Can’t get there from here: I Need Drugs!

“The only two activities where the participants are called users are drugs and computers.”--Overheard at IETF

It takes, of course, all kinds. Everybody knows that. But why is there always someone who needs to prove it?

From: Name Deleted to Protect the Neuron Impaired
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: need drugs
Date: 17 Jun 1994 21:01:01 GMT

I am from Colorado and i need drugs.  If you are from the col.
sprgs./boulder/denver area, please write me and give me a list of somje drugs

and prices. (amphetamines, kind buds, opium preffered). Thanks. I’M NOT A COP.

Oh sure, he’s not a cop. Even cops aren’t that stupid. Did someone actually send him drugs? Who knows? This is the Internet, after all. And the guy’s not completely baked. He asks for opium rather than its more dangerous derivative, heroin. What he got, however, at least publicly, was a good bit of flames.

From: [j s horey] at [netcom.com] (John Shorey)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: Re: need drugs
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 1994 09:12:30 GMT

Name Still Deleted. But anyone on alt.drugs can tell you. wrote:
: I am from Colorado and i need drugs.  If you are from the col.
: sprgs./boulder/denver area, please write me and give me a list of somje drugs
: and prices. (amphetamines, kind buds, opium preffered). Thanks. I’M NOT A COP.

Ill be sure to do that as soon as monkey’s fly outta my butt...
-- 
                                             [j s horey] at [netcom.com]

I did not see any flying monkeys before the Freenet Twins, Jennifer and Julie, joined in:

From: [j--nn--k] at [freenet3.scri.fsu.edu] (Jennifer A. Kieval)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: Re: need drugs
Date: 19 Jun 1994 15:57:25 -0400

[j s horey] at [netcom.com] (John Shorey) writes:
>Boy is he going to be pissed if I miss one of these and Mom sees wrote:
>>I am from Colorado and i need drugs.  If you are from the col.
>>sprgs./boulder/denver area, please write me and give me a list of somje drugs
>>and prices. (amphetamines, kind buds, opium preffered). Thanks. I’M NOT A COP.

	I’m a loser, baby... so why don’t you kill me...

	fuckin’ DORK.
_
     “A moment’s insight is sometimes worth
   a life’s experience.”
                          -O. W. Holmes (1809-1894)

Nice quote. Oliver, smarter than the average Internet user, said that after contemplating climbing to the highest building in Maine’s capitol and screaming for whiskey. A moment’s contemplation and he decided that the dry state wasn’t quite ready for such a move.

From: [julie 94] at [freenet3.scri.fsu.edu] (Julie Burton)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: Re: need drugs
Date: 19 Jun 1994 17:42:59 -0400

[j--nn--k] at [freenet3.scri.fsu.edu] (Jennifer A. Kieval) writes:
>[j s horey] at [netcom.com] (John Shorey) writes:
>>_Don’t know why I care enough to delete his name. He didn’t;_ wrote:
>>>I am from Colorado and i need drugs.  If you are from the col.
>>>sprgs./boulder/denver area, please write me and give me a list of somje drugs
>>>and prices. (amphetamines, kind buds, opium preffered). Thanks. I’M NOT A COP.
>
> 	I’m a loser, baby... so why don’t you kill me...
>
>	fuckin’ DORK.

	I would have to agree.  I mean, reallllllyyyy.......

	fuckin’ DORK.

In fact, it’s pretty easy to buy drugs on the net, and nerds and geeks have the monopoly. You just have to know where to look. A couple of student techies at the Rochester Institute of Technology wired a drug dispenser into the infobahn, although it is, of course, only useful for people in their own Computer Science dormitory.

This drug machine has five slots, though each only serves caffeine ^(od). You can get an assortment of beverages. Classic Coke and Jolt are always available. There’s also a gambling option for those who are broke or cheap: if any of the slots are empty, you can tell the Coke Machine to dispense the mystery drink, and the cost is reduced by the number of slots that are drug-free. Empty, that is. You’ll get something from one slot, at random, but it might be an empty slot, and then you’re out of luck. Even worse, it might be from the Mystery Diet Slot.

You can even tell it to ‘delay’ the drug drop, so that the can doesn’t drop into the tray until you walk into the room. The machine doesn’t accept money: it debits from each dorm member’s account. So if you’ve got a good account, you can drop a can from anywhere. The longest delay so far has been from Arizona. It is unknown whether or not the user arrived in time.

No matter where you are, if you’re on the Internet and feeling lonely for the RIT Computer Science House, you can pull up a picture of the CSH Coke Machine, and know how many drinks remain, and what they are. They eventually plan to incorporate this machine as part of a computerized role-playing game. Deep inside the bowels of the dungeon, you come across a mysterious potion labeled ‘Coke’... Is it Classic or Cherry? *plop*

Their work was so impressive that they were donated a Coke™ machine a year later to replace the one they’d dragged out of the trash. If you’d like to view this infobahn roadside attraction, you used to have to access a telnet connection and finger [g--a--h] at [drink.csh.rit.edu]. You don’t even know what that means, do you? It’s easier today, but I can’t tell you. That would be aiding and abetting an interstate drug transfer.

