, does it?” said Clarke.

DrugScope’s recent survey highlighted the falling quality of street drugs as a reason why legal highs are growing in popularity. The Mephedrone Tim took was far cleaner than anything he was likely to have bought from a dealer. It had not been cut with chalk, or mashed-up aspirin, or Dreft detergent; it had been mass-produced in a factory, probably in China, imported by a wholesaler, and sold to him by a head shop – pure. He posted a description of his experience on an online drug forum, to warn others about making the same misjudgment.

This is another advantage of legal highs, according to Clarke. When people have better evidence as to what they’ve taken – because a substance bears a brand name, or because it is produced in a factory to roughly the same strength from dose to dose – effects can be compared with some kind of accuracy. Sites such as Drugs-Forum.com and Erowid.org throb with testimonials and advice. “With generic ecstasy there are so many different pills out there with different things in them that their effect is not going to be consistent,” says Clarke. “It makes similar discussion almost impossible.”

We also got a quality link back to our site from their website and a shitload more orders than usual. Check out our traffic:

Monday was a LONG day...

We’re well chuffed! I just hope Sean Bean isn’t some anti-drugs nazi…

Looking back at my previous post, Democracy In Action, I think it’s pretty clear the upcoming legal highs ban in the UK is NOT a “Harm Reduction” move.  Banning a class of substances with medical value because of “potential harm”, despite never having killed anyone seems to me to be an attempt to control particular states of conciousness. Inspired by the fuckwits that run this country, I decided to investigate just why people get high in the first place.

Elephants drink to forget...

The first interesting and often overlooked point is that animals like to get high too. Elephants not only like to get pissed every now and then by eating fermenting fruit; they also drink themselves stupid if their mate dies, clearly drowning their sorrows. Vervet monkeys love stealing people’s drinks and getting drunk just for the fun of it. Lemurs have evolved to get high off the millipede juice they spray over themselves to repel bugs. Even the wallabies are at it! In fact, animals getting high is such a prevalent phenomenon that there’s an entire episode of Weird Nature dedicated to it – Peculiar Potions. All this evidence points to getting high as another kind of instinct, alongside eating, sleeping and mating. That doesn’t mean we all want to get high 100% of the time and will kill each other for the privilege, it just means that right across the animal kingdom, this penchant for getting high (or a tendency to self-medicate) obviously had its advantages. Anxiety, restlessness, depression, pain, lack of appetite – all of these can be managed to some extent by one drug or another, and if trying to manage those things means you live longer and are more likely to pass on your genes, it’s no wonder this instinct is so ingrained. You can read more about the “Intoxication Instinct” here.

I’ve done a little study of my own to find out why people get high. With tens of thousands of pounds in funding from John Hopkins and the University of Nottingham, I bought massive bag of drugs and consumed them over a five year period to really get to the bottom of that issue. When the last of the drugs had gone, I spent the afternoon on various drugs-related forums finding out why people got high and totalled up the results. Here they are:

All the categories do kind of blur into each other a bit, so here are the loose definitions I used for each:

Fun

This category included any responses that indicated a purely recreational, almost innocent reason for drug use., such as dancing or having a laugh.

Meditation

This category included not only those that used drugs for strict meditation, but also those that used drugs to “expand their conciousness” or to perhaps shift their perspective on things.

Self Medication

The most obvious reason to take drugs is for pain management, but other responders used drugs for anxiety issues, depression and a whole range of other conditions.

Boredom

Quite simply those people who take drugs because being sober all the time is boring.

Masking Negative Feelings

This would include our bereaved elephant and anyone else who uses drugs to stop themselves dwelling on the negative.

Sociability

This is related to the self medication category in that these people take drugs to help their confidence in social situations, those who enjoy a quick drink down the pub and everything in between.

Escapism

This category is probably the hardest to define, representing those looking for something different. While you could argue that these responses could be put in the other categories, this category was actually for those responses that couldn’t be categorised. It includes people who just want a break from normality for no reason in particular.

Productivity

Believe it or not, some people are more productive on drugs. Take that, government!

***

So there we have it! An interesting looking graph produced from some pretty dodgy qualitative statistics obtained from a small internet-savvy sample, not representative of the entire population. Still, having fun, introspection, deep though, meditation and self medication are certainly the most popular reasons to take drugs. It’s no wonder organised religion wants to keep this kind of thing under wraps.

Why is it that you get high? Leave an answer in the comments and perhaps we can extend this “study” a little bit.