No. 7583Anonymous 11th July 2015 Saturday 2:08 pm7583Chinese drugs raid took six years to plan and fourteen hours to carry out.
This whole article is fairly mind-blowing, in both the unusual depth of the reporting and the subject area that it covers. I did consider posting in /news/, but decided to post it here as even though everyone should be interested in it (I would imagine that it'd be pretty fascinating to just about anyone, even just for some of the economic consequences), I've been mugged off enough times for posting anything drugs-related outside of /A/ by now to err on the side of caution:
While the article is full of the usual lazy journalism found in mainstream media (e.g. they mention that ketamine is still used as an emergency anesthetic in humans in "developing nations" but fails to mention that the same is true in the UK) there is quite a lot of fascinating and previously largely unknown information about mass Chinese drug production in there to make it worth reading in full.
Points that I found interesting or have thought about since reading the article:
1) While the agents were expecting to find massive quantities of methamphetamine, they were surprised to find such a large amount of ketamine being produced in clandestine labs, they (like us?) had always assumed Chinese ketamine was being rerouted from pharmaceutical supplies.
2) Since the (legit, pharmaceutical) Indian supplies dried, up the majority of ketamine imported to the UK has come from China. While superficially we've been led to believe that these supplies have been rerouted from legitimate laboratories with a general subtext of "because China is so corrupt, the triads have their fingers in everything, etc", it now turns out that a large proportion (perhaps all?) of this Chinese ketamine has been coming from clandestine labs. Ketamine is not a simple chemical to produce, and like its cousin PCP is notorious for having a large number of toxic by-products left in the final reaction when produced clandestinely. I have been poo-pooed repeatedly by my peers for suggesting that the drying up of legitimate pharmaceutical ketamine supplies from India and the massive uptick in KBS cases were related and not simply correlated; this new information at least gives us some new food for thought on the issue.
3) The UK is probably about to experience the worst ketamine drought since about 2008. It's also possible that crystal meth will dry up although it's such a niche (and mind-blowingly expensive/profitable) drug in the UK that I imagine supply will be arranged to meet demand. What we might see with meth is a drop in quality as second and third rate goods are shipped to us via China from labs in Thailand and Burma.
4) Given the chemical similarities, how likely is it that the majority of the novel cyclohexyl legal highs (MXE/MXP/N-meo-PCP, etc) produced in China for (legal) sale in the UK have been developed / manufactured in dodgy makeshift labs like these? While early legal highs such as 2-cb, methylone, mephedrone, etc were relatively "simple" (and well documented) syntheses, the cyclohexyl drugs aren't, and are in fact notoriously difficult to produce without toxic byproducts in the final synthesis (viz illicit PCP in the states). I've personally kept away from all such novel substances out of general respect for my aging mind and body but again this is more food for thought for people who've been experimenting with them.
Anyway, I've rambled on for long enough and I don't want to make the link redundant by addressing the whole article in this post.
>almost three tonnes of methamphetamine and, a staggering 400 tonnes of meth ingredients.
Fuck. Shame about all that ket though, I wish it could make a comeback over here.
>But this old drug is getting a new life in night clubs. Recreational users say ketamine lifts them out of their bodies, into other worlds. Many feel like they can fly or float.
K-holing is clubs isn't fun, what the hell?
I've also never understood people who do ketamine in clubs or in public places generally. Then again I've been reliably told that most people who do ketamine in the UK actively try to avoid the k-hole rather than strive for it (nevermind the fact that most people think a k-hole is having tunnel vision or not being able to stand up as opposed to the completely dissociated otherworldly experience it actually is). Moan ticked for literal Moaning.
>3) The UK is probably about to experience the worst ketamine drought since about 2008.
It had been my understanding, and certainly my experience due to the massive upsurge in street price, that we are already in this drought, and have been since around the start of 2014 precisely for the reasons you mention. I read this article myself the other day, and while I too think there was a lot of 'lazy journalism' as you put it, am pleased that at least some reporters are going directly to the source to observe how China's labs and state-sponsored corruption are influencing the global drugs trade. It was also quite interesting to have an insight into China's own ketamine culture. I don't really have anything to add other than recommending it as a good read - though I do have a vague recollection that MXE came out of the minds and 'workshops' responsible for mephedrone, but I can't be bothered to find any sources for this. Its successors like MXP I would be less surprised to learn that they came from muddying the processes for manufacturing MXE in China.
Interestingly mephedrone was first synthesised in in 1929 but wasn't "rediscovered" as a psychoactive until 2003, I think. (Similarly MDMA was first synthesised in 1912 but wasn't rediscovered by Shulgin until much later).
>Given the chemical similarities, how likely is it that the majority of the novel cyclohexyl legal highs (MXE/MXP/N-meo-PCP, etc) produced in China for (legal) sale in the UK have been developed / manufactured in dodgy makeshift labs like these?
Pretty much all of the weird modern drugs are made in China. Like any sort of manufacturing in China it runs the gamut, from pristine modern facilities to backstreet sheds. If something isn't a scheduled drug, you can have it manufactured in whatever quantity you like as easily as ordering a batch of paint. Even if a substance is scheduled, many companies are acting with impunity - it's easy to pay off local police, and the national government don't really care as long as everything is going to export.
It should be obvious that the raid mentioned in the article is largely a dog-and-pony show. The BBC story closely apes the sort of propaganda that followers of the Chinese media are intimately familiar with. I'll wager that all the numbers have been exaggerated by an order of magnitude, and the "police officer" interviewed was in fact a spokesman from the Ministry of Public Security.
China are pushing the ketamine story because they're concerned about use of the drug inside the country, which has been spreading north from Taiwan. They have been lobbying for over a decade for ketamine to be internationally reclassified as a schedule 1 drug, which would strictly control manufacture and supply. These restrictions wouldn't be an issue in the developed world where pharmaceutical supply chains are resilient and well regulated, but could affect availability in the developing world; Some reporters seem to have slightly misunderstood that issue and characterised ketamine as a medicine that is predominantly used in developing nations. Google "ketamine China" and you'll find plenty of backstory.
This episode of Vice on HBO includes a tour of a Chinese factory producing novel psychoactive substances, and some very interesting background on the history of NPSs (start at about 5:20 to skip the sensationalist twaddle).
