VICE (2013) s03e05 Episode Script
Synthetic Drug Revolution & Transsexuals of Iran
Shane Smith: This week on "VICE" the future of recreational drugs.
We're looking for new psychoactives.
We're developing hundreds and hundreds of new drugs.
Morris: This is all industrial level synthesis.
Smith: Then, the reality of sex change surgery in Iran.
They have two gender norm-- male and female.
And if you're anything in between, you're sick and have to fix yourself.
(speaking foreign language) (theme music playing) (chanting) I'm currently inside a lab in Shanghai, China.
This is the future of recreational drug use.
They basically find gay Iranians in Iran and help underground railroad them out of the country.
Bath salts have made some sensational and disturbing headlines over the last few years.
As one of the strangest, and oftentimes dangerous drugs to hit the streets.
Police say 20-year-old Quinn Albers is responsible for killing 30-year-old Katherine Gick.
He purposely abused bath salts, and didn't remember anything leading up to Gick's death.
Now, bath salts are not actually salts that you put in your bath, they're just a nickname for one of a host of new synthetic drugs that are designed to skirt current narcotics laws.
They're cheap, relatively easy to make, hard to track and trace, and extremely popular with young people.
So "VICE's" Hamilton Morris took a closer look at this new frontier of recreational drugs.
Man: Can I get the one with the strawberry? And the one next to it? Clerk: $18.
Morris: This is Felipe and Wolfe, two Brooklyn-based DJs who agreed to show us how easy it is to buy a new class of drugs called synthetic cannabinoids right here in New York.
Morris: Which ones did you get? He recommended this one.
- This is new, apparently.
- Oh, wow.
Second generation.
It's legal.
Good, so we have nothing to worry about.
(electronic music playing) Morris: The new psychoactive substances flooding gas stations, corner stores, and the Internet, are one of the fastest-growing drug markets in the world.
The DEA estimates that the industry is now worth billions of dollars, with hundreds of different chemical compounds to serve any kind of high you're looking for.
There are stimulants, sedatives, dissociatives, psychedelics, and cannabinoids-- each with thousands of possible variations.
Synthetic cannabinoids are the most popular drugs in America for high school students, surpassed only by marijuana, a drug their effect is supposed to mimic.
Given the surge in new psychoactive substances, government authorities around the world have started paying much closer attention.
We spoke with DEA representative Rusty Payne.
I think people don't realize, especially in this country, that there's a completely new frontier of drugs out there.
Over the last five or six years, we've identified over 300 new drugs.
And many have been very much scrutinized by the government, and Congress has actually made them illegal.
Morris: Although hundreds of psychoactive drugs have been prohibited, manufacturers stay one step ahead of the law by tweaking the drug's molecular structure, creating a new compound that technically isn't illegal.
In an effort to skirt regulations, the drugs are marked with a "Not for human consumption" disclaimer and deceptively sold as incense, potpourri, or bath salts.
Payne: These are unregulated chemicals overseas, many of them.
They're shipped in bulk over here, and they're distributed either retail or Internet sites here in the US.
Parents have no idea, a lot of times, that their child can go online and buy a psychoactive substance for pretty cheap and get it in the mail.
What people haven't realized is how dangerous that is, because nobody really knows what's in these chemicals.
It's something that is smoked or snorted and it's potentially deadly.
(whimpering) (screaming) Payne: If you ask the emergency room treatment facilities across the country, their numbers are up, and a lot of times, they don't know what they're dealing with.
(laughing) Morris: The synthetic cannabinoid market has been expanding globally for the last five years.
(screams) In New York City alone, synthetic cannabinoid associated emergency department visits rose 220% in the first six months of 2014.
ER doctors citywide say they are dealing with a huge spike in cases related to the abuse of synthetic marijuana.
Springhill hospital, alone, is averaging up to five severe cases of this every day.
We just started seeing a mushrooming of calls.
Some drug baron that's making big money off people's addictions-- of course he's gonna be the one to tell you, "Oh, yeah, I should be able to do this legally, "without any scrutiny.
" He doesn't care about these abusers of drugs.
Simply put.
(grunting) Morris: But as we are about to find out, the modern synthetic drug industry began with the goal of actually making drug use safer.
In the search to find out where these drugs come from and exactly how they're made, the trail led us to the other side of the planet-- New Zealand.
There we met up with what seemed like the world's least-likely drug baron, Matt Bowden.
- (goat bleating) - (folk music playing) Over the last 15 years, Bowden, a recovered methamphetamine addict, has created a veritable pharmaceutical empire from the sale and manufacture of new psychoactive drugs in New Zealand, allowing him to realize his wildest fantasies-- a sprawling estate with private recording studio, a steampunk fashion line, and a starring role in an intergalactic rock opera.
