Norman Haddal (1968-2025)
"The Papa of Pleasure Pills"
A pioneer in designer drugs, Norman Haddal began his long career in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. Originally, he merely sold drugs -- like Ecstasy, Ketamine and LSD -- which had been constructed or distilled by other people. At the time, drugs were regulated by a draconian group of laws that subverted the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. In 1995, he was arrested by the DEA and convicted of being a major distributor. In an interesting footnote, his defense was the first case taken on by Jimmy Sansler (1964-2065), who, after he won the Gibson AI Murder Trial, would later be compared to Clarence Darrow or Johnnie Cochran.
Sansler was able to discredit the evidence collected by the prosecution, but a deal was made that ended up with Haddal serving two years in a minimum security prison, with five years of probation. While serving his time, Haddal earned a Masters Degree in Chemistry. After leaving prison, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, which led to a job with the ChemGen research company.
While at ChemGen, Haddal was on teams that developed six new drugs, including three that fought depression, two that combated high blood pressure, and one variation on ampicillin that was marketed as a complexion aid. It was this last product that brought Haddal back into the orbit of designer drugs. With the exception of alcohol, there were no legal drugs widely available for the specific result of pleasure. Mood-altering drugs available by prescription tended to focus on alleviating symptoms, not creating pleasure.
Haddal set out to create a new kind of designer drug. He set up a minor project at ChemGen which he claimed was going to work on a new anti-depression drug, but was in fact going to investigate the possibility of a pleasure drug that would be accepted to the general public in a way that marijuana and opiates never had.
In 1998, Haddal had isolated the first version of the drug that would become best known as SFX. Using a series of dummy companies, Haddal distributing SFX in pill form to various dance clubs around San Francisco. He found that while the pill was a more efficient delivery mechanism of the active ingredient, it also tended to attract law enforcement more quickly. So, by January of 1999, he had partnered with the existing company Smith Soda. Together, he and Kadrey Smith developed the first batch of bottled SFX.
At first, they offered six flavors of SFX, but found that few people identified the pop itself as the source of the pleasure they felt after drinking it. Chemical historians are in general agreement that this version of SFX -- which produced a feeling similar to the initial joy from alcohol before the depressive effects set in -- simply did not have as concussive an effect as heroin, cocaine or the pill version of SFX.
However, Haddal and Smith gradually distributed SFX Pop!, as it was called, all across the country. Using every bit of money he had, Haddal threw "SFX Pop! Parties" in six major cities (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Atlanta) across the country on