rec.drugs.smart

Long-form reference · 3,497 words · about a 15-minute read

Created April 1996, by 185 votes to 66

Most online communities have fuzzy beginnings. rec.drugs.smart has a birth certificate. On 8 April 1996, David C. Lawrence — the moderator of news.announce.newgroups, whose control messages sent from uunet.uu.net were what actually brought Big Eight newsgroups into existence — issued the newgroup command for rec.drugs.smart, noting that the group had passed its creation vote by 185 to 66, as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 2 April 1996.

The vote cleared the era's standard bar for a Big Eight group — a two-thirds majority with at least a hundred more yes votes than no — comfortably rather than triumphantly. The one-line description distributed for servers' newsgroups files was a model of compression: "Smart drugs (nootropics)." The charter, preserved in the same control message, was only slightly less brisk:

A newsgroup dedicated to nootropics ("smart drugs"): cognitive enhancers that claim to boost intelligence, memory or mental stamina. Possible topics include descriptions of effects; availability of nootropics; etc. Anabolic steroids are *not* considered an acceptable topic. Attempts to sell or trade controlled substances in these groups are *not* permissible. Discussion of the merits of legalization and the morality of using drugs is off topic and should be conducted in talk.politics.drugs.

It is a tightly drawn document. Effects and availability are in; anabolic steroids are pointedly out; selling or trading controlled substances is banned; and the era's loudest drug argument — legalisation and the morality of use — is exported wholesale to talk.politics.drugs. The exclusions say as much about the proposers as the inclusions do: this was to be a group about a specific class of substances and the claims made for them, not another front in the drug war.

Nor did it arrive alone. rec.drugs.announce, a moderated companion group for low-volume announcements — new FAQ revisions, changes in drug law, conference notices — passed in the same round of results by 196 votes to 56 and was created days later, on 17 April 1996, with a stated target volume of one to two messages a day. Pairing a discussion group with a moderated announcement channel was standard good practice in the mid-1990s Big Eight, and its presence here already signals a community that took its documentation seriously.

The mechanics behind those vote counts were themselves a period institution: a Request for Discussion posted to news.announce.newgroups, a public argument in news.groups, then a Call for Votes conducted by neutral volunteer votetakers, with the tally published for anyone to check. The process was bureaucratic, slow and frequently bad-tempered — and it produced, as a by-product, exactly the sort of paper trail that lets a page like this one cite dates and numbers rather than folklore.

The long road out of alt.*

The name carried a decade of history. A newsgroup called rec.drugs had famously been refused in 1987, and that refusal was one of the provocations that led John Gilmore and Brian Reid to found the anything-goes alt.* hierarchy — a story told properly on our alt.* page. The practical consequence for this subject was that online drug discussion spent its first decade in alt.drugs and its offshoots: unofficial groups, patchily carried by news servers, and entirely outside the formal machinery of hierarchies like rec.*.

Within that family, smart-drug traffic had collected in alt.psychoactives, alongside the broader alt.drugs readership. The mid-1990s brought a deliberate migration. In July 1995 the first wave of Big Eight drug groups passed their votes — rec.drugs.cannabis (by a hefty 365 to 93), rec.drugs.misc and rec.drugs.psychedelic, with results reported on 10 July 1995 and the newgroup messages issued the following week. Drug discussion, refused at Usenet's front door in 1987, walked back through it eight years later with charters in hand.

rec.drugs.smart belonged to the second wave, nine months on. Its proposal presented the group as the successor to alt.psychoactives, which was to be deleted once its replacement was established. How cleanly that deletion actually happened is harder to say: removing an alt.* group was always advisory, honoured or ignored server by server, and the sources on alt.psychoactives' precise fate are thin. What is not in doubt is where the centre of gravity went — after April 1996, the smart-drug conversation's canonical address was in rec.*.

Nor was smart the only specialism chartered in that second round: the same 2 April results created rec.drugs.chemistry, which passed by 188 votes to 62 and received its newgroup message in the same 8 April batch. (The control archives also hold a 1998 newgroup message for a rec.drugs.jimson-weed, ostensibly from the same moderator, whose stated 64-to-56 tally fails the hierarchy's own hundred-vote rule — by then spoofed control messages were a familiar nuisance, and this one has the look of them.) That "smart" earned a group of its own is itself telling: rec.drugs.misc's official one-line description had read "Stimulants, sedatives, smart drugs, et cetera", and within nine months the third item on that list had outgrown the et cetera. Nootropics discussion concerned substances that were mostly legal, was argued in the vocabulary of clinical literature, and was read by people who did not necessarily consider themselves part of drug culture at all. It had fitted awkwardly in alt.drugs, and it knew it.