Oh, all right.

The URL for the coke machine is http://www.csh.rit.edu/projects/drink.shtml. URLs, Universal Resource Locators, are infobahn addresses that computer programs such as the various children of mosaic can understand. They aren’t really meant for humans, but the geeks have picked it up as their own lingo.

Drink up. But don’t let the DEA see you.

Speaking of whom, rumor has it that there’s an ftp site somewhere outside of the USA where you can download pictures of narcotics agents. Hey, why not? It’s good to know who your clientele is, and law enforcement always pays top dollar.

Meanwhile, there are some parents worried that they might succumb to the lure of the net and buy alcohol for their children. And they’re so weak they’ll do it on camera.

That’s what seems to have Maya Mosher’s dad sweating nights. He succumbed to his weakness for Tom Brokaw. When a box of beer arrived for Maya, he said, “Just what a ten-year-old might want.” He was trying to make the point that it’s too easy for children to order alcohol on the net--but he’s the one who bought it! Perhaps its too easy for children to convince their parents to order alcohol?

It is at least as hard for children to order via the net than it is to order via standard postal mail. Harder, in fact: Anyone who knows how to lick a stamp can order alcohol through the mail via a postcard. It takes technical geek skill to order alcohol through the mail via the Internet.

It is, of course, impossible for a kid to order alcohol through the mail, Internet or not, unless they have their own postal address and credit card. All that Maya’s father was proving was that he doesn’t care enough about his daughter to pay attention to the mail she’s receiving. The box had her name on it because he asked the company to put it there. But it still had his address, because it is still his house. When the box of booze arrived at his door, did he simply hand it off to the kid and tell her to drink up for the cameras?

The Internet is great at distributing subversive words and pictures. But it still sucks at distributing booze and other controlled substances. Until we can get Captain Kirk’s Internet Transporter working, anything real still has to go through the post office.

Shapes and colors. The drugs--computers--are taking effect, despite the finding of a trio of cyber psychologists that “computer-mediated communication is not physiologically arousing.” ^(?) They must have missed alt.sex.stories. Librarians have always feared the occasional splooge in the stacks, and now computing staff face the same dangers. Computer supervision is no longer an easy task involving snorting cocaine and playing Moria adventures until dawn. The old weapons were swords and pikes; the new, Lemon Pledge and Bounty, “the Quicker-Picker-Upper”™.

That the Internet is a drug--and an arousing one--is so unquestionably true that it’s probably wrong. The Internet certainly sees a lot of talk about drugs. There was even a proposal by a British drug writer to start a Journal of Drug Experiences to record the experiences of drug use for posterity.

Newsgroups: alt.drugs
From: [d--vi--m] at [aic2.act.crime.oz.au] (David McDonald)
Subject: JOURNAL ON DRUG EXPERIENCES

Peter McDermott asks if we think it is worth considering the 
development of an electronic journal concerned with the real life
experiences of drug users.  He argues that academics are too often
working on information far removed from the experiences of users.

Well, I am an academic working in the field of currently illicit
drugs.  While I have contact with current and past users, the range
of users that any one researcher can interact  with  obviously is
limited.  I, for one, would be an appreciative user of such an 
electronic journal. 

To give an example, ‘Special -K’ is new in Australia and little known.
To be able to tap the experience of users (as has already occurred through
alt.drugs) would be very helpful.

I support Peter’s suggestion.  Looking forward to hearing others’ views.

David McDonald
Australian Institute of Criminology

This proposal was floated on alt.drugs and may have been the forerunner of the great alt.drugs split war of 1994. If the Internet is a drug, the threat of withdrawal from alt.drugs is enough to cause violent convulsions. At its high point, there were a dozen groups proposed as children of alt.drugs:

1. alt.drugs.marijuana
2. alt.drugs.psychedelics
3. alt.drugs.research
4. alt.drugs.stories.d
5. alt.drugs.chemistry
6. alt.drugs.support
7. alt.drugs.hard
8. alt.drugs.politics
9. alt.drugs.tech
10. alt.drugs.plant
11. alt.drugs.opiates
12. alt.drugs.stimulants

Not including alt.drugs itself, which would presumably stay around to catch drug-related discussion that doesn’t fall into any of the above categories. And I have to wonder what the difference was meant to be between the proposed alt.drugs.politics and the already existing talk.politics.drugs. Not to mention rec.food.wine, alt.beer, and alt.drugs.caffeine. When we noticed that things were getting out of hand, then they really started getting out of hand.

Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.config
From: [b--ch--l] at [cats.ucsc.edu] (Jeff Burchell
Subject: PLEASE READ! Regarding new alt.drugs.* newsgroups

[p--t--r] at [petermc.demon.co.uk] (Peter McDermott) writes:
>The discussion on how and why we split alt.drugs seems to be
>getting out of hand with all kinds of people wanting to set
>up groups, and discussions taking place in a whole load of
>threads.