So how did this eccentric musician become the godfather of a synthetic drug revolution? I asked him in his laboratory.
(beeping) This is the only lab of its kind in the world, I think.
Can you give the entire story of you got into this research? I'm trying to understand what's different about New Zealand, what allows this lab to exist.
What really got me involved in this area was we're an island in the middle of nowhere.
The cocaine boat just doesn't stop here, and so methamphetamine was the drug of choice.
And you do go quite crazy doing that.
People losing their families, losing their businesses, and so we had to do something about it.
In the late '90s, I started working with chemists and asking, "Would it be possible to look for a molecule "which can substitute for methamphetamine in addicts "that has a far safer profile?" And one of them was BZP.
Right through the clubbing community, the drug of choice changed.
Methamphetamine sort of went out, and BZP came in.
Morris: Bowden's research suggested that BZP was less harmful to users than methamphetamine, so he set out to get the compound legalized as a safer, alternative drug.
Bowden: I rocked down to Wellington, where the Parliament is, asked, "Who's writing the drug laws?" and sat down and said, "We need to change the laws around here.
" So they said, "Okay, let's do some research.
" And it worked, so they said, "Okay, let's rewrite these drug laws.
" Very pragmatic and practical, and we just did it.
(cheering) Bowden: We started packaging them into pills and making them available, so you could buy them in nightclubs with people who are awake at 4:00 in the morning bouncing up and down like yo-yos.
Morris: Stargate International became one of the only pharmaceutical companies dedicated exclusively to creating new, legal, recreational drugs.
Bowden: Over an eight-and-a-half-year period, about 26 million pills were consumed by 400,000 consumers, and there were no lasting injuries.
Morris: Bowden's success inspired less-scrupulous manufacturers to release an array of competing products, creating a synthetic drug boom that didn't sit well with many New Zealanders.
Eventually we had 30 or 40 different brands of pills, and they were for sale right across the board, in the corner stores, next to where children buy lollies and ice blocks.
Mommies and daddies saw that and thought, "This isn't cool.
"We don't want our children exposed to these brands.
" So a lot of people sort of turned and said, "This is a bad idea.
" And politicians, unable to convince the wider public that we were changing direction away from the war on drugs, decided to ban BZP pills.
And as things started to be banned in New Zealand, they started to be banned everywhere else.
Morris: Bowden's company responded by manufacturing an unregulated derivative of MDMA, called Methylone.
This pill here was an ecstasy-replacement product and it came in this sort of container.
Looks more like an engagement ring box.
So it's kind of like, "Would you like to "have a very intense, emotional, "three to four hour relationship with me?" Morris: Soon, Methylone was prohibited as well, so Bowden moved on again.
He built a state-of-the-art laboratory in order to stay ahead of the government by continuously developing new compounds.
So this lab was set up for our R&D.
We're looking for new psychoactives.
We're developing and designing hundreds and hundreds of new molecules, and just looking for the best ones.
Morris: Bowden's business is now focused on synthetic cannabinoids, and he's trying to build safer variations of the same products that have been prohibited in the US.
Some cannabinoids are an oil, and other cannabinoids are an incredibly pure, white powder.
That shows how sophisticated the chemists working in Matt's lab is.
But one problem is that not all labs share Bowden's level of sophistication and dedication to quality control.
If there's no motivation to develop safer drugs, then what's gonna happen is that the cheapest, nastiest, strongest drugs are gonna float to the surface.
And anybody with a phone can Google the name of a molecule, order something like it from any of the hundreds of suppliers that are now around the planet, and have it shipped out to them.
Those things can move around.
They can't be stopped.
Morris: To get a firsthand look at the massive scope of production, we headed to China, the manufacturing hub for everything from iPhones to acne medication to synthetic cannabinoids.
Using Bowden's long-standing relationships with Chinese labs, we were granted exclusive access to manufacturing facilities that are usually off-limits.
I'm currently inside a lab in Shanghai, China, where synthetic cannabinoids are designed and produced on a mass scale.
These five rotovaps could easily allow the lab to produce kilos or maybe even tons of a given chemical if they wanted to.
This is equipment that they use to characterize the compounds that they're making.
This room definitely contains at least a million dollars worth of analytical equipment.
This is all industrial-level synthesis.
This is something that I actually know very little about.
It's one thing to make a couple grams of a chemical, but it's an entirely different thing to make metric tons in a lab like this.
