Legal Highs? Looking at Legal Drugs Through History
- Filip
- Jul 27, 2025
- 3 min read
In 1898, Bayer launched a new wonder drug. It was fast-acting, non-addictive (allegedly), and more effective than morphine. They called it… heroin.
Technically speaking, it was legal — and marketed as medicine. So was cocaine. So were amphetamines. The history of legal highs isn’t a straight line from prohibition to purity. It’s a looping, hallucinogenic feedback system of loopholes, branding, and chemical sleight-of-hand.
This piece isn’t just about what gets you high. It’s about how legality and synthetic innovation keep reshaping that high — from Victorian pharmacies to early internet headshops to today’s designer drugs that exist in a legal grey fog.
1. The Original High Was a Prescription Pad
Let’s start at the beginning. Most of what we now call “hard drugs” started their lives inside medicine cabinets. Heroin was sold as a cough suppressant. Cocaine was an energizer. Meth was a diet pill. LSD was tested in psychiatric clinics and Cold War basements alike.
Legality was never about morality. It was about marketing. If a substance could be patented, bottled, and advertised with a bowtie doctor on the label, it was golden — at least until the public started panicking or dying. Then it was banned. Then the cycle restarted.
2. Legal Doesn’t Mean Safe — or Simple
Fast-forward to the late 20th century. As countries tightened bans on well-known substances, underground chemists started tweaking molecules just enough to create new ones. These were called research chemicals — synthetic drugs designed to mimic banned substances while technically avoiding legal classification.
This is how things like 2C-B, MXE, and spice (synthetic cannabinoids) entered the scene. They were “legal” not because governments approved them, but because no one had caught up yet.
The irony? Many of these compounds were far less tested, more unpredictable, and often more dangerous than the substances they were mimicking.
3. The Rise of the Grey Market
The internet turned legal highs into a full-blown industry. By the 2000s, you could order entire lab-synthesized experiences from early darknet forums or sketchy “plant food” sites — all stamped “not for human consumption.” Classic loophole.
Bath salts. Flakka. Novel benzodiazepines. The names changed, but the hustle stayed the same: stay one step ahead of legislation, ride the hype, rebrand, repeat. Some countries began issuing blanket bans on entire drug families. Others tried scheduling them one by one — a bureaucratic game of whack-a-mole with real human fallout.
4. Cultural Legality vs. Chemical Reality
We also need to talk about alcohol. And nitrous. And caffeine. These are all legal highs, too — but their legality has more to do with history, capitalism, and cultural norm than pharmacology.
Nitrous is legal at your dentist’s, illegal in nightclubs. Ayahuasca is banned in most places — unless you’re part of a sanctioned religious ceremony. Psychedelics like psilocybin are rapidly being decriminalized and reframed as wellness tools, despite decades of being Schedule I substances.
So the question isn’t just what’s legal?It’s who decides, how quickly, and for whose benefit?
5. The Future: Legal by Design?
With the psychedelic renaissance in full swing and pharmaceutical startups patenting new psychoactive compounds for anxiety, trauma, and depression, the line between a legal high and a clinical one is blurrier than ever.
Will the next MDMA be prescription-only? Will psilocybin retreats become luxury wellness vacations? Are we heading for a world where only certain highs are legal — and only for those who can afford them?
And what happens to the underground, once the overground starts taking its cues from it?
Legal, "Legal" or Illegal
Legal highs have never just been about chemistry — they’re about power, control, access, and culture. From lab coats to corner shops, from cough syrup to crypto, the story of synthetic highs is a story of how we chase euphoria through loopholes, how we regulate altered states, and how the definition of “legal” keeps slipping through our fingers — one molecule at a time.