Agreed.  I’m doing a lot of work on this, at it seems like some of it is 
being duplicated, or even stepped upon (i.e. whoever posted a RFD regarding 
rec.drugs.*, is now on my shitlist.  They should have at least contacted me 
first.)  If you don’t like the way I’m doing things, then tell me about it, 
but don’t go over my head, please, at least without my permission.
-Jeff
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Jeff Burchell      [b--ch--l] at [cats.ucsc.edu]      [t--x--c] at [phantom.com]     
“And, in a similar fashion to the ancient locust, the advertisments 
fell upon the USENET causing great
People take things seriously when they volunteer to organize anarchy.
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.config

---

From: [l--w--s] at [aera2.mitre.org] (Keith Lewis)
Subject: Re: PLEASE READ! Regarding new alt.drugs.* newsgroups

[b--ch--l] at [cats.ucsc.edu] (Jeff Burchell) writes:
>Agreed.  I’m doing a lot of work on this, at it seems like some of it is 
>being duplicated, or even stepped upon (i.e. whoever posted a RFD regarding 
>rec.drugs.*, is now on my shitlist.  They should have at least contacted me 
>first.)  If you don’t like the way I’m doing things, then tell me about it, 
>but don’t go over my head, please, at least without my permission.

Go over your head on Usenet?  I just wanted to get the “official” RFD
started.  Things move much slower on news.groups than alt.config.


--Keith Lewis             [k--ew--s] at [mitre.org]          PGP key available.
.. pH balanced for your decisions, your life. -- Proctor & Gamble
The above may not (yet) represent the opinions of my employer.

When the silliness came in, the split was officially dead. ^(!)

Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.config
From: [lamon t g] at [u.washington.edu] (Lamont Granquist)
Subject: Re: PLEASE READ! Regarding new alt.drugs.* newsgroups

the only think i don’t like about rec.drugs.* is that i already waste enough
time on alt.drugs, and i couldn’t handle two heirarchies....  it could wind
up splitting resources...

(then again rec.drugs.sick.of.lamont might not be a bad idea -- 70+ posts in
 the last fucking week?!?!?!  alt.drugs.usenet.abuse...)

-- 
Lamont Granquist ([lamon t g] at [u.washington.edu])
“And then the alien anthropologists - Admitted they were still perplexed - But
on eliminating every other reason - For our sad demise - They logged the only
explanation left - This species has amused itself to death” -- Roger Waters

Usenet abuse or not, he got at least one vote:

Newsgroups: alt.drugs
From: [p--t--r] at [petermc.demon.co.uk] (Peter McDermott)
Subject: Re: PLEASE READ! Regarding new alt.drugs.* newsgroups

[lamon t g] at [u.washington.edu] (Lamont Granquist) writes:
>the only think i don’t like about rec.drugs.* is that i already waste enough
>time on alt.drugs, and i couldn’t handle two heirarchies....  it could wind
>up splitting resources...
>
>(then again rec.drugs.sick.of.lamont might not be a bad idea -- 70+ posts in
> the last fucking week?!?!?!  alt.drugs.usenet.abuse...)

Oh, I dunno. Any votes for alt.drugs.netgod-lamont-granquist?

Count mine as 1. ;-)

--peter 

+--------------------------+---------------------------------------------
|	“Lifeline are to be commended for taking this approach,
|    even if some of the material sails close to the edge of 
|    an Egon McDermott Good Drug Guide.”
|                   Harry Shapiro, Head of Publications, ISDD.

In the end, the split did not come to pass, probably because we talked ourselves to death.

From: [p w h] at [bradley.bradley.edu] (Pete Hartman)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.config,alt.hemp
Subject: Re: <<<RFC: ALT.DRUGS SPINOFF GROUPS>>> “Official” discussion
Date: 8 Jun 1994 13:30:30 -0500

Let me repeat:

VOTES ON ALT.GROUPS ARE MEANINGLESS.

talking about voting for an alt.group labels you as a fledgeling newbie.

Discuss, by all means, and express opinions, but when it comes down to
it no one is bound to do ANYTHING wrt alt.groups.

Somebody, somewhere, created alt.drugs.marijuana, long after the discussion died down at my node, but it hasn’t propagated and it gets only a couple of messages a week, compared with the continuing hundreds a day in alt.drugs.

Finally, when it became obvious things were going nowhere, we made it official: things went nowhere.

From: [m--rp--e] at [ukelele.gcr.com] (Murple)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.hemp,alt.config
Subject: Re: <<<RFC: ALT.DRUGS SPINOFF GROUPS>>> “Official” discussion
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 94 16:50:18 CET

[lamon t g] at [u.washington.edu] (Lamont Granquist) writes:
>ARE WE GOING TO VOTE ON THIS THING OR SIT ON OUR BUTTS AND LET IT DIE?!?!?!!?
>we now return you to your regularly scheduled inane threads on drugs...

I vote that we sit on our butts and let it die...I’m still against
splitting up alt.drugs.

The voter has spoken, the bastard.