Bowden: Medicines are produced in bulk like this, the things are dried out here on the table, the solvents are evaporated off under lights, and cannabinoids, ecstasy, and other drugs are produced in exactly the same manner.
This is the future of all recreational drug use.
It's a cheaper, easier way to make drugs.
This could easily represent millions of dollars of profit, both for this lab and for all the people down the line that sell it in smoking blends.
It's certainly cheaper than growing cannabis plants.
There's no question about that.
And it's easier to ship.
It doesn't have any odor.
There are no drug sniffing dogs that are trained to detect this material.
To test how easy it is to buy kilogram quantities of ultra-potent synthetic cannabinoids, we went to another lab posing as potential customers.
We were amazed by the sheer volume of synthetic cannabinoids stacked casually around the lab.
(speaking foreign language) Oh, wow.
That's quite a bit.
Oh, okay.
Morris: Considering that each dose may be a small fraction of a milligram, what I'm holding might amount to millions of hits.
(man speaking foreign language) Morris: But this was just one order.
A representative then went on to show us other cannabinoid compounds that he's been making for overseas customers.
(speaking foreign language) (interpreter speaking foreign language) (man speaking foreign language) Is the business growing or getting smaller? (interpreter speaking foreign language) (man speaks) Interpreter: Growing.
There's an idea that we should place blame on the Chinese manufacturers.
To them, it doesn't really matter.
If someone says, "Can you put this carbon next to this carbon?" They don't know if this is a glue to go inside the next part of Nike's shoe, or if this is some sort of a compound that's gonna be used in a coloring agent in wallpaper.
It's not really a concern for them.
Morris: Whether it was an amphetamine, psychedelic, or cannabinoid, they were eager to synthesize whatever compound I requested.
(interpreter speaks) (man speaking foreign language) (interpreter speaks) Bowden: Instead of saying, "These guys are bad.
"Let's shut them down.
Let's lock them up.
" Why don't we put some safety standards in place? So that we know at least what we are consuming is gonna be safe enough.
It's not gonna hurt us.
The only solution that I can see, as we move forwards, is a regulatory system which rewards safer alternatives.
It's unclear which of these will be toxic until they're introduced into a large human population.
It's like a giant clinical trial.
Bowden: At the end of the day, you've got to realize that in the pharmaceutical industry, things are tested on animals.
These things here are probably gonna be tested by somebody's children.
Morris: And considering the size of the market, we're talking about an uncontrolled trial that spans the globe.
I've been told that there are about 160,000 chemical manufacturing companies in China.
160,000 is a lot.
Those are just ones that we know of, and it makes the law enforcement challenge even greater.
When we do research on a particular substance, there's always a new derivative or a new chemical compound similar to it that is being manufactured.
I'm not gonna sit here and tell you we're gonna arrest our way out of the problem.
We're not gonna legislate our way out of this.
You're talking about a completely different game.
And for the government in the United States, it's become a game of whack-a-mole.
Ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when the Shah was overthrown, Iran has been ruled by fundamentalist Islamic law.
Iranian people are united, and they believe, and all of them are behind Khomeini leadership.
Smith: Today, women must wear head coverings in public, all alcohol is banned, and homosexuality is strictly forbidden.
(speaking foreign language) Translator: In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country.
(laughter) Translator: We don't have that in our country.
(booing) Now what's strange is that in the time since Iran banned homosexuality, it's actually become one of the world's capitals for sexual reassignment surgery.
Now to see if there's a connection between the two, we sent Thomas Morton to meet with Iranian refugees who fled this anti-gay policy.
(cheering) (participant speaking) (siren wails) Hi, it's Thomas.
I'm in Toronto at the World Pride Parade.
It's basically the gayest place on the planet right now.
There's a guy running the show back there in blue shorts named Arsham.
He runs an organization called The Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees.
They basically find gay Iranians in Iran and help underground railroad them out of the country.
He brings them here to Canada where they are basically free to be whatever they want.
How many people a year does the IRQR help? Since 2005, 885 cases.
On average, we have I grew up in Iran as a heterosexual guy.
I had to be a heterosexual guy.
Homosexuality is punishable by death.
Among all of the Muslim clergy and the justice system, the only difference and the only argument is how we should kill them.
If I go back to Iran, I will be executed.
They believe that homosexuals are against God.
So they interpreted that since you want to change this one, you want to change the God's rule.
So you are against God, so you have to be killed.
Morton: One of the most recent Iranians that Arsham's group has helped find refuge in Toronto is Sohrab, who fled Iran with his boyfriend last year.
(speaking foreign language) Morton: After government officials established that Sohrab was gay, he was sent to see a psychologist to see if there was any alternative to arrest and execution.
