alt.drugs.chemistry

Long-form reference · 8,529 words · about a 37-minute read

What the record actually holds

The surviving administrative record of this address is small, precisely dated and entirely public. It sits in the Internet Systems Consortium’s archive of Usenet control messages, which files every newgroup, rmgroup and checkgroups message it has received under the name of the group that message would have affected. The file kept under this name is 2,680 bytes compressed and 6,253 bytes uncompressed; the archived copy carries its own last-modified stamp of 21 February 2003, and nothing has been filed against the name since. It contains five messages, spanning eight and a half years. That is the whole of it.

The first is the creation. It is dated 7 July 1994 at 12:55 GMT, was posted to alt.config from a machine at the MITRE Corporation, and is signed by Keith Lewis. It carries a Control: newgroup alt.drugs.chemistry header and, in its body, something that alt.* creations only rarely bothered with — a result. “The results of the vote were 27 to 2 in favor of the creation of alt.drugs.chemistry,” it reads. “As promised, here it is.”

The vote was informal. In alt.* no ballot had any binding force, and a newgroup message was never a command but a request that each news administrator was free to honour or ignore — the mechanics are set out on our alt.* hierarchy page and are not repeated here. A twenty-nine-vote straw poll in an adjacent newsgroup was, by the conventions of alt.config, an ordinary basis for asking the network to carry a group. It was also, as the following year would demonstrate, no guarantee whatever that the network would.

The message supplied the line a server administrator was to paste into the newsgroups file — alt.drugs.chemistry: discussion of drug chemistry and synthesis — and then the charter, which the proponent said had been culled from the call for votes. Its operative sentences read:

Alt.drugs.chemistry will be for the discussion of the chemical nature and synthesis of drugs. Biochemistry issues (receptor sites, etc.) are probably best left in alt.psychoactives. Relevant commercial postings […] will be allowed *if* they are less than 100 lines and they are repeated no more often than once per month. Judicious use of “e-mail/ftp for more info” is requested.

One elision has been made, and it is worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind the bracket. The charter’s third sentence carried a parenthetical example of the kind of commercial posting it had in mind, and that example names an item of laboratory equipment. This page declines to name equipment, so the example is cut. Nothing else is omitted, and nothing is paraphrased. Readers who want the sentence entire can find it where this page found it, in the control archive.

The charter is, on its face, an ordinary piece of Usenet housekeeping: a scope statement, a boundary with a neighbouring group, a limit on advertising by line count and frequency, and a request that people keep long material out of the group and offer it by other means. The last of those requests carries an assumption worth noting: that part of the group’s traffic would consist of pointers to material held elsewhere — on a mail server, on an FTP host — rather than of the material itself. In 1994 that was an ordinary way for a newsgroup to work.

Three of the remaining four messages are boosters: repeat newgroup messages sent in the hope that administrators who had ignored the first would honour a second. On 24 August 1994 one was sent from a site in Helsinki, describing the group as “a group created in the spring that was widely approved of in alt.drugs but has suffered from poor propagation” and proposing a breezier one-line description of its own. Its dating disagrees with the creation message’s own timestamp of July, and the disagreement is left here unresolved rather than smoothed over; the original call for votes is referenced by message-ID in the creation message but is not itself preserved in this file.

On 16 November 1994 Keith Lewis sent a second booster, this time posted into alt.drugs itself and framed as a reply to a reader who had written to say that his news service carried only alt.drugs and alt.psychoactives, and could someone please list the related groups so he could ask for them. Lewis named four siblings — alt.drugs.culture, alt.drugs.chemistry, alt.drugs.pot and alt.drugs.psychedelics — and added the sentence that is the whole story of the alt.drugs subgroups in one line: “These are thriving already, but they lack proper propagation. Please carry them.” The last booster, in June 1995, is a different animal altogether: a newgroup message from an administrator at a large computer manufacturer, carrying a Distribution: unisys header. It was not addressed to the network at all. It was one company creating the group on its own servers.

The fifth and final message, dated 21 February 2003, is of dubious provenance and is recorded here only because it is what the file ends with. It is a booster, it repeats the newsgroups-file line, and it was cross-posted to four groups — a programming-language group, a fan group, a test group and a flame group — that have nothing to do with the subject. Its sender address, its self-described organisation and its stated newsreader are all jokes of a kind that were common in the control-message traffic of the early 2000s, when forged and mass-produced control messages were a recognised nuisance. It is evidence of the state of Usenet’s control channel in 2003. It is not evidence about this group.

Against that eight-and-a-half-year record stands the present. In the newsgroups file that the Internet Systems Consortium publishes as the working census of publicly available hierarchies — the edition of 26 August 2026, checked for this article, which lists 45,003 groups, of which 20,466 are in alt.* — the entry reads, in full and exactly:

alt.drugs.chemistry    Discussion of drug chemistry and synthesis.

