I'm a native of Germany, where I am a university student. My interest in drugs is born of academic curiosity, triggered by a documentary about Dr. Timothy Leary.

I used to reside in a small village where several students lived in a small student dormitory. We were ten students and two families living in small apartments, housed in a converted barn. One of our neighbors was a police officer who had just finished at the police academy and was now walking a beat. She comes from a town near my own hometown, and is one year younger than me. We occasionally discussed our common interests in current events and mountain biking and every now and then she'd tell me about something that had happened at work.

One day she told me that they (two police cars with a total of four cops) had been called out to an apartment where a guy had gone totally berserk and trashed everything; not a single stick of furniture was left intact. The alarm call had come from a neighbor who thought that maybe some teenagers or a burglar had broken in. When the cops entered the thoroughly trashed house, they found a completely naked man standing in the middle of the bedroom, with blood on his hands and upper body. The police went into the room with their guns drawn and my friend asked him, "Sir, are you okay?" He replied, "I'm scared and I think I need an ambulance", and then slumped down on a pile of rubble. Still conscious and non-threatening, he started to tell them what he had taken. My friend summarized it as, "A whole pharmacy of shit I have never even heard of". To this I replied, "Like what? Coke and magic mushrooms?", whereupon my friend said, "That, and a shitload of different antidepressants and something called 2C-I. None of my partners knew what that was, and the hospital didn't quite know either."

"2C-I is a phenethylamine classified as a research chemical, kind of hard to get ahold of", I blurted out without thinking. At the time I was trying to study Portuguese as a break from my anthropology studies, so there is no way in hell that I had a really good reason to know about something the German police in the most drug experimenting and drug liberal town in Germany hadn't heard of.

In an instant, her eyes went from sheer amazement to a hard cop stare of Clint Eastwood proportions. "How - do - you - know - that?" she asked slowly. I thought and came up with a quick white lie: "I did an essay on drugs for an anthropology class, did my research on the Internet. There is a really good academic site called Erowid.org that has all kinds of information about nearly every drug imaginable."

"Oh, I see, care to show me?"

I did show her. And now, whenever my friend needs a neutral academic source on drug-related questions, she always uses Erowid. And that's the story of how at least one German cop uses Erowid for reference material.