(speaking foreign language) So what did you do? (speaking foreign language) Morton: Sohrab joined the hundreds of other gay Iranians who flee to Turkey every year.
Morton: Despite the fact that being gay is a capitol offense, transsexuality is completely off the books, which leads some Iranians who may otherwise identify as gay or lesbian to see being trans as their only legal option for coming out.
According to Iran's regime and Islamic ideology, they have two gender norm-- male and female.
And if you are anything in between, you're sick, and you have to fix yourself.
Morton: Iranian doctors perform some 300 operations a year.
Putting Iran up there with Thailand and the Netherlands as one of the sex change capitals of the Eastern Hemisphere.
While getting a sex change is surprisingly easy in Iran, getting a visa as an American reporter, unsurprisingly, is not.
So we sent a crew with international passports to film this improbable bastion of trans culture in the Muslim world.
Farimah is undergoing surgery today to transition from male to female.
(speaks foreign language) Up to now, she's had to hide her sexual identity from her family and neighbors.
(speaking foreign language) Morton: Before a person like Farimah can undergo this procedure, they are required to do up to two years of counseling, hormone therapy, and physical examinations to make sure they're actually transsexual.
Once they've passed, they receive their official diagnosis from a government board who stamps a permit authorizing the operation.
Dr.
Cohanzad is a renowned surgeon who, despite taking part in Iran's booming sex change trade, is very particular about whom he will and will not operate on.
(Dr.
Cohanzad speaking) Morton: Iran's legal code is based on Islamic law.
To clarify the Quran's distinction between homosexuality and transsexuality, we went to Qom, one of the Shiites' holiest cities to speak with Mohammad Mahdi Kariminiya, a prominent Muslim scholar and hafiz, which is someone who's memorized the entirety of the Quran.
(speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) Morton: So, because it's not explicitly dealt with in the Quran, the proper Islamic stance on transsexuality is left up to clerical interpretation, which prior to the 1980s, lumped it together with homosexuality as a form of perversion.
Then Ayotollah Khomeini met a trans activist named Maryam Molkara, had a change of heart, issued a fatwa, and all of a sudden, it was legal to be trans in Iran.
Amir Reza is one of the beneficiaries of Ayotollah Khomeini's pronouncement.
Once a married woman, Amir has now legally transitioned into a man.
(Amir speaking foreign language) Morton: While the legal status of transgender Iranians like Amir Reza changed overnight, social acceptance has come a lot slower.
(speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) Morton: Legalizing gender reassignment surgery may have made life better for trans men like Amir Reza, but has done nothing to improve the lot for Iran's gays.
(speaking foreign language) Morton: Harsh as they may sound, especially coming from a trans man's brother, these threats are fully in keeping with the Quranic stance on homosexuality.
(Mohammad speaking foreign language) Morton: While homosexuality ultimately carries the death penalty, there's no official records for how many Iranians are executed simply for being gay.
Hossein Alizadeh, an Iranian ex-pat who monitors Iran for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
helped explain this lapse.
The Iranian government, they recognize the international pressure that exists around these issues and the sensitivity when there's a public execution of a gay man, so what they try to do is that they try to cover up to always mix up the charges with something unrelated that seems so big that nobody can really protest to that.
Narrator: This videotaped backroom trial from the 1980s is some of the only footage of Iranians openly accused of homosexuality.
(speaking foreign language) (interrogator speaks) (man speaks) (speaks) (man speaks) (officer speaks) (interrogator speaks) (officer speaks) Morton: Two hours after this footage was shot both of these men were executed.
So can you tell me what it's like being gay in Iran? It really depends on your social-economic background.
For people who come from a more comfortable upper middle-class background, obviously it's very easy to conceal your real identity.
And whenever things get heated up, you always have a way, either to throw money at the problem or try to get out of the country.
But for the majority of people, I have to argue that's not the case.
If you live in a very controlled environment in a very closed society like Iran, admission of homosexuality means that you disappointed your society.
You failed your family.
People don't know who they are, people get confused, and the government tries to block access to information, intentionally, and promotes that homophobia, so that people feel cornered.
And then, all of a sudden, that surgery might seem something that they can work with.
Morton: For trans people like Farimah, it's a wildly progressive move.
But for gay Iranians trying to come to terms with their identity, in an environment clouded by such an enormous social pressure to conform, and where even basic sexual information is withheld by the government, it makes an already insanely difficult decision even harder.
(crying) (doctor speaks foreign language) (Farimah speaks) Arsham: It's not a solution, but a lot of people doesn't have another option.