The companion active file carries the name with the flag y, meaning simply that posting is permitted where the group is carried. Neither file is evidence of traffic. A name in the newsgroups file is a name in a census: it records that the group has never been struck from the namespace, and nothing more. Some 180 names in that file begin alt.drugs., the great majority of them created long after 1994 and most of them named after individual substances. This page does not reproduce that list.

One thing the record does not hold, here or anywhere on this site, is the messages themselves. This address ends in _messages because the page at it once carried a list of the postings then arriving. That listing is gone. The archive of this group is not preserved here, is not linked from here, and has not been read by anyone in the writing of this page. Every quotation above comes from a control message or a group-creation document, not from a posting to the group.

The family it belonged to, and why nobody could find it

alt.drugs was old. The second of the two Requests for Discussion that would eventually move drug traffic into the Big Eight described it as “created in 1987 … one of the oldest alt groups”. The first RFD, two weeks earlier, had said something different: that alt.drugs “has been operating since 1986”. Both figures are the proponents’ own and this page reports them as theirs rather than adopting either as settled; the control archive’s holdings for that name begin only in 1992, and the alt.* hierarchy itself dates from 1987, which is a reason to treat the earlier of the two figures with care. What is not in dispute is that the parent group predated the split that produced this one by the better part of seven years, and that it lived in a hierarchy with no central authority over what could be created — the mechanics are set out on our alt.* hierarchy page.

By 1994 alt.drugs had grown past what a single group could hold, and a set of subgroups was spawned off. The RFD’s account of what followed is the most useful surviving description of the environment alt.drugs.chemistry was born into, and it is worth quoting because it explains the group’s entire early history:

Unfortunately, the groups were created before a consensus was reached about them, and many of them … were poorly thought out. They were promptly rmgrouped by the alt.config regulars, but it was decided that creating a new set of groups would be even worse, so several sets of booster newgroups were issued, recreating the hierarchy.

That is why the control file for this group contains three boosters and no removal. The subgroups were created, removed, and put back — not by a decision but by an accumulation of individual decisions on several thousand independently administered machines. The RFD is candid about the cost. “When alt.drugs was created, newgroups were honoured by every site that carried the alt hierarchy,” it notes; but by 1994 alt.* “had become very large and disorganised, full of frivolous groups”, newgroup messages “are now treated with some skepticism by many admins”, and the alt.drugs subgroups “enjoy barely half the propagation of their parent group”.

The RFD names a specific aggravating cause, and does so without much charity. A Netcom user posting under the name Tom Servo had, it says, repeatedly circulated a guide to sending the control messages needed to create groups, a guide that “makes no mention of Usenet naming conventions or the alt.config discussion process, which has since led to hundreds of useless and/or illegally named alt groups being created”. The consequence the proponents drew is a nicely balanced piece of Usenet fatalism: “It has long been known that alt groups are almost impossible to destroy; this recent experience shows that they can be equally difficult to create.”

The proponents’ account of the consequence is consistent throughout both documents: because the subgroups reached a fraction of the sites the parent reached, contributors cross-posted to the parent in order to be read, and readers had to follow both. They put numbers to that, and the numbers are the subject of the next section.

The one contemporary measurement of this group

Almost nothing quantitative survives about alt.drugs.chemistry. One thing does, and it survives because the people who wanted to abolish the alt.drugs hierarchy needed numbers to argue with. Both Requests for Discussion reproduce a short table of readership statistics, introduced in the proponents’ own words as “Some selected USENET Arbitron May 1995 [Snowhare] statistics”. The row for this group reads: 29,854 readers; 32 per cent propagation; 595 messages; 49 per cent cross-posting.

Every one of those figures needs a caveat, and the caveats are the point. The Arbitron of the period was a sampled estimate built from reports volunteered by participating sites, not a census; the readership number is an extrapolation and was understood as one at the time. Propagation is the estimated share of servers carrying the group. The message count is a period total, not a lifetime one. And the table is reproduced here as the RFD reproduced it, including the label “May 1995” on a document first posted on 20 April 1995 — a discrepancy this page notes rather than corrects, because correcting it would mean inventing a date.

The last column is the one the proponents were arguing from. At 49 per cent, alt.drugs.chemistry was among the most heavily cross-posted groups in the table — above every entry except alt.drugs.culture at 57 per cent and alt.drugs.hard, whose figure the table gives only as “> 50%”. Roughly half of what appeared in the group also appeared somewhere else. The RFD’s own explanation for that pattern is the propagation failure: cross-posting to the parent was, on its account, how contributors reached the majority of sites that did not carry the child.

A second, cruder trace of volume survives in the headers of the group-creation documents themselves. Because those documents were cross-posted into alt.drugs.chemistry, each carries an Xref line recording the article number the receiving server assigned. At one large relay site, that counter reads 3,143 on 20 April 1995, 3,360 on 3 May, and 4,785 on 10 July. Article numbers are per-server, begin whenever that server started carrying the group, and count everything the server accepted including cross-posts; they are a lower bound on one machine’s intake and nothing more. Read with that in mind, they show a group that took in something over sixteen hundred articles at that one site across eighty-one days of the summer of 1995 — busy, but nowhere near the volume of its parent.