Nor was rec.* the subject's only official address. The sci.* hierarchy carried sci.life-extension — the organised home of the movement Pearson and Shaw had popularised — and sci.med.nutrition, both of whose territory bordered this group's. Where exactly a question about, say, choline belonged was the kind of jurisdictional puzzle Usenet's crossposting conventions existed to fudge; the point is that by the mid-1990s the cognitive-enhancement conversation had a small constellation of chartered venues, where a decade earlier it had had none.

The smart-drug moment

The cultural wave that filled the group's sails had been building for a decade and a half. Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw's Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach (1982) was the precursor text: a doorstop bestseller that taught a lay audience to read pharmacology journals, dose themselves accordingly, and treat ageing itself as an engineering problem. Its blend of genuine citations and heroic extrapolation set the template for everything that followed — including the arguments about whether the extrapolation was justified.

The movement acquired its own handbook in 1990 with Ward Dean and John Morgenthaler's Smart Drugs & Nutrients, which condensed the case for piracetam, hydergine, vasopressin and the rest into something a curious reader could act on; a sequel followed in 1993. On the newsgroup the book occupied a curious double role: recommended to newcomers as the fastest orientation available, and simultaneously dissected by regulars who measured its enthusiasm against the clinical literature it cited — often finding the citations real but the conclusions considerably sunnier than the papers underneath them.

Around the books swirled the period colour: "smart bars" serving amino-acid "smart drinks" to the rave scene, magazine and television features on cognitive enhancement as the coming thing, and the cyberculture press — Mondo 2000 conspicuous among it — treating nootropics as standard equipment for the approaching future. The coverage peaked in the early 1990s and receded, as such fashions do.

The mainstream response ran sceptical from the start: period coverage of smart bars and mail-order nootropics rarely appeared without an unimpressed pharmacologist attached, and the medical press treated the movement's claims as unproven throughout. What is notable in retrospect is that the newsgroup's own hard core did not entirely disagree — the group inherited the movement's reading list and much of its vocabulary, but never quite its confidence.

Which makes the group's timing quietly funny: Usenet's machinery voted rec.drugs.smart into existence in 1996, comfortably after the cameras had left. What remained by then was the residue that settles when a fashion drains away. The people still reading were disproportionately the ones interested in earnest, and the group's signal-to-noise ratio was the better for it.

Thirty years of prior art

The subject was much older than the hype. Piracetam was synthesised in 1964 by Corneliu Giurgea (1923–1995), a Romanian-born psychologist and chemist working at the Belgian firm UCB; the company went on to sell it across much of the world under the name Nootropil. In 1972 Giurgea coined the word nootropic — from Greek roots meaning "mind" and "to bend or turn" — for the class of substances he believed piracetam had inaugurated, together with an optimistic set of criteria a compound was supposed to meet before it earned the label.

Giurgea's criteria did double duty in the smart-drug world as both definition and battleground. As usually summarised, a true nootropic was to enhance learning and memory, protect the brain against insult, and do all this while lacking the stimulant or sedative profile of the classical psychotropics — with next to no toxicity. Judged strictly, most of what the era sold as smart drugs failed the test, and the definitional tension between "nootropic" in Giurgea's sense and "smart drug" in the marketing sense was well understood by the literature's more careful readers, this group's included.

By way of a footnote the group's regulars would have appreciated: Giurgea died on 30 December 1995, some fourteen weeks before the newsgroup organised around his coinage was created. The compounds it debated were, for the most part, already middle-aged. Hydergine had been prescribed for decades; deprenyl and vasopressin came out of mainstream medicine; DMAE and vinpocetine had long paper trails; and the herbal contingent was led by ginkgo biloba, whose history is measured in centuries rather than decades.

This mattered for the group's character. Because the substances were old, there was literature — real, peer-reviewed, frequently ambiguous European clinical literature — and because there was literature, there was something to argue about beyond anecdote. A newsgroup devoted to a genuinely novel drug class would have had only its members' reports to go on; rec.drugs.smart had three decades of published papers to fight over, and fought over them with relish.