They believe it's choice, but it's not a choice.
(machine beeping) (doctors chattering)
We're looking for new psychoactives.
We're developing hundreds and hundreds of new drugs.
Morris: This is all industrial level synthesis.
Smith: Then, the reality of sex change surgery in Iran.
They have two gender norm-- male and female.
And if you're anything in between, you're sick and have to fix yourself.
(speaking foreign language) (theme music playing) (chanting) I'm currently inside a lab in Shanghai, China.
This is the future of recreational drug use.
They basically find gay Iranians in Iran and help underground railroad them out of the country.
Bath salts have made some sensational and disturbing headlines over the last few years.
As one of the strangest, and oftentimes dangerous drugs to hit the streets.
Police say 20-year-old Quinn Albers is responsible for killing 30-year-old Katherine Gick.
He purposely abused bath salts, and didn't remember anything leading up to Gick's death.
Now, bath salts are not actually salts that you put in your bath, they're just a nickname for one of a host of new synthetic drugs that are designed to skirt current narcotics laws.
They're cheap, relatively easy to make, hard to track and trace, and extremely popular with young people.
So "VICE's" Hamilton Morris took a closer look at this new frontier of recreational drugs.
Man: Can I get the one with the strawberry? And the one next to it? Clerk: $18.
Morris: This is Felipe and Wolfe, two Brooklyn-based DJs who agreed to show us how easy it is to buy a new class of drugs called synthetic cannabinoids right here in New York.
Morris: Which ones did you get? He recommended this one.
- This is new, apparently.
- Oh, wow.
Second generation.
It's legal.
Good, so we have nothing to worry about.
(electronic music playing) Morris: The new psychoactive substances flooding gas stations, corner stores, and the Internet, are one of the fastest-growing drug markets in the world.
The DEA estimates that the industry is now worth billions of dollars, with hundreds of different chemical compounds to serve any kind of high you're looking for.
There are stimulants, sedatives, dissociatives, psychedelics, and cannabinoids-- each with thousands of possible variations.
Synthetic cannabinoids are the most popular drugs in America for high school students, surpassed only by marijuana, a drug their effect is supposed to mimic.
Given the surge in new psychoactive substances, government authorities around the world have started paying much closer attention.
We spoke with DEA representative Rusty Payne.
I think people don't realize, especially in this country, that there's a completely new frontier of drugs out there.
Over the last five or six years, we've identified over 300 new drugs.
And many have been very much scrutinized by the government, and Congress has actually made them illegal.
Morris: Although hundreds of psychoactive drugs have been prohibited, manufacturers stay one step ahead of the law by tweaking the drug's molecular structure, creating a new compound that technically isn't illegal.
In an effort to skirt regulations, the drugs are marked with a "Not for human consumption" disclaimer and deceptively sold as incense, potpourri, or bath salts.
Payne: These are unregulated chemicals overseas, many of them.
They're shipped in bulk over here, and they're distributed either retail or Internet sites here in the US.
Parents have no idea, a lot of times, that their child can go online and buy a psychoactive substance for pretty cheap and get it in the mail.
What people haven't realized is how dangerous that is, because nobody really knows what's in these chemicals.
It's something that is smoked or snorted and it's potentially deadly.
(whimpering) (screaming) Payne: If you ask the emergency room treatment facilities across the country, their numbers are up, and a lot of times, they don't know what they're dealing with.
(laughing) Morris: The synthetic cannabinoid market has been expanding globally for the last five years.
(screams) In New York City alone, synthetic cannabinoid associated emergency department visits rose 220% in the first six months of 2014.
ER doctors citywide say they are dealing with a huge spike in cases related to the abuse of synthetic marijuana.
Springhill hospital, alone, is averaging up to five severe cases of this every day.
We just started seeing a mushrooming of calls.
Some drug baron that's making big money off people's addictions-- of course he's gonna be the one to tell you, "Oh, yeah, I should be able to do this legally, "without any scrutiny.
" He doesn't care about these abusers of drugs.
Simply put.
(grunting) Morris: But as we are about to find out, the modern synthetic drug industry began with the goal of actually making drug use safer.
In the search to find out where these drugs come from and exactly how they're made, the trail led us to the other side of the planet-- New Zealand.
There we met up with what seemed like the world's least-likely drug baron, Matt Bowden.
- (goat bleating) - (folk music playing) Over the last 15 years, Bowden, a recovered methamphetamine addict, has created a veritable pharmaceutical empire from the sale and manufacture of new psychoactive drugs in New Zealand, allowing him to realize his wildest fantasies-- a sprawling estate with private recording studio, a steampunk fashion line, and a starring role in an intergalactic rock opera.
