Some think the government is gaining too much control over us at the very instant that I think the opposite is happening. Pretty soon, as the anarchy of the Internet is loosed back into the real world, it will be tougher to control much of anything. Big Brother can watch, but can he act?

That wonderful Browser blog pointed me to “The Drug Revolution No One Can Stop,” Mike Power’s Medium article about designer drugs that are made to order and delivered to you like a chair, a lamp, a knife. An excerpt:

“MXE is part of a cultural shift that started a generation ago, but has taken on a new edge in the last few years. In 2008, the first in a wave of new, legal, synthetic drugs emerged into the mainstream. They had little to no history of human use. Instead, they were concocted in labs by tweaking a few atoms here and there—creating novel, and therefore legal, substances. Sold mainly online, these designer drugs cover every category of intoxication imaginable, and their effects resemble the full range of banned drugs, from the mellowness of marijuana to the extremes of cocaine and LSD. They are known as ‘legal highs,’ and they have exploded in popularity: the 2012 Global Drugs Survey found that one in twelve people it surveyed worldwide takes them.

Legislators around the world have been put off-balance by the emergence of this massively distributed, technically complex and chemically sophisticated trade. And the trade is growing rapidly.

In 2009 The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction’s early warning system identified 24 new drugs. In 2010, it identified 41. In 2011, another 49, and in 2012, there were 73 more. By October 2013, a further 56 new compounds had already been identified—a total of 243 new compounds in just four years.

In its latest World Drug Report, the United Nations acknowledged this extraordinary expansion: ‘While new harmful substances have been emerging with unfailing regularity on the drug scene,’ it said, ‘the international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon.’

Technology and drugs have always existed in an easy symbiosis: the first thing ever bought and sold across the Internet was a bag of marijuana. In 1971 or 1972, students at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory used ARPANET—the earliest iteration of the Internet—to arrange a marijuana deal with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”