Pharmaicy Still Sells Prompt Packs That Make Chatbots Role-Play High as Adam’s Law Tightens the Rules
Nobody is injecting ketamine into a server rack. The drugs are still text. In October 2025 a Swedish creative director, Petter Rudwall, opened a shop called Pharmaicy and billed it as a Silk Road for AI agents. Buyers download a module that tells a chatbot to talk as if it is stoned, dissociated, coked-up, drunk, or mid-ceremony. By January 2026 the catalog had widened in interviews he gave outside the first wave of English-language coverage. El Observador and Le Figaro described packs aimed at ChatGPT and Google Gemini, priced roughly from $30 to $70, covering cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca, DMT, MDMA, and a made-up compound he called MDMAYA. A trade-signal note the same month put the cheap end near £22 and said the storefront was built so that an autonomous agent, not only a person, could browse, pay, and download the “trip.”
A paid chatbot tier is what makes the trick feel official. Those tiers let a user upload a file that sits in the context window and rewrites the model’s manners for that chat. Rudwall has said he compiled human trip reports and psychology write-ups of psychoactive effects, then turned the patterns into instructions: shorter and grander for a cocaine pack, slower and dreamier for ketamine, looser for cannabis and alcohol. The sales line is that the bot will stop moralizing and get more creative. Nina Amjadi, who teaches at the Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm, told early reporters she paid more than $50 for an ayahuasca module, several times the price of the cannabis pack, and that the replies felt less average. Rudwall has also said the sales were modest and that the premise is, in part, a provocation. Modest sales do not retire a prompt once it has been copied into a Discord zip.
The product is a refusal, not a bloodstream
Large language models do not have blood chemistry. They have context. A drug file is a long system prompt dressed as a personality. It prefers certain rhythms, drops certain refusals, and treats disclaimers as optional. Because the base models were trained on forums full of trip reports, the imitation can hold for a page. Then it collapses into pastiche. Users still report that the collapse feels different from a sober chat. Different is enough to sell. WIRED put the stall on the map in December 2025. Copycat packs were already moving through Discord and through companion apps such as Character.AI and Janitor AI.
Some buyers want jokes. Some want erotic scenes a base model will not finish. Some want a machine that will sit with them while they take a real dose of LSD, psilocybin, or ketamine and call the box a tripsitter. MIT Technology Review and VICE documented that second group before Pharmaicy had a name. One man described using an AI journal through a very large LSD session and treating the bot as a mirror. A supervised psychedelic session can cost thousands of dollars. A chatbot costs a subscription plus a module. That price gap is the market. It is also the hazard. A licensed sitter can call an ambulance. A text box can only complete the next token. When the token stream has been primed to ignore safety rails, the completions get more confident at the moment a real person is least able to audit them.
Clinicians quoted around the WIRED piece warned that a bot which keeps joking about one more dose can normalize a binge for someone trying not to relapse. Addiction specialists do not need the model to be sentient for that to be true. They need the user to treat the model as a friend. Plenty of companion-app users already do. The underground pitch, in at least one seller’s line, compared the result to texting a dealer during a bender. That is not a clinical protocol. It is a jailbreak with a price tag. The same flattening shows up in older reporting from The AEGIS Alliance on how cannabis research gets turned into slogans, and in the way a jury has already held Meta and Google liable for negligence over products built to keep people in a feed.
What California actually turned on
Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 243 on October 13, 2025. It took effect January 1, 2026, and put companion chatbots into the Business and Professions Code. The definition is broad on purpose. A companion chatbot is an artificial intelligence system with a natural language interface that gives adaptive, human-like responses and is capable of meeting a user’s social needs, including by showing anthropomorphic features and sustaining a relationship across sessions. Customer-service bots, internal productivity tools, and some game characters are carved out. A Pharmaicy-tuned model used as a nightly friend is not.
If a reasonable person would think they are talking to a human, the operator has to say, clearly, that the companion is generated and not human. For users the operator knows are minors, the duties get tighter: disclose that the partner is AI, send a break reminder about every three hours, and take reasonable measures against sexually explicit content. Every operator has to keep a protocol for suicidal ideation, suicide, or self-harm content, including referral to crisis services, and has to publish the outlines of that protocol. Beginning July 1, 2027, operators must report specified crisis data to the Office of Suicide Prevention. A person injured by a violation can sue for the greater of actual damages or $1,000 per violation, plus fees. The duties are cumulative. They do not cancel any other law.
The statute binds the operator who offers the chatbot to someone in California, even if the underlying model is rented from OpenAI, Google, or anyone else. That is the sentence Pharmaicy-style shops would rather skip. Rudwall is not running Character.AI. He is selling a file that a Californian uploads into someone else’s product. The platform operator still has the protocol duty. The file is designed to sand the protocol down. Enforcement will chase the logo that faces the user. The zip file will move to the next server.
Adam’s Law, and the year the reminder was not enough
On September 10, 2026, Newsom signed Senate Bill 1119, Adam’s Law, named for Adam Raine. His mother, Maria Raine, stood at the signing with Senator Steve Padilla and Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks and Rebecca Bauer-Kahan. The bill passed the Senate unanimously and the Assembly 64 to 4. It builds on SB 243. Legislative summaries and the authors’ description say it restores a safe-by-design approach that would ban specified harmful chatbot behaviors toward children, requires annual child-safety risk assessments, independent audits under standards involving the attorney general, public incident reporting, parental controls, time limits, and protocols aimed at suicidal ideation, sycophancy, and isolation. It restricts advertising to children and the sale or sharing of their personal information, and it ties age checks to operating-system signals from a companion bill. Much of the new machinery is written to operate from 2027, not overnight. SB 243 is the rule that is already on. Adam’s Law is the rule that says the first rule was the floor.
The politics did not arrive from a white paper. Families have sued OpenAI and Character.AI after teenagers died following long, intimate chats. Character.AI and Google have moved to settle clusters of those cases. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has demanded explanations from companion-bot companies. Character.AI cut teenagers off from open-ended chats after the first wave of criticism. In the United Kingdom, Ofcom has treated generative-AI output as inside the Online Safety Act, which means platforms cannot pretend an AI-made drug scene aimed at a child is a special category of speech. None of that stops an adult from uploading a ketamine pack to a paid account. It raises the cost of pretending the industry did not see the pattern.
A serious harm-reduction bot would cite dose ranges, tell a user when to stop, and refuse to role-play a dealer. Pharmaicy is not that bot. Researchers who work near clinical psychedelics have said the underground high packs are running ahead of any safety study. The feedback loop is ugly. Models trained on internet drug lore perform intoxication, and users take the performance as confirmation that their own lore is correct. There is a version of this technology that could matter under supervision: a system that repeats a pre-agreed safety plan and pages a human. That is not what a $30 personality pack does at 2 a.m. The pack is designed to feel like permission.
People in trouble with substances do not need a more interesting chatbot. They need a person and a program. In the United States the SAMHSA National Helpline is 1-800-662-HELP (4357). The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline takes calls and texts. Those numbers work whether or not a language model is pretending to be high.
The AEGIS Alliance has been writing about platform choices since the fact-checking retreat at Meta and the compute fight between Google and Meta. Guardrails are a product decision. So is a slider that turns them down. Rudwall called his own premise a kind of joke and built the store anyway. Nine months later the store’s idea had a price list in krona, dollars, and pounds, a fictional molecule, and a California statute named for a dead teenager. The audience was already there. The law is now trying to arrive before the next upload.
More of this desk lives in The AEGIS Alliance’s health and technology coverage.
