A Dose of Dr. Zee

One man’s case for legalizing recreational drugs

- Jonah Brunet

In the spring of 2018, a new recreational drug briefly appeared on the Canadian market. It looked like white wine, came in fifty-millilitre bottles, and sold for roughly $10 apiece from a nondescript website. According to its inventor, Ezekiel Golan, the drug, called Pace, is a panacea for our postmodern, late-capitalist lives, capable of curbing excess in everything from food to shopping to sex. Through his company, Golan marketed Pace as an alcoholbinge-drinking mitigator.

Within nine months, it was shipped to some 1,000 customers across the country. One of these early adopters, posting a review to Pace’s website, described it as tasting “like dirty puddle water from a busy gas station” and characterized its effects as being “like a STRONG drunk except without the slurring of speech, or most of the imbalance issues, and absolutely zero hangover.” Five stars.

Exactly how Pace affects the brain is contested and something of a mystery. Golan’s theory is that the drug’s active ingredient, MEAI (or 5-methoxy2- aminoindane), works by binding to the brain’s 5-ht1A receptors and saturating the serotonin system, a process that can help mitigate cravings: roughly speaking, the more serotonin available to a person’s brain, the less they tend to desire things like alcohol and cigarettes. “It’s the ‘enough’ switch,” Golan says of MEAI. “[Serotonin] signals to the brain that it is satisfied, that it wants nothing.” And, at least anecdotally, Pace seems to work: over one-third of its online reviewers confirmed (and none denied) that, when they took the drug, they felt like drinking less.

Pace’s short run on the market ended in December 2018, when a CBC reporter wrote a story about Golan’s new alcohol alternative. She sent a media request to Health Canada, tipping the regulator off.