Any idea what this fake cocaine was?

Factual Questions
1

In the closet of my old bedroom at my ma’s house I found an old issue of High Times magazine (December, 1981). I had already been married and out of the house by that time, so I’m thinking it was my brothers

Through out this mag there are ads for products called “Pseudo Caine”, Supercaine", and “Substitoot”. This is some kind of designer cocaine replacement that they claimed was legal. Probably not unlike the status of K2 and such today.

Any idea what this stuff was made out of? I got into law enforcement in 1982 and never came across anything like this. It’s obviously not available today, so I’m thinking it was outlawed. What exactly was this stuff?

2

Pseudocaine is a current slang term for crack cut with PPA (phenylpropanolamine). Don’t know if that’s what it was back then, or if it was just PPA, or something else. PPA was certainly legal then, in fact it was used in cold medicines and an active ingredient in Accutrim, a weight loss OTC. (It was the only cold med which worked for me, by the way.) It’s still legal in the UK. It’s a stimulant.

This is what supercaine is today, don’t know if that’s what it was back then. Doesn’t look very stimulating, but maybe it was a different percentage of epinephrine back then. The mixture of 1% lidocaine and 0.2% tetracaine with 1:200,000 epinephrine, so-called “supercaine,” has been used extensively for axillary brachial plexus blockade for several decades. Since the advent of bupivacaine, the supercaine mixture has fallen into relative disuse despite its record of effectiveness and safety.

Never heard of Substitoot, and a Google search yields nothing but MySpace pages (for a band, I assume).

3

I just read an article by Jack Shafer about “Designer Drugs”, where chemists would synthesize drugs, changing the chemical structure enough to push them into legality, but not enough to alter their effects.

The article appeared in Science magazine in 1985. Perhaps that’s what these ads sold?

The article goes into significant detail about the chemicals involved, and how there can be hundreds of variants of a molecule that have similar effects. It’s mainly about fake heroin, but maybe the same concept extends to cocaine and others.

4

I always assumed that these sort of things were sold to people who wanted to cut or dilute drugs for higher profits on resale…
I always assumed they were an innert or otherwise mostly non-intoxicating filler.