What the threads were made of

Self-experimentation was the staple genre. Regimen logs and single-subject reports arrived steadily — what was taken, in what amounts, in what combinations, with what perceived result — followed just as steadily by arguments over what an unblinded sample of one could actually demonstrate. The placebo effect was not an embarrassment the group tiptoed around; it was practically a named participant in half the threads.

The recurring subjects map almost exactly onto the contents page of the era's smart-drug literature:

• Piracetam and its relatives, above all in combination with choline — the canonical "stack", and the group's single most-argued-about topic;
• prescription compounds carried over from mainstream medicine — hydergine, deprenyl, vasopressin — and the claims lay users made for them;
• the over-the-counter and herbal contingent: DMAE, vinpocetine, ginkgo biloba;
• the practical traffic of any pharmacology group — questions of dose, timing, tolerance and combination — recorded here as period belief, not as guidance;
• and the perennial newcomer's question of whether any of it worked at all, customarily answered with a pointer to the FAQ.

The sharpest recurring argument was about extrapolation. Nearly all of the clinical literature on the classic nootropics concerned impaired populations, while nearly everyone posting was a healthy adult hoping for improvement on an unimpaired baseline; whether results in the first population implied anything about the second was the debate's structural fault line, on Usenet as everywhere else the subject was discussed. The piracetam FAQ that Erowid still maintains preserves this shape exactly — its research section is organised around studies of alcoholism, Alzheimer's disease, elderly drivers and children with dyslexia: patient groups, not healthy self-experimenters. The gap between where the evidence lived and where the enthusiasm lived was the era's defining problem, and the group's threads worried at it constantly.

The group also caught substances on their way up. Modafinil, a French wakefulness drug then barely known in the English-speaking world, was being discussed here while still an obscure import with striking claims attached — before its 1998 approval in the United States began turning it into the one smart drug everybody had heard of. Few corners of the archive date themselves so precisely.

What gave the group its lasting reputation, though, was the scepticism. A core of regulars treated citations as the price of admission: claims were expected to arrive with references, and references were expected to survive being read. The tone, at its best, was less drug den than journal club — the same insistence on sources that distinguished the era's better science-adjacent groups; alt.psychology fought a parallel version of the same battle. It is precisely this habit that made the archive age better than the fashion which produced it.

And because the substances had to come from somewhere, there were supplier reviews: reports on which overseas mail-order firms delivered, which substituted, and which vanished with the money. On most of Usenet, "where do I buy it" was the least interesting genre a group supported; here it shaded into one of the group's most distinctive subjects — the grey market itself.

The grey market, openly discussed

Piracetam and several of its relatives occupied a genuinely odd legal position in the United States: never approved as medicines, and therefore not marketable as drugs, yet not scheduled as controlled substances either. Possession was lawful; domestic sale was restricted; and the standard route to a supply was importation from countries where the same compounds were ordinary licensed pharmaceuticals.

The instrument that made this semi-respectable was the FDA's personal-use importation policy, whose modern form had been shaped in the late 1980s when AIDS activists pressed the agency to tolerate small personal imports of unapproved treatments. The policy was discretionary guidance rather than a right — legal enough to discuss openly, ambiguous enough to discuss at length — and the group did both, at length.

The commercial backdrop shifted in mid-decade. The United States' Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 redrew the boundary between supplement and drug just as the rec.drugs.* groups were being created, and much of the "smart nutrient" end of the market — the cholines, the amino acids, the herbal products — lived on the supplement side of that line, sold domestically without efficacy review. The pharmaceuticals proper stayed on the import side. The grey market was therefore really two markets with a statutory line between them, and learning which side of the line a given substance fell on was half the practical education the group's threads provided.

Hence a genre of thread that reads today like comparative regulatory fieldwork: country-by-country surveys of what required a prescription where, what a given customs service was believed to make of a small package, and how the period press's coverage of European and Mexican mail-order houses squared with subscribers' actual experience. The charter's flat ban on selling or trading controlled substances sat comfortably alongside all this, because the substances in question mostly were not controlled — a distinction the group policed with some care, since it was what kept the whole conversation respectable.

FAQ culture

Like every substantial newsgroup of its era, the smart-drug community distilled its recurring arguments into periodically posted FAQs — the great Usenet institution by which a group spared itself re-fighting its founding battles for each new arrival, and part of the newcomer folklore that groups like alt.newbie existed to explain. The wider drug hierarchy was well served by the tradition: the alt.drugs FAQ, for one, was archived on the standard FAQ mirrors alongside thousands of others.