The vote that moved the subject into the Big Eight

The alt.drugs hierarchy’s propagation failure produced, in 1995 and 1996, one of the more remarkable episodes in Usenet’s governance history: a successful public campaign to move drug discussion out of the network’s unregulated wing and into its formally governed one, by open ballot, with the tallies published.

The first Request for Discussion was posted to news.announce.newgroups on 20 April 1995 by Jani Poijärvi of Helsinki, with A. J. Moss of Cambridge as co-proponent and Bill Godfrey of Coventry as mentor. It proposed two groups, and it was cross-posted to the whole alt.drugs family, to alt.hemp, to alt.psychoactives and to talk.politics.drugs. Its housekeeping instruction is a small masterpiece of procedural discipline: discussion of the proposal belonged in news.groups, and “debates about the merits of legalisation or the morality of drug-taking” belonged in talk.politics.drugs, and the two were not to be mixed. A second RFD followed on 3 May, adding a third group and, its author noted with some exasperation, rewriting about ninety per cent of the text to make it clearer while changing almost none of its substance.

The Call for Votes went out on 8 June 1995 from Warren Lavallee, posting under the banner of the Big Eight’s standing pool of neutral votetakers; a second CFV followed on 21 June. The result was posted on 10 July 1995. rec.drugs.cannabis passed 365 to 93, rec.drugs.psychedelic 356 to 99, rec.drugs.misc 362 to 99, with twelve votes ruled invalid. All three cleared the era’s standard bar — a two-thirds majority and at least a hundred more yes votes than no. The votetaker could not resist appending an observation under the heading INTERESTING FACT: the number of raw votes received, before duplicates were filtered and a further 121 removed, was 666.

The charter distributed with that result is a document worth reading for its tone, which is neither defensive nor defiant but administrative. Two of its rules are directly relevant to what this page is about. The first: “Attempts to sell or trade controlled substances here are *NOT* permissible.” The second, immediately after it, and the single most quoted sentence any of these charters produced: “Remember that the authorities are likely to be watching these newsgroups.”

A second round followed. A Request for Discussion for the expansion of the hierarchy went out on 1 November 1995; the Call for Votes for rec.drugs.announce, rec.drugs.chemistry and rec.drugs.smart was issued on 20 February 1996 by Jan Isley, a second on 4 March, and the result was posted on 2 April 1996 with all three groups passing, ten votes having been ruled invalid. rec.drugs.chemistry passed 188 to 62. On 8 April 1996 David C. Lawrence, moderator of news.announce.newgroups, sent the newgroup control message from uunet.uu.net that actually brought it into existence, carrying the description line “Chemistry, pharmacology and related issues” and the charter, which opened: “A newsgroup dedicated to the chemistry and pharmacology of recreational drugs and directly related subjects.” Its companion in the same round, rec.drugs.smart, passed 185 to 66 and has its own page in this directory.

The significance of that sequence is easy to state and easy to overstate, so it is worth stating narrowly. Between April 1995 and April 1996, Usenet’s formal group-creation machinery — public proposal, public argument, a neutral votetaker, a tally published with the name and vote of every voter, and then a control message from the moderator of news.announce.newgroups six days after the result — was used to create, in the network’s governed namespace, a group whose charter named this subject in terms very close to those of the alt group created two years earlier. It was done by ballot, in public, with the count open to checking.

It did not close the alt group. Nothing did. Two separate proposals had said it would. The April 1995 RFD set out a schedule for phasing out alt.drugs.* — weekly reminders, an auto-responder, then removal by as many alt.config regulars as could be mustered after six months. The November 1995 RFD was more specific still: “If rec.drugs.chemistry passes its vote, alt.drugs.chemistry will be rmgrouped”, six months after the newgroup creating the rec group was issued. rec.drugs.chemistry passed, the newgroup went out in April 1996, and no rmgroup for alt.drugs.chemistry appears in the control archive at any date. The outcome is legible in today’s newsgroups file, where alt.drugs survives with the terse description “Use rec.drugs.misc instead.” and alt.drugs.chemistry survives with its original description unchanged. Both names are still in the census, thirty-two years on. The alt hierarchy is, as its own proponents observed, almost impossible to destroy.

Why the group is studied: the literature and what it argues

The reason a directory page about this address can be written at all, without describing anything the page has undertaken not to describe, is that there is a real and substantial scholarly literature about online drug-information communities. It is written by pharmacists, medical toxicologists, psychiatrists, criminologists, sociologists and information scholars; it is about circulation, community, accuracy and policy; and it does not, as a rule, contain chemistry. That is the level at which this section reports it.