So how did this eccentric musician become the godfather of a synthetic drug revolution? I asked him in his laboratory.
(beeping) This is the only lab of its kind in the world, I think.
Can you give the entire story of you got into this research? I'm trying to understand what's different about New Zealand, what allows this lab to exist.
What really got me involved in this area was we're an island in the middle of nowhere.
The cocaine boat just doesn't stop here, and so methamphetamine was the drug of choice.
And you do go quite crazy doing that.
People losing their families, losing their businesses, and so we had to do something about it.
In the late '90s, I started working with chemists and asking, "Would it be possible to look for a molecule "which can substitute for methamphetamine in addicts "that has a far safer profile?" And one of them was BZP.
Right through the clubbing community, the drug of choice changed.
Methamphetamine sort of went out, and BZP came in.
Morris: Bowden's research suggested that BZP was less harmful to users than methamphetamine, so he set out to get the compound legalized as a safer, alternative drug.
Bowden: I rocked down to Wellington, where the Parliament is, asked, "Who's writing the drug laws?" and sat down and said, "We need to change the laws around here.
" So they said, "Okay, let's do some research.
" And it worked, so they said, "Okay, let's rewrite these drug laws.
" Very pragmatic and practical, and we just did it.
(cheering) Bowden: We started packaging them into pills and making them available, so you could buy them in nightclubs with people who are awake at 4:00 in the morning bouncing up and down like yo-yos.
Morris: Stargate International became one of the only pharmaceutical companies dedicated exclusively to creating new, legal, recreational drugs.
Bowden: Over an eight-and-a-half-year period, about 26 million pills were consumed by 400,000 consumers, and there were no lasting injuries.
Morris: Bowden's success inspired less-scrupulous manufacturers to release an array of competing products, creating a synthetic drug boom that didn't sit well with many New Zealanders.
Eventually we had 30 or 40 different brands of pills, and they were for sale right across the board, in the corner stores, next to where children buy lollies and ice blocks.
Mommies and daddies saw that and thought, "This isn't cool.
"We don't want our children exposed to these brands.
" So a lot of people sort of turned and said, "This is a bad idea.
" And politicians, unable to convince the wider public that we were changing direction away from the war on drugs, decided to ban BZP pills.
And as things started to be banned in New Zealand, they started to be banned everywhere else.
Morris: Bowden's company responded by manufacturing an unregulated derivative of MDMA, called Methylone.
This pill here was an ecstasy-replacement product and it came in this sort of container.
Looks more like an engagement ring box.
So it's kind of like, "Would you like to "have a very intense, emotional, "three to four hour relationship with me?" Morris: Soon, Methylone was prohibited as well, so Bowden moved on again.
He built a state-of-the-art laboratory in order to stay ahead of the government by continuously developing new compounds.
So this lab was set up for our R&D.
We're looking for new psychoactives.
We're developing and designing hundreds and hundreds of new molecules, and just looking for the best ones.
Morris: Bowden's business is now focused on synthetic cannabinoids, and he's trying to build safer variations of the same products that have been prohibited in the US.
Some cannabinoids are an oil, and other cannabinoids are an incredibly pure, white powder.
That shows how sophisticated the chemists working in Matt's lab is.
But one problem is that not all labs share Bowden's level of sophistication and dedication to quality control.
If there's no motivation to develop safer drugs, then what's gonna happen is that the cheapest, nastiest, strongest drugs are gonna float to the surface.
And anybody with a phone can Google the name of a molecule, order something like it from any of the hundreds of suppliers that are now around the planet, and have it shipped out to them.
Those things can move around.
They can't be stopped.
Morris: To get a firsthand look at the massive scope of production, we headed to China, the manufacturing hub for everything from iPhones to acne medication to synthetic cannabinoids.
Using Bowden's long-standing relationships with Chinese labs, we were granted exclusive access to manufacturing facilities that are usually off-limits.
I'm currently inside a lab in Shanghai, China, where synthetic cannabinoids are designed and produced on a mass scale.
These five rotovaps could easily allow the lab to produce kilos or maybe even tons of a given chemical if they wanted to.
This is equipment that they use to characterize the compounds that they're making.
This room definitely contains at least a million dollars worth of analytical equipment.
This is all industrial-level synthesis.
This is something that I actually know very little about.
It's one thing to make a couple grams of a chemical, but it's an entirely different thing to make metric tons in a lab like this.
Bowden: Medicines are produced in bulk like this, the things are dried out here on the table, the solvents are evaporated off under lights, and cannabinoids, ecstasy, and other drugs are produced in exactly the same manner.