The smart-drug corner's own FAQ output is best documented today through the documents that drifted onto the web. The clearest survivor is the piracetam FAQ — first drafted in 1997 by Chris Schoon and still maintained in Erowid's vaults, where its most recent revision dates to 2006 — which lists rec.drugs.smart among its Internet resources. Whether a single canonical rec.drugs.smart FAQ ever entered the formal news.answers archive is harder to establish from what survives; the tradition itself, and its migration to the web, is not in doubt.

The FAQs proved more durable than the group that produced them. Revised, reposted and mirrored on the early web, they are the form in which most readers now meet the group's accumulated arguments — and, since the drug-information archives that absorbed them point back at their sources, they are the route by which many readers arrive at this page.

Why the archives cite a newsgroup

This page's most consistent readership arrives from the Erowid family of drug-information archives and from grassroots harm-reduction sites — which is worth explaining, because it says something about what Usenet-era material is for. Erowid was founded in 1995, and the systematic web archives of drug information all post-date the start of the newsgroup era. Through the first half of the 1990s, contemporaneous first-person reports about nootropics accumulated in exactly one kind of public place, and this group and its alt.* predecessors were that place.

The claim deserves to be made modestly. What the archive preserves is a record of what a self-selected population of enthusiasts and sceptics believed, reported and argued in the middle 1990s — not evidence that any of it worked, and emphatically not a source of usable pharmacological guidance. Doses, combinations and safety claims in posts approaching thirty years old are historical artefacts, nothing more. The era's own regulars, demanding references from one another, would have been the first to say so.

There is also a plainer, structural reason the archives point here. A Usenet post is citable in a way most early online writing is not: it carries a date, an author line and a globally unique message identifier, and the major archives preserved all three along with the text. When a modern reference site wants to show that a claim, a coinage or an adverse report was circulating in 1996, a newsgroup post is often the most checkable evidence that survives.

Read as history rather than advice, though, the material has real value. It documents the vocabulary and the stacking habits at their point of origin; it records which claims were circulating before the modern information sites existed to check them; and it preserves the scepticism alongside the enthusiasm, which is precisely the balance a later researcher needs and rarely gets.

Dispersal and revival

The conversation eventually went the way of Usenet conversations generally. As web forums and mailing lists matured in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the traffic dispersed to them, and the group declined through the same spam-thickened afterlife as most of the unmoderated hierarchy. There was no dramatic ending; there rarely was.

The subject, though, declined to stay buried. Cognitive enhancement re-emerged in the following decades under new branding — "nootropics" again, now flanked by "biohacking" — with its own web communities, commercial vendors and press cycle. A striking amount of it was familiar: the racetams and choline, the stacking habit, the grey-market importation of unapproved compounds, and the running argument about whether self-experiment can demonstrate anything at all. The revival's debates were substantially the ones this group had already rehearsed, conducted for the most part by people with no idea they were revivals.

By the time the revival matured, its participants had built precisely the institutions the newsgroup never had — wikis, community-funded testing of vendors' products, large moderated forums — and rediscovered precisely the problems it had documented: unverifiable claims, grey-market quality control, and the stubborn scarcity of trials in healthy adults. Anyone who reads the 1990s threads next to their modern descendants will find the family resemblance immediate; only the typography has really moved on.

The archival record

rec.drugs.smart is unusually lucky in its paperwork. Created in April 1996, its entire lifespan falls inside the era of systematic Usenet archiving: DejaNews had begun collecting newsgroup traffic in 1995, and that collection — which passed to Google in 2001 — spans the group's whole existence. There is no lost early period here, as there is for the groups born in the 1980s.

DejaNews deserves its footnote in this story for another reason: by making Usenet searchable from an ordinary web browser, it changed what posting meant. A report typed for a few thousand newsreader users in 1996 became, without its author doing anything, a permanently searchable document — a shift the era's posters understood imperfectly at best, and one worth keeping in mind when reading candid self-experimentation reports that were never exactly written for posterity.

The archive's later custodial history is less happy — Google wound down Groups' support for Usenet in 2024, and access to the old material has depended on it and on independent preservation efforts since — but the group's record is well anchored at both ends. Its birth certificate survives verbatim in the archived control-message collections, down to the vote count, and its FAQ material survives in the drug-information archives that cite it. For an unmoderated 1990s newsgroup on an unfashionable subject, that is about as well-documented as an afterlife gets.