The earliest relevant study is also the one closest to Usenet’s own machinery. In August 1997 J. A. Seaboldt and R. Kuiper published, in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, a comparison of the answers given to drug-information questions on a Usenet newsgroup with the answers given by institutional drug information centres. They took twenty-five questions from five years of a pharmacy journal’s continuing-education sections, posted them to the newsgroup sci.med.pharmacy from assorted addresses over ten weeks, and telephoned the same questions to randomly selected centres. A panel of four pharmacists judged the replies. Thirty-one per cent of the newsgroup responses were judged correct against fifty-six per cent from the centres — a difference the authors reported as statistically significant, and the only controlled comparison of newsgroup answers against institutional ones that this page was able to locate. It was made on a professional group, not on this one.

The Internet’s drug-information libraries were surveyed at the turn of the decade by M. P. Bogenschutz of the University of New Mexico, writing in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs in 2000. His finding was more equivocal than the era’s public debate generally allowed: the information he surveyed was, he reported, largely accurate on the effects of substances and their biological sources, and his stated concern was less that the material was wrong than that its sheer availability “could have significant effects on patterns of drug use”. In March 2001 J. H. Halpern and H. G. Pope of McLean Hospital reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry on eighty-one sites they had located by standard search techniques, concluding that a reader could now “bypass traditional channels of medical information”, and noting the near-absence of comparable government material on the same subjects. In June 2002 P. M. Wax, a medical toxicologist, made a related argument from clinical cases in Pediatrics.

Through the 2000s the field widened. R. F. Forman surveyed the availability of websites selling controlled substances in Psychiatric Services in 2006. E. W. Boyer and colleagues published work in CyberPsychology & Behavior in 2007 on what they termed innovative drug users — people who learn about a substance online and then relay what they learn onward — a study notable here because its subject is transmission rather than content: how material found online was passed on, in that study by instant message, into wider peer networks. In the same year P. Deluca and F. Schifano, writing with the Psychonaut 2002 Research Group, published in the American Journal on Addictions an analysis of what an ordinary web searcher would find about a single widely-discussed compound: they identified and classified 280 sites, of which roughly half took an anti-drug line, a quarter a pro-drug line and a sixth a harm-reduction line, and they reported that the pro-drug sites appeared significantly earlier in the results. The first book-length treatment appeared in 2007: Real Drugs in a Virtual World: Drug Discourse and Community Online, an edited collection of 252 pages published by Lexington Books, catalogued to Edward Murguía and Ann Lessem.

By the 2010s the subject had a criminology as well as a medicine. Monica Barratt’s “Discussing illicit drugs in public internet forums”, presented at the fifth International Conference on Communities and Technologies in 2011, treated the forum as a community rather than as a hazard. Charlotte Walsh’s “Drugs, the Internet and Change” appeared in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs the same year. Barratt, with Simon Lenton and Matthew Allen, published “Internet content regulation, public drug websites and the growth in hidden Internet services” in Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy in 2013, a paper whose title states its thesis. C. Soussan and A. Kjellgren’s qualitative analysis of three international forums appeared in the Harm Reduction Journal in 2014. And Judith Aldridge and David Décary-Hétu’s work on cryptomarkets, from 2014 onward, extended the same questions to a technically different generation of venue.

One caution has to be attached to all of it, and this page attaches it prominently rather than in a footnote: none of this literature is about alt.drugs.chemistry. Not one of the works cited above names it. They are about the class of venue to which it belonged, and about the questions its existence raised. Anyone citing this page should cite it for that distinction, not against it.

The frame: technical knowledge outside its institutions

The reason the literature exists at all is that these venues were an early, unusually legible instance of a general phenomenon: specialist technical knowledge circulating outside the institutions that had previously held it, among people with no institutional credentials, at no cost, and at the speed of a news feed.

That phenomenon has a scholarship of its own, developed largely on other cases. The standard reference point is Steven Epstein’s Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1996), a study of how treatment activists in the 1980s and 1990s acquired enough technical fluency to argue with clinical researchers on the researchers’ own ground and, in some measure, to change how trials were designed. Epstein was writing about a different subject in a different setting, and he was not writing about newsgroups of this kind; the comparison is offered here as a description of the intellectual frame available for thinking about such cases, not as a claim about what Epstein argued or about what this group was.

What made the online drug-information venues of the 1990s a distinctive case, in the terms the literature actually uses, was the combination of three things: the material was technical, its circulation was in most jurisdictions of contested legality, and the venue was fully public. A newsgroup had no membership, no gatekeeper, no subscription and no barrier of any kind between a passing reader and whatever the group happened to be discussing that day. That is what made these venues interesting to researchers, and it is the same property that made them interesting to legislators.

Law aimed at substances: the analogue and generic technique

The legal context in which this group lived was shaped by a drafting problem that long predated the Internet. A statute that controls substances by naming them can be answered by making something it does not name. Legislatures responded in two broadly different ways, and the difference matters for what follows.

