'Born Illegal' -- Exploring the Powerful Advanced Psychedelics Invented by the Father of Ecstasy

By all accounts Anthony Reed was what you would have called a model citizen. In a very traditional sense, he was a hardworking young man looking at a very bright future. He attended an exclusive boarding school for gifted students, and after posting a near-perfect score on the ACT and a 3.7 GPA at Louisiana Tech University, he found himself wooed by graduate programs across the country. Rather than go straight to grad school, though, Reed felt it was his obligation to volunteer a portion of his most able-bodied years to what he called “the betterment of society.” He applied for an Americorps post and was quickly accepted and dispatched to the Berkshires in Massachusetts to begin work on a conservation project that helped maintain federally protected land.

In mid-April of this year, the 22-year old Reed took a well-deserved break and drove to the Wanee Music Festival in Live Oak, Florida. He brought with him gallons of homemade gumbo that he and a friend planned to give away, and three small doses of an obscure psychedelic compound known as “2C-I.” Each 10 mg dose was just enough for a stimulant effect, according to Reed, to keep him awake and dancing all night to Government Mule, Widespread Panic, and the Allman Brothers Band.

Reed was introduced to psychedelics sometime in his sophomore year of college, where he was very active on campus and maintained a high GPA, all the while choosing to smoke marijuana instead of doing “the typical college drinking thing.” He already knew marijuana was not the “evil, dangerous drug people portrayed it to be.”

“My experimentation with psychedelics came as a result of the same understanding I went through with marijuana... if I had been lied to my whole life about that, I figured I'd find out what else I was lied to about.”

Reed was interested in exploring psychedelics and researched a number of them on Erowid, the free and extensive internet archive of psychoactive substances that contains thousands of anonymous reports of the effects of various substances. After some basic experimentation with LSD,  Reed came to many profound realizations that fundamentally changed his life and worldview.

“I feel like I got a boost of motivation and developed my own understanding of how I relate to the rest of the universe and what part I play in this world.”

He shared his experiences anonymously on Erowid, and soon began exploring more compounds, where he learned about the 2C drugs. He was looking for something that had the potential “to give me other perspectives I had not otherwise experienced on LSD.”

Reed first heard of 2C-I by reading the experience reports on Erowid, and the book PIHKAL, an archive of psychedelic compounds created by Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a former research chemist for Dow Chemical who is best known for introducing MDMA to psychedelic culture, and who was also the inventor of 2C-I. Reed felt he made an informed decision that 2C-I was safe to try. No deaths had ever been reported on the substance.

“It also had the benefit, so I thought, of keeping me out of trouble.”

Reed believed it was not against the law to possess 2C-I since it is an “unscheduled” compound, meaning it does not appear on the federal schedule (or ranking system) of Controlled Substances, nor is it explicitly made illegal in any known law. This makes it technically “not-illegal.” This distinction was critical to Reed, because he had worked too hard to jeopardize everything he had going for him to risk getting busted for possession of illegal drugs.

That measure of security would prove to be chimeric.  

Expecting only 10,000 people, the festival was overwhelmed when three times that number flowed through the gates. In response, like flies to a bloated carcass, it also appears that a commensurate number of undercover police officers joined in. Word quickly began to circulate about the sheer number of cops among them, and the equally audacious number of people getting busted for what seemed like ultra-petty offenses like smoking pot.