This is the future of all recreational drug use.
It's a cheaper, easier way to make drugs.
This could easily represent millions of dollars of profit, both for this lab and for all the people down the line that sell it in smoking blends.
It's certainly cheaper than growing cannabis plants.
There's no question about that.
And it's easier to ship.
It doesn't have any odor.
There are no drug sniffing dogs that are trained to detect this material.
To test how easy it is to buy kilogram quantities of ultra-potent synthetic cannabinoids, we went to another lab posing as potential customers.
We were amazed by the sheer volume of synthetic cannabinoids stacked casually around the lab.
(speaking foreign language) Oh, wow.
That's quite a bit.
Oh, okay.
Morris: Considering that each dose may be a small fraction of a milligram, what I'm holding might amount to millions of hits.
(man speaking foreign language) Morris: But this was just one order.
A representative then went on to show us other cannabinoid compounds that he's been making for overseas customers.
(speaking foreign language) (interpreter speaking foreign language) (man speaking foreign language) Is the business growing or getting smaller? (interpreter speaking foreign language) (man speaks) Interpreter: Growing.
There's an idea that we should place blame on the Chinese manufacturers.
To them, it doesn't really matter.
If someone says, "Can you put this carbon next to this carbon?" They don't know if this is a glue to go inside the next part of Nike's shoe, or if this is some sort of a compound that's gonna be used in a coloring agent in wallpaper.
It's not really a concern for them.
Morris: Whether it was an amphetamine, psychedelic, or cannabinoid, they were eager to synthesize whatever compound I requested.
(interpreter speaks) (man speaking foreign language) (interpreter speaks) Bowden: Instead of saying, "These guys are bad.
"Let's shut them down.
Let's lock them up.
" Why don't we put some safety standards in place? So that we know at least what we are consuming is gonna be safe enough.
It's not gonna hurt us.
The only solution that I can see, as we move forwards, is a regulatory system which rewards safer alternatives.
It's unclear which of these will be toxic until they're introduced into a large human population.
It's like a giant clinical trial.
Bowden: At the end of the day, you've got to realize that in the pharmaceutical industry, things are tested on animals.
These things here are probably gonna be tested by somebody's children.
Morris: And considering the size of the market, we're talking about an uncontrolled trial that spans the globe.
I've been told that there are about 160,000 chemical manufacturing companies in China.
160,000 is a lot.
Those are just ones that we know of, and it makes the law enforcement challenge even greater.
When we do research on a particular substance, there's always a new derivative or a new chemical compound similar to it that is being manufactured.
I'm not gonna sit here and tell you we're gonna arrest our way out of the problem.
We're not gonna legislate our way out of this.
You're talking about a completely different game.
And for the government in the United States, it's become a game of whack-a-mole.
Ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when the Shah was overthrown, Iran has been ruled by fundamentalist Islamic law.
Iranian people are united, and they believe, and all of them are behind Khomeini leadership.
Smith: Today, women must wear head coverings in public, all alcohol is banned, and homosexuality is strictly forbidden.
(speaking foreign language) Translator: In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country.
(laughter) Translator: We don't have that in our country.
(booing) Now what's strange is that in the time since Iran banned homosexuality, it's actually become one of the world's capitals for sexual reassignment surgery.
Now to see if there's a connection between the two, we sent Thomas Morton to meet with Iranian refugees who fled this anti-gay policy.
(cheering) (participant speaking) (siren wails) Hi, it's Thomas.
I'm in Toronto at the World Pride Parade.
It's basically the gayest place on the planet right now.
There's a guy running the show back there in blue shorts named Arsham.
He runs an organization called The Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees.
They basically find gay Iranians in Iran and help underground railroad them out of the country.
He brings them here to Canada where they are basically free to be whatever they want.
How many people a year does the IRQR help? Since 2005, 885 cases.
On average, we have I grew up in Iran as a heterosexual guy.
I had to be a heterosexual guy.
Homosexuality is punishable by death.
Among all of the Muslim clergy and the justice system, the only difference and the only argument is how we should kill them.
If I go back to Iran, I will be executed.
They believe that homosexuals are against God.
So they interpreted that since you want to change this one, you want to change the God's rule.
So you are against God, so you have to be killed.
Morton: One of the most recent Iranians that Arsham's group has helped find refuge in Toronto is Sohrab, who fled Iran with his boyfriend last year.
(speaking foreign language) Morton: After government officials established that Sohrab was gay, he was sent to see a psychologist to see if there was any alternative to arrest and execution.