The United States chose an open-textured standard. The Federal Analogue Act, enacted in 1986 and codified at 21 U.S.C. § 813, provides that a chemical “substantially similar” to a substance in Schedule I or II is to be treated as if it were itself in Schedule I, but only where it is intended for human consumption. The provision has been criticised for indeterminacy since its passage, and the objection has been raised from the bench as well as by defendants. In United States v. Forbes, a 1992 decision of the federal district court for Colorado, the definition was held void for vagueness as applied, on the ground that it provided “neither fair warning nor effective safeguards against arbitrary enforcement”; the Act was not amended in response, and the particular compound at issue was instead added to the schedules by name. The objection is intrinsic to the design: a standard that catches what a list cannot must leave its own boundaries to be found case by case.

The United Kingdom chose the opposite technique. Rather than an analogue standard, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was amended to carry what are usually called generic statements: structural descriptions drawn widely enough to capture whole families of related compounds in advance, with the first such sub-paragraphs added in 1977 and further ones in 1986. The result is a statute that is more determinate than the American one and considerably harder to read, and which requires periodic redrafting as the boundary is tested: further generic paragraphs and substitutions have been made to the same schedule in 2002, in 2015 and again in 2025. In 2016 Parliament abandoned enumeration altogether for a residual category of substances, with the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which received Royal Assent on 28 January 2016 and came into force across the United Kingdom on 26 May 2016; it works by defining a general effect and then carving out exemptions.

None of this is law about information, and this page includes it for one reason only. Under a scheme of that kind, the question of what is and is not controlled stops being a matter of looking up a name and becomes a matter of construction — and questions of construction are, in the ordinary way of things, discussed. The legal boundary itself became a topic. That is the setting in which the era’s arguments about published information took place, and it is why those arguments were harder than the equivalent arguments about, say, published lists.

Law aimed at communication rather than substances

American federal drug law has contained provisions directed at communication since its modern foundation. Section 843(b) of the Controlled Substances Act, in force since 1970, makes it unlawful “to use any communication facility in committing or in causing or facilitating the commission of” a felony under the drug chapters, and defines a communication facility, expansively, as “any and all public and private instrumentalities used or useful in the transmission of writing, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds of all kinds”, including “mail, telephone, wire, radio, and all other means of communication”. Each separate use is a separate offence. The provision predates the network by a decade and is drafted broadly enough to reach it, but it is tied throughout to the commission of an underlying felony; it is not, and was never, a prohibition on discussion.

Two further paragraphs of the same section, added in 1988 and rewritten in 1993, make it an offence to possess, manufacture, distribute, export or import specified items of equipment, or any equipment, chemical, product or material that may be used to manufacture a controlled substance, where the person knows, intends or has reasonable cause to believe it will be so used. This page does not reproduce the list of items those paragraphs name. It is enough to record that by the early 1990s the statute reached objects as well as substances, and reached them through a state-of-mind test rather than through a prohibition on the objects themselves.

The provision that comes closest to the subject of this page is the advertisement offence at section 843(c), added in 1994 by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. It makes it unlawful to place in any publication a written advertisement known to have the purpose of seeking or offering illegally to receive, buy or distribute a Schedule I substance. And then, in the same paragraph, it draws the line that the whole of the era’s argument would turn on:

The term “advertisement” does not include material which merely advocates the use of a similar material, which advocates a position or practice, and does not attempt to propose or facilitate an actual transaction in a Schedule I controlled substance.

The carve-out is not incidental drafting. It is Congress, in the year alt.drugs.chemistry was created, writing into the statute itself the distinction between speech about a subject and the proposal of a transaction. The same distinction was carried forward verbatim in structure when the section was extended to the Internet fourteen years later: paragraph (c)(2), added by the Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act in 2008, prohibits knowingly using the Internet to advertise the sale of, or offer to sell, a controlled substance without authorisation, and then excludes material that “merely advocates the use of a controlled substance or includes pricing information without attempting to facilitate an actual transaction involving a controlled substance”.

Read together, the 1994 and 2008 provisions describe the settled American position on this narrow question with unusual clarity: the offence is the transaction, and its proposal, and not the discussion. What follows describes the one sustained federal attempt to move that line.

The information provision that was proposed and not enacted

On 17 August 1999 Public Law 106–54 added subsection (p) to 18 U.S.C. § 842. It makes it unlawful to teach or demonstrate the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device or a weapon of mass destruction, or to distribute by any means information pertaining to their manufacture or use, either with the intent that the teaching or information be used in furtherance of a federal crime of violence, or knowing that the recipient so intends. The provision is drafted around a state of mind: the same words distributed without that intent or knowledge are not within it. It remains the model for every subsequent American attempt to legislate about instructional material.

