Nomad Codes

described in PiHKAL and TiHKAL are duds; others are actively unfun. 2C-B, on the other hand, has gained quite a following for its electric visuals and mescaline-like effects, while the more esoteric 2C-T-7 can unleash a hyperactive barrage of 3-D psychedelic imagery that can take some users to the edge of delirium. Dosage, of course, matters greatly, but dosages are by nature provisional in this scene—a psychonaut recently died after snorting an ungodly amount of 2C-T-7. Still, even at the right amounts, it could turn out that nothing in the Shulgin universe will ever match the depth of LSD, mushrooms, or DMT. But the genie is out of the bottle.“I find postings about compounds that are slipped away in little corners of my books,” says Shulgin. “And all of a sudden they are commercially available and people are talking about them. The seeds are all in there.”
    To no one’s surprise, the weird scientists have embraced the Internet, which hosts the gossamer strands of data and debate necessary to support a shadowy and fragmented community that needs to stay informed. Sites like the Vaults of Erowid and the Lycaeum provide loads of information on dosage, chemistry, legal status, effects, and, perhaps most importantly, experiential feedback. The problem is that such public information also runs the risk of killing the scene, especially when kids get into the act. “The more people know about what’s going on, the more likely somebody is to come in and try to squash it,” explains Scotto, one of the more balls-out contributors to Erowid’s growing vault of reports. At the same time, the persistent curiosity of psychonauts and the endless potential for pharmacological novelty may have created a perpetually expanding zone of gray-market psychedelia. “Humans are going to keep inventing these things faster than the government’s going to make them illegal,” says Scotto, pointing out that the efflorescence of esoteric synthetic compounds mocks the “logic” of the war on drugs. “Are we going to reach the point where I can be imprisoned for doing twenty milligrams of 4-acetoxy diisopropyltryptamine in my bathtub, when nobody even knows what that fucking is? What kind of culture is that?”
    I’ll tell you what kind of culture that is: a posthuman one.

    This might seem like a tall claim. After all, if you take a random slice of human history, you can pretty much bank on the existence of some popular and dependable pharmacological route toward altered states of consciousness, whether through snuff, brews, bark, or herbs. What makes the coming drug culture posthuman is the historically novel conjunction of our exploding knowledge of psycho-pharmacology, the growing dominance of reductionist accounts of the mind, and a consumer culture increasingly focused on what some have called the “experience economy.”
    According to the drug researcher Earth, who runs the Vaults of Erowid with his also pseudonymous partner Fire, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. “In the next fifty years, virtually everyone in developed countries will be faced with daily decisions about their psychoactive drug use,” he says. He argues that the number of psychoactive chemicals in our midst is about to explode, the work not so much of underground drug designers as of pharmaceutical companies. “Imagine a thousand caffeine replacements,” says Earth. “Myriad amphetamines, though less fun than ones today. Or, like Viagra, a coming class of pseudo-medicinal recreational drugs.”
    The signs of this emerging culture are around us. Just ask subway and train riders across the land what time it is, and they’ll tell you: “It’s Prilosec time!” The garish $50-million direct-to-consumer ad campaign for the “little purple pill” is a remarkable indication of the shift toward a mainstream embrace of psychoactive enhancement. Though you can’t generally tell from the ads, the drug itself is indicated for nothing more interesting than heartburn. But the marketing machine presents Prilosec as a lifestyle drug, a kind of luxurious soma, floating against azure skies. Look at the connotations: the “little pill” is a microdot, the color a purple haze, and the image of the witchy New Age blonde exulting before the clock an ambiguous symbol of the slice of eternity that the greatest psychoactives promise—Eliot’s “intersection of the timeless with time,” hovering over hasty commuters.
    Ordinary drugs can promise such magic in