Journalistic history of the development of "designer drugs"/"research chemicals", with focus on past two decades and Internet-based RC communities. This is a topic you might think I'd know all about, but actually I don't, because my focus was always Silk Road & the dark net markets, where research chemicals often showed up after being banned, but I didn't know much about what went on before they became normal illicit drugs. So this filled in a lot of holes for me.

Power starts with the Western discovery of psychedelics and LSD, giving an engaging potted history of the period to focus on the late Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin is the central figure in research chemicals for demonstrating that variants and twists on old drugs are almost as easy as falling off a log, one would think, coming up singlehandedly with dozens of stimulants and psychedelics and drugs with unclassifiable effects (the one which "makes everything sound 1 octave lower" always amuses me), all documented in his famous PIHKAL and TIHKAL. Shulgin's work and other chemists (including the still-mysterious discoverer of MDMA) lit a long fuse that finally detonated with Usenet (now there's a name you probably haven't heard in a while) showing that the Internet could document and spread knowledge about drug use through newsgroups and forums, and eventually, in a miracle of globalization, chemists with foreign chemical laboratories with customers online. Here Drugs 2.0 really gets moving, covering Erowid, the Hive, Chinese labs doing dodgy syntheses, discussion of what chemical analogues are and how these grey-market communities can come up with literally scores of new substances every year, faster than they could be banned, interviews in person or email with some of these amateur chemists and Chinese lab operators and the intermediary businessmen, and of course, Silk Road 1 (Power's chapter on it, while unavoidably obsolete in 2016, was one of the better writeups around when it was published). The focus tends to be on the UK, but that's fine by me, as the UK's more explicit drug policy makes changes easier to describe, and Power includes interesting material on fads in the UK drug consumer market and how it affected choices (the safrole oil shortage's effects on MDMA and finding substitutes is a good one).

Where I'm left a little dissatisfied is in descriptions of effects of the various RCs which have been discovered. By the end, you don't know too much about how the various drugs differ, or how many could be considered to have found a niche of their own as more than just a formerly legal analogue of something like psilocybin. Like a biography of a scientist which doesn't go into much depth about what their ideas or discoveries were, it feels incomplete.

Disclosure: Mike Power has interviewed or quoted me on several occasions about the dark net markets, and gave me a free PDF of Drugs 2.0 back in 2014 or something. (But it was so hard to read because of publisher watermarking, that I downloaded a better copy from Libgen and read that instead.)