Three months later, on 19 November 1999, the Senate engrossed S. 486 of the 106th Congress, the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999. Section 205 of that bill would have inserted a new chapter 22 into title 18 of the United States Code, containing a single section — a proposed 18 U.S.C. § 421, “Distribution of information relating to manufacture of controlled substances”. Its prohibition is the explosives provision with the nouns changed:

It shall be unlawful for any person—(A) to teach or demonstrate the manufacture of a controlled substance, or to distribute by any means information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture of a controlled substance, with the intent that the teaching, demonstration, or information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime; or (B) to teach or demonstrate to any person the manufacture of a controlled substance, or to distribute to any person, by any means, information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture of a controlled substance, knowing that such person intends to use the teaching, demonstration, or information for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime.

The penalty proposed was a fine, imprisonment for not more than ten years, or both.

It was not enacted. The bill went no further than the Senate; the record at the Government Publishing Office holds an introduced version, a reported version and the Senate-engrossed version, and no House or enrolled version at all. The short title was ultimately enacted in 2000 by a different route: Title XXXVI of the Children’s Health Act of 2000, Public Law 106–310, signed on 17 October 2000, provides that “this title may be cited as the ‘Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 2000’”. That title runs to four subtitles, the first of them divided into four parts covering criminal penalties, enhanced law enforcement, abuse prevention and treatment, and reports. It contains no information-distribution offence. Chapter 22 of title 18 of the United States Code does not exist, and section 421 was never created.

The same Act does, however, contain the clearest statement Congress ever made of what worried it about online drug information. Among the statutory findings of its Subtitle C is this, quoted here with the substance name elided by this page’s own rule and nothing else changed:

Due to the popularity and marketability of [the substance], there are numerous Internet websites with information on the effects of [the substance], the production of [the substance], and the locations of [its] use … The availability of this information targets the primary users … who are most often college students, young professionals, and other young people from middle- to high-income families.

A finding is not an operative provision and creates no offence. But it is the legislature putting on the record, in October 2000, that the existence of publicly available online information of this kind was a matter it had considered — and it did so in the same statute from which the offence that would have addressed it had disappeared. What that statute did instead, in its miscellaneous subtitle, was direct attention to the supply side of the same problem: a section headed “Antidrug messages on Federal Government Internet websites”. That is a response to availability by publication rather than by prohibition, and it is what the enacted statute contains in the place where the Senate’s offence would have stood.

The constitutional argument, as its participants made it

The reason the drug-information provision failed where the explosives provision succeeded is not recorded in the statutes, and this page does not speculate about it. What is on the record is the shape of the argument that was running at the time, and that argument had been formally commissioned by Congress itself.

Section 709 of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, enacted on 24 April 1996 and headed “Determination of constitutionality of restricting the dissemination of bomb-making instructional materials”, directed the Attorney General to study, among other things, “the extent to which there is available to the public material in any medium (including print, electronic, or film)” providing such instruction; “the application of Federal laws in effect on the date of enactment” to that material; “the need and utility, if any, for additional laws”; and “an assessment of the extent to which the first amendment protects such material and its private and commercial distribution”. The report was due within 180 days and was required to be made public. It is a statutory instruction to the executive to decide, in writing, whether the government may lawfully prohibit the publication of instructions — and Congress issued it three and a half years before the Senate applied the same drafting to a different subject.

The doctrinal background is Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), in which the Supreme Court held that government may not punish inflammatory speech unless it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”. On any straightforward reading, general instructional material published to the world at large is a poor fit for a test built around imminence and likelihood, and that is the objection that opponents of information-restriction statutes made throughout the period.

Against it stood the most consequential decision of the era on publisher liability. In Rice v. Paladin Enterprises, decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on 10 November 1997, a unanimous panel held that a how-to manual published in 1983 was not protected by the First Amendment against a civil claim that the publisher had aided and abetted a murder committed by one of its readers. The case never reached trial on the merits; the publisher’s insurers settled on 21 May 1999 over the publisher’s objection. This page describes the case only at that level, names no content, and takes no position on whether it was rightly decided.

The third element is the network itself. In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, decided on 26 June 1997, the Supreme Court struck down the anti-indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — the first major ruling on the regulation of material distributed over the Internet, and one which established that online speech was not to be treated as a lesser category. The two 1997 decisions and the 1969 test were the fixed points available to anyone arguing the question at the time, and they did not resolve it between them.

This page reports the disagreement and adjudicates none of it. The relevant historical fact for a directory entry is narrower and can be stated without taking a side: throughout the period in which this group existed, whether a government could lawfully prohibit the publication of technical instructions was an open and actively litigated question, and the one federal bill that would have answered it for this subject was passed by one chamber and enacted by neither.

Enforcement, and where it was actually directed

Enforcement in this area, so far as the public record shows, was directed at transactions rather than at discussion. The clearest example from the period is Operation Web Tryp, a United States Drug Enforcement Administration investigation that concluded on 21 July 2004 with ten arrests. Its targets were websites selling compounds whose legal status was contested — not forums, not newsgroups, and not authors.

