Ned Beauman - Glow

A laboratory is like a radio transmitter: if you have one in your flat you might just be a hobbyist but you are more likely a criminal. Most of the laws you can break with a glass pipette involve either drugs or weaponry. Once in a while the two coincide. There’s a synthetic opioid called 3-methylfentanyl that’s about six thousand times as strong as morphine and has its own small population of addicts dispersed across the Baltic States like an obscure and wretched religious sect, but which was also the basis of the aerosol spray that killed over a hundred hostages when the Spetsnaz pumped it into the air-conditioning system of that theatre in Moscow in 2002. In principle, an entrepreneurial terrorist planning an attack on the London Underground could wholesale half his 3-methylfentanyl to drug pushers in order to subsidise the production of the other half. But what rules out 3-methylfentanyl here, along with sarin and acetone peroxide and every other high explosive and nerve agent that Raf can find listed on the internet, is that none of them has organic precursors. If Lacebark are using herbicides against something that’s blossoming outside council estates, it must be for the same reason that Thai customs officers confiscate sassafras oil: they’re trying to scotch one of the ingredients in a drug recipe. And in this case it’s not going to be coca shrubs or opium poppies or sassafras trees. So what is it?

At first, Raf tries reasoning forward from the precursor to the drug. Thinking of that anonymous email, he wonders if the precursor might be one of the forty-three plants that Linnaeus listed for his flower clock. But none of them is known to have narcotic derivatives. The best he can do is the Icelandic poppy (7 p.m.), which has some of the same alkaloids as the opium poppy but not nearly enough to be useful, and the dandelion (5 a.m.), which makes dandelion wine. Raf feels pretty confident that Lacebark haven’t come to London for dandelion wine. He’s leaning too hard on a rickety clue. Perhaps the precursor is just some other plant with the potential to fill a slot in the Horologium Florae but that wasn’t necessarily known to Linnaeus. That could be any one of a few hundred thousand species.

So he tries reasoning backwards from the drug to the precursor. With real ecstasy so scarce, London is a salon of avant-garde compounds at the moment: ethylbuphedrone and DMBDB and MDPV and a lot of other pretenders. But there’s one that stands out. Glow. Cherish asked him about it at the rave. Ko offered to sell him some a few days later. That’s why he was wondering about it even before he started this research.

Fourpetal has estimated that Lacebark came to London around January. And Raf didn’t hear about glow for the first time until last week. But when he searches on Lotophage for the earliest mention of glow, it’s in a post from 28 October 2009. ‘Anyone heard anything about this new stuff “glow”? Haven’t been able to track any down yet but apparently it’s a very potent entactogenic:)’. (An emoticon like that is the closest anyone on Lotophage ever gets to a moan of anticipation.) In another post in a different thread, the same user happens to mention that he lives in London. The timing is exactly right.

Still, it can only be glow if glow does have a botanical precursor. As Rose dozes at his feet like a small black hole on loan from a particle accelerator, Raf reads through every single forum post about glow in chronological order to see what he can find out. Most of them are no help. Everyone wants to try glow, but almost no one can get hold of any, and no one knows for sure where it comes from. However, even though scholars at the University of Lotophage don’t usually have much tolerance for speculation, there’s something about glow that seems to give rise to a lot of competing tattle. One user says that all extant glow comes from a single batch of experimental medication that was stolen from a hospital in South Wales where the Ministry of Defence were using it to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraq War veterans. Another says that glow is rare but not new and he tried it for the first time in Ibiza in 1995. And another says that all this hype about glow is just more evidence of how the placebo effect is getting stronger every year in the feeble-minded populations of the developed world.

But there is one Lotophage user who seems to know a lot more than anyone else.

His username is ‘Fitch’, and rather than showing off his expertise, he steps in only when he wants to correct a misconception that he finds particularly irritating. In one thread, for instance, people are speculating that part of the difference in the respective effects of glow and ecstasy might result from a faster enzymatic conversion of dopamine to noradrenaline.

‘you think glow might feel like that “because” the dopamine/noradrenaline balance different???’ writes Fitch. ‘what the fuck you think you mean by “because”?! all you bitches need to read L’Amour Médecin by Molière. one doctor says “Most learned bachelor, whom I esteem and honor, I would like to ask you the cause and reason why opium makes one sleep.” the other doctor says “The reason is that in opium resides a dormitive virtue of which it is the nature to stupefy the senses.” nothing changes in three hundred years except the terminology. “Most learned bachelor, whom I esteem and honor, I would like to ask you the cause and reason why MDMA makes one dance.” “The reason is that through the brain gushes a catecholic neurotransmitter of which it is the nature to inflame the senses.” no explanatory power, no predictive power, no falsifiability. . no real theory. there are >100 neurotransmitters in the brain. we don’t know shit about what most of them do. dopamine used to get all the research funding. now oxytocin. soon octopamine/enkephalin/substance P/something else. when we still so ignorant, none of this has any meaning!! anyone who uses an individual neurotransmitter to support an explanation of human emotion or behaviour is talking out of his ass. we all be old or dead before anyone get a handle on how subjective experience supervenes on brain activity. . and, by the way, it’s obvious that anything with an N-methylyhio-tetrazole functional group gonna have an indirect inhibitory effect on dopamine β-hydroxylase, so your whole bullshit chain of causation backwards.’ There follows a GIF of a sailor in a tricorne hat looking the wrong way down a telescope.

It’s the final sentences of these posts that are especially intriguing to Raf — Fitch insists that these debates are pointless and yet he can’t resist winning them anyway. Compile the whole lot, and it becomes clear that Fitch is an expert on glow. He also makes occasional contributions to threads about some of the more esoteric new chemicals from China, concluding one dense post about the possible neurotoxicity of halogenated amphetamines with ‘so, yeah, all you guys playing russian roulette with your brain tissue.’ But he never mentions taking any drugs himself. As Raf sees it, there are two obverse reasons you might talk a lot about drugs without ever indulging in them: either you’re very distant from the drug world, or you’re deep inside it. Fitch might just be some pharmacology graduate student at a rural college in the US who enjoys making Lotophage users look stupid. Or he might be directly involved in the manufacture and distribution of glow.

So Raf makes a list of the exact times of every one of Fitch’s posts, hoping to triangulate him not in space but in time. This is going to be fuzzy at best, since most Lotophage users keep odd schedules. But Raf can’t find any statistical tendency whatsoever. Fitch has posted at least once at every different time of day. Could he have non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome? Could he work in a corner shop?