(speaking foreign language) So what did you do? (speaking foreign language) Morton: Sohrab joined the hundreds of other gay Iranians who flee to Turkey every year.
Morton: Despite the fact that being gay is a capitol offense, transsexuality is completely off the books, which leads some Iranians who may otherwise identify as gay or lesbian to see being trans as their only legal option for coming out.
According to Iran's regime and Islamic ideology, they have two gender norm-- male and female.
And if you are anything in between, you're sick, and you have to fix yourself.
Morton: Iranian doctors perform some 300 operations a year.
Putting Iran up there with Thailand and the Netherlands as one of the sex change capitals of the Eastern Hemisphere.
While getting a sex change is surprisingly easy in Iran, getting a visa as an American reporter, unsurprisingly, is not.
So we sent a crew with international passports to film this improbable bastion of trans culture in the Muslim world.
Farimah is undergoing surgery today to transition from male to female.
(speaks foreign language) Up to now, she's had to hide her sexual identity from her family and neighbors.
(speaking foreign language) Morton: Before a person like Farimah can undergo this procedure, they are required to do up to two years of counseling, hormone therapy, and physical examinations to make sure they're actually transsexual.
Once they've passed, they receive their official diagnosis from a government board who stamps a permit authorizing the operation.
Dr.
Cohanzad is a renowned surgeon who, despite taking part in Iran's booming sex change trade, is very particular about whom he will and will not operate on.
(Dr.
Cohanzad speaking) Morton: Iran's legal code is based on Islamic law.
To clarify the Quran's distinction between homosexuality and transsexuality, we went to Qom, one of the Shiites' holiest cities to speak with Mohammad Mahdi Kariminiya, a prominent Muslim scholar and hafiz, which is someone who's memorized the entirety of the Quran.
(speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) Morton: So, because it's not explicitly dealt with in the Quran, the proper Islamic stance on transsexuality is left up to clerical interpretation, which prior to the 1980s, lumped it together with homosexuality as a form of perversion.
Then Ayotollah Khomeini met a trans activist named Maryam Molkara, had a change of heart, issued a fatwa, and all of a sudden, it was legal to be trans in Iran.
Amir Reza is one of the beneficiaries of Ayotollah Khomeini's pronouncement.
Once a married woman, Amir has now legally transitioned into a man.
(Amir speaking foreign language) Morton: While the legal status of transgender Iranians like Amir Reza changed overnight, social acceptance has come a lot slower.
(speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) Morton: Legalizing gender reassignment surgery may have made life better for trans men like Amir Reza, but has done nothing to improve the lot for Iran's gays.
(speaking foreign language) Morton: Harsh as they may sound, especially coming from a trans man's brother, these threats are fully in keeping with the Quranic stance on homosexuality.
(Mohammad speaking foreign language) Morton: While homosexuality ultimately carries the death penalty, there's no official records for how many Iranians are executed simply for being gay.
Hossein Alizadeh, an Iranian ex-pat who monitors Iran for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
helped explain this lapse.
The Iranian government, they recognize the international pressure that exists around these issues and the sensitivity when there's a public execution of a gay man, so what they try to do is that they try to cover up to always mix up the charges with something unrelated that seems so big that nobody can really protest to that.
Narrator: This videotaped backroom trial from the 1980s is some of the only footage of Iranians openly accused of homosexuality.
(speaking foreign language) (interrogator speaks) (man speaks) (speaks) (man speaks) (officer speaks) (interrogator speaks) (officer speaks) Morton: Two hours after this footage was shot both of these men were executed.
So can you tell me what it's like being gay in Iran? It really depends on your social-economic background.
For people who come from a more comfortable upper middle-class background, obviously it's very easy to conceal your real identity.
And whenever things get heated up, you always have a way, either to throw money at the problem or try to get out of the country.
But for the majority of people, I have to argue that's not the case.
If you live in a very controlled environment in a very closed society like Iran, admission of homosexuality means that you disappointed your society.
You failed your family.
People don't know who they are, people get confused, and the government tries to block access to information, intentionally, and promotes that homophobia, so that people feel cornered.
And then, all of a sudden, that surgery might seem something that they can work with.
Morton: For trans people like Farimah, it's a wildly progressive move.
But for gay Iranians trying to come to terms with their identity, in an environment clouded by such an enormous social pressure to conform, and where even basic sexual information is withheld by the government, it makes an already insanely difficult decision even harder.
(crying) (doctor speaks foreign language) (Farimah speaks) Arsham: It's not a solution, but a lot of people doesn't have another option.
They believe it's choice, but it's not a choice.
(machine beeping) (doctors chattering)