The scholarly observation usually made about that period is a displacement argument, and it belongs to Barratt, Lenton and Allen, whose 2013 paper in Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy connected Internet content regulation aimed at public drug websites with the subsequent growth of hidden Internet services. The claim is reported here as theirs. It is worth noting that the mechanism they describe — visible venues becoming less visible under pressure — is a general one, and that the same argument, with different subject matter, runs through the history of other kinds of restricted information on Usenet; the parallel case in this directory is alt.new.cracks, where the information at issue was software rather than chemistry and the statutes were copyright statutes.

No source consulted for this article records any enforcement action of any kind against alt.drugs.chemistry, against its proponent, or against any identified participant in it. That is stated as a limit of the record and not as a finding of fact: the absence of documentation about a group with almost no external documentation proves very little.

The harm-reduction disagreement, reported and not resolved

Running underneath the legal history is a disagreement about consequences that the literature has not settled. It is set out here as its participants made it, in their own emphases, and this page reaches no conclusion about it.

The position that open technical discussion increases harm was argued most directly by clinicians. Halpern and Pope, in 2001, framed their finding as a bypass: readers could now reach detailed material without passing through any of the channels through which medical caution had historically travelled, and they observed that the cautionary material a searcher might have encountered instead was, at the time they looked, largely absent. Wax, writing for a paediatric readership in 2002, argued the case from clinical presentations, and drew particular attention to the appeal of sites whose register was one of responsible use rather than of prohibition — the very quality that makes such material persuasive being, on his account, the source of the risk.

The position that open discussion reduces harm was argued most systematically by researchers who read the venues at length rather than surveying them. Soussan and Kjellgren’s 2014 analysis in the Harm Reduction Journal examined 13,082 posts across sixty discussion threads on three international forums and coded what the participants were actually doing. Their conclusion is quoted here in full because summarising it would flatten it:

The findings showed that the discussions were characterized by a social process in which users supported each other and exchanged an extensive and cumulative amount of knowledge … Although this publicly available knowledge could entail an increase in drug use, the main characteristics of the discussions in general were a concern for safety and harm reduction, not for recruiting new users.

Between the two sits a finding that is uncomfortable for both. Bogenschutz, surveying the drug-information libraries in 2000, reported that what he read was largely accurate on effects and sources — which weakens the standard misinformation objection while strengthening the standard availability objection. Seaboldt and Kuiper’s 1997 experiment cuts the other way, and cuts at the venue rather than the subject: answers volunteered on a Usenet newsgroup by whoever happened to be reading were, on their measurement, substantially less likely to be correct than answers from a staffed information centre. Both findings are about accuracy; they do not agree; and neither was made on this group.

The disagreement is therefore not one that better evidence has resolved, and a directory page is not the place to resolve it. What can be said without taking a side is that the argument long outlived the venue. It was made about newsgroups in the 1990s, about web forums in the 2000s, about cryptomarket forums in the 2010s; the venue changes and the argument does not.

The archive question: nobody decided this

There is one fact about a group like this one that is more consequential than anything in its charter, and it was not the result of any decision made by anybody connected with it.

When alt.drugs.chemistry was created in July 1994, Usenet was understood by nearly everyone using it as an ephemeral medium. Articles expired off a server after days or weeks. There were archives, kept by individuals and institutions for their own reasons, but there was no general, public, searchable index of what had been said. Posting to a newsgroup was, in the mental model of the time, closer to speaking in a room than to publishing a document.

Eight months later that stopped being true. The Deja News Research Service began operating in March 1995, founded by Steve Madere in Austin, Texas. Its innovation was not archiving, which had always happened, but the combination: public access, a web interface, search across all archived groups, immediate results, and messages retained indefinitely. On the standard account of the service and its successor, that combination transformed Usenet from a loosely organised and ephemeral communication tool into a valued information repository — and it did so retroactively, to material written by people who had had no reason to expect it.

Mechanisms for opting out followed the fact rather than preceding it. An X-No-Archive header would keep an article out of the archive if the poster thought to use it, which required knowing that it existed. A facility known as nuking let posters remove their own messages from the index; it was introduced under user protest and legal pressure after the founder’s initial reluctance to remove anything, kept available for years, and later withdrawn without explanation under subsequent ownership, though nukes already in effect were honoured. Previously nuked messages were also, at one point, restored by mistake. Neither mechanism could do anything about a message quoted in someone else’s reply, which is how a great deal of Usenet content survives regardless of what its author later wanted.

The consolidation came next. Google acquired the Deja archive in February 2001 and, by the end of that year, had extended it backwards to 11 May 1981 — the earliest material coming from tapes preserved by Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto and donated by the University of Western Ontario. What had been a commercial search service became a component of the largest search index in the world. From May 2014 European residents could apply to have results for their own names delinked under the right to be forgotten, and Google Groups was among the most heavily delinked sites in the years that followed. On 22 February 2024 Google Groups stopped supporting new Usenet content altogether; the existing archive remained available.

