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So, somebody somewhere set up some labs? I guess?

Before I entered the internet drug scene, some of the drugs in PIHKaL had already risen to popularity. In the early 1990s, 2cb enjoyed popularity as 'nexus', a European club drug, but I was still a little kid; I heard about it only later.

I started reading about drugs online in about 1994-95. For as long as I can remember, 5-meo-dmt has held its reputation as the most intense psychedelic drug available. It lasts 10-30 minutes and, yeah, basically rewires you: bring on the identity crisis, communion with imaginary winged whatnot, You Can Never Go Home Again. It's never had a name, really; people simply call it 5-meo-dmt. The similarly-labeled-but-experientially-wildly-different... 5-meo-dipt... had also become popular before I got online. 5-meo-dipt is streetnamed for its libidinous hallucinatory character: 'foxy methoxy' or just 'foxy', an hallucinogen to have sex on. I guess it was pretty big in Amsterdam in about 1999-2000.

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I don't know how the name 'Research Chemicals' came about. I suppose it must have originated to legitimize the strange commerce that sprang up around 1999. It started happening that you could buy, say, anywhere from 100mg to 5g of any one of these chemicals, over the internet. To dose, you needed a milligram scale; thus the scene always remained fairly elite, as the scale is a $1,000+ item. The gossip at the time was that the powders were being synthesized in southeast Asia somewhere. Americans and Europeans were importing and reselling. For the most part, it wasn't about pressing new party pills, even though pills were inevitably made: mostly, avant-trippers were weighing the powders at home, licking doses off their own scales. To buy these chemicals, you had to establish or convincingly claim that you were a scientist using these 'chemicals' for 'research'. That was basically it: to buy this, you gotta fake a lab. Human ingestion was always explicitly banned by resellers, but the market was, of course, based around ingestion.

PIHKaL and TIHKaL are vast works, containing substances that preceded the Research Chemical phenomenon as well as many promising-sounding substances that have not yet become available. The Research Chemicals were drugs that had faddish internet popularity from about 1999 to 2004. The vast majority of Research Chemicals were hallucinogenic, but some were closer in effects to amphetamines and empathogens [drugs that make you 'empathize', like mdma]. In the final year or so of the Research Chemical boom, new substances became available so rapidly: like watching a candy store through an especially filthy kaleidoscope. More More More More! For me, the famous Research Chemicals are 5-meo-dmt, 5-meo-dipt [foxy methoxy], 2ci [banned in britain / called something else in Britain], 2ct2, 2ct7 [blue mystic], amt, dob [dragonfly], doi, dom, tma-2, 4-ho-dmt [synthetic psilocin / 'shroom pills', a confusing name i thoroughly discourage], 4-ho-dipt, 4-fmp, mdmc [methylone, Explosion]. And a few others.

In 1999, you could buy 5 or 6 of these substances, if you knew where to look online. 'Looking' involved technique, to be sure. By 2003, however, all you had to do was Google 'research chemicals', and you'd find several competing suppliers with a combined offering of 25+ substances, some massively obscure by the standards of 2006. Indeed, it got to the point that several shockingly brazen souls became Google's _sponsored businesses_ for query 'research chemicals'.