Ivory Wave

PHOTO OF AUTHOR BY MAGGIE LEE


“Soothing bath salts,” the description reads. “Relax and soak away IVORY WAVE. Concentrated bath salts… PLEASE do not use this as SNUFF!!! This is used to mimic the natural hot springs of the Greek sea… Once you have experienced ivory wave bath salts you will hoe to apply in the future.” Aside from the unusual use of the verb “hoe”, there is something else odd about Ivory Wave bath salts. Perhaps the seemingly superfluous warning against it being used as SNUFF—who would ever wish to snort the hot springs of “the Greek sea”? As it turns out, an unnamed member of our London office was overcome by curiosity and SNUFFED two entire bags of Ivory Wave, which resulted in a psychotic episode that lasted for at least four days and then five more days of crushing suicidal blackness. Even more scary when you consider that the two bags contained less than a gram of powder combined and it was shared with another person, a sturdy male in his 30s.

In the aftermath, he asked if I could shine some light on this mysterious eburnean powder, and at his behest I shall do just that.

The first question is: what is ivory wave? Good question. I don’t know. It has been rumoured to contain MDPV, pentylone, and even a somewhat obscure phenyltropane cocaine analogue called β-CFT. Thus far the only one of these ingredients it’s been proven to contain is MDPV and the rest is hearsay. If you’re not familiar with MDPV, you’re probably not a nerdy man who spends excessive time on the internet reading about designer drugs. MDPV is a highly potent pyrrolidinophenone-class psychostimulant that’s been circulating for some time, predating the mephedrone craze by several years. Despite it­­s anxiogenic, tremulous, paranoid shitty high—which makes you feel as if your apartment is filled with both physical and notional cats that endlessly dart through the corners of your vision—some people really like this stuff. MDPV was scheduled in the April 16 UK cathinone ban, so if Ivory Wave still contains MDPV, it’s illegal. And if it doesn’t, then the contents are truly unknown.

Here is the problem: openly selling legal drugs has become extremely difficult. If a vendor honestly identifies the ingredients of a blend it will only accelerate the rate at which the drug is scheduled after someone is hospitalised for abusing it like a moron. If I stagger into A&E clutching my chest moaning “Ivory Waaaave”, nobody really knows what I took, thus it cannot be banned immediately. Here is the second problem: eventually someone will figure out the contents of a given blend and when they do it will be banned. So the contents must continuously evolve in order to evade classification. This means that the MDPV containing Ivory Wave of March 2010 may see many incarnations by the time this article is printed. Quoth Heraclitus: “Upon those who rail bath salts the same ever different stimulants flow.”

Here is the third problem: the good people behind Ivory Wave do not want you or I to steal their proprietary drug formulae, so they keep the ingredients hidden to minimise competition—assuming they actually know the ingredients—it’s entirely possible that they have no idea whatsoever. Which means the only people who really know what is in these blends are the Chindian chemists who are synthesising them, i.e. the only people who are not snuffing them. This is an epoch of not-giving-a-shitness in the drug-consuming commonwealth. As our drug laws become increasingly strict, pure chemical compounds will all but disappear. Eventually we will enter an age where even the blends are simply blends of blends, and you will be lucky if you can find a metablend containing a few granules of the unknown drug(s) in Ivory Wave.

Next question: why does Ivory Wave make me feel like shit? Let me go right ahead and answer that for you with a resounding, echoic “I don’t know”, which I hope rattles the stones in the cathedral of your mind. I can speculate—dopamine reuptake inhibitors increase the quantity of extracellular dopamine, which stimulates post-synaptic dopamine receptors producing euphoria. Binging on said mysterious bath salt blend may increase the expression of surface dopamine transporters, resulting in a neurochemical environment somewhat analogous to a sieve full of sand. That is, if sand remaining in a sieve was necessary to get out of bed in the morning and an empty sieve made you want to slit your wrists. Or made you run around brandishing a pool cue fighting invisible malefactors and jump off a rocky cliff falling 300 feet to your death.

I can’t honestly say that Ivory Wave is dangerous. As far as I know, it’s good for you. But maybe you should consider what it might feel like sitting in a neurologist’s office 20 years hence recounting the foolish bath salt excesses of youth. And yes, I’m fully aware of the irony that my suggesting you do not use Ivory Wave is simply informing you about a potent unknown drug, a few keystrokes away from your nostrils, which you are now curious about. I fully understand this and it fills me with a sense of guilt and responsibility so, uh, please be careful.

HAMILTON MORRIS
Watch Hamilton meet Haitian zombies on VBS.TV from October 4th in Hamilton’s Pharmacoepia: Nzambi