The sequence is worth stating without adjectives, because the adjectives are what would turn it into an argument. A medium whose participants had understood it to be transient was archived wholesale, by commercial actors, without consultation, and the archive was then made searchable by name, indexed globally, and preserved past the death of the medium. That happened to every newsgroup equally: to the cookery groups, to the support groups, to the country and culture groups documented elsewhere in this directory, and to this one. The material that a group like this carried therefore persists, is searchable, and outlives every institution that produced it — and nobody, at any point, decided that it should. It illustrates the general point, which is why this page makes it here and why the related question of what an archive does to the people in it is treated at greater length on our alt.privacy page.

Why this directory preserves the address

news2mail.com was a Usenet gateway. This address existed because the gateway carried the group, and the page at it once listed the messages then arriving. The directory that survives is a record of what the gateway carried; entries are therefore kept on the basis of what the gateway carried rather than of what their subjects were.

So the address is kept, and it resolves to this. A citation to /alt/drugs/chemistry_messages.html now resolves to a dated administrative record, a set of verifiable claims about the group’s creation and its place in a namespace, a survey of the scholarly literature that treats venues of this kind, and an account of the statutes and cases of the period. It resolves, pointedly, to none of the group’s contents. Readers arriving from the alt.* hierarchy page or from the all-groups list get the history and not the material.

That is a deliberate editorial position and it is stated here so that anyone citing the page knows exactly what they are citing. It is not a claim that the material is unobtainable; obviously it is obtainable, by anyone who wants it, from the archives that hold it. It is a claim about what this page is for. A directory entry is a finding aid for a name. It is not obliged to be a copy of what the name once pointed at, and this one is not.

What the record does not show

The gaps here are large and it is worth listing them, because a reader who assumes this page is comprehensive will draw wrong conclusions from its silences.

• The call for votes referred to in the creation message is not preserved in the control archive. The reported tally of 27 to 2 therefore cannot be checked against a published ballot, and the constituency it was drawn from is unknown beyond the fact that the discussion took place in alt.config and the group was “widely approved of in alt.drugs”.
• The creation message’s date of 7 July 1994 and the August booster’s reference to a group “created in the spring” do not agree. There is no third source in the archive to settle which is right.
• The two Requests for Discussion date the parent group to 1986 and to 1987 respectively, two weeks apart and over the signatures of the same proponents. Neither figure is independently corroborated here.
• No subscriber count for the group exists. The 1995 Arbitron figure is a sampled readership estimate reproduced inside an advocacy document, not a count of anything.
• No moderator, no FAQ, no periodic posting and no charter revision is recorded for the group anywhere this article could find. It was unmoderated from creation and remained so.
• No rmgroup was ever sent for it, although two separate group-creation documents, in April and November 1995, said one would be. Whether the schedule was attempted and failed, or simply abandoned, is not recorded.
• The date on which the group effectively ceased to carry traffic is unknown and probably unknowable; groups of this era faded rather than closed, and the newsgroups file records only that the name was never struck.
• No academic work names this group. No enforcement action against it is recorded. No press coverage of it was found. Its reputation, such as it is, is a reputation attaching to a class of venue rather than a documented history attaching to this address.

None of that is unusual for an alt.* group of the period, and none of it has been filled in with plausible-sounding invention. Where this page states a number, a name or a date, it comes from a document that can be fetched and read.

Scope and limits

A set of deliberate omissions runs through everything above. They are listed here so that they read as policy rather than as ignorance.

• No substance is named beyond what is unavoidable to identify the group’s subject in the most general terms — which, as it turns out, is nothing at all: the charter and the newsgroups line do the work.
• No precursor, reagent, solvent, item of apparatus, reaction, route, yield or method appears anywhere above. Where a quoted primary document named one, the name has been elided and the elision flagged in the text.
• No synthesis of anything is described, summarised, outlined, alluded to, characterised or compared with any other, at any level of detail, however historical and however widely published elsewhere.
• No method of analysis, identification or testing is explained.
• No dosage, no effects, no sourcing and no harm-reduction guidance appears. This page offers no advice to any reader about anything.
• No archive of this group is linked, and nothing from the group is quoted. Every quotation above is from a control message, a group-creation document, a statute, a bill or a published academic paper.
• The one-line group description reproduced above is the description carried in the Internet Systems Consortium’s newsgroups file and in the 1994 control message. It is a directory label, not a summary of contents.

On register: the disagreements described in this article are real, they are live, and people of good faith hold every one of the positions set out. This page reports them and endorses none of them. Where a court decided something, the decision is stated; where the law is unresolved, it is described as unresolved; where researchers disagree, both findings are given with their authors’ names attached. Nothing above is an argument for or against anything, and nothing above should be read as one.

Corrections are welcome, particularly from anyone holding the 1994 call for votes or any contemporaneous administrative document about this group. Corrections that would require describing what the group carried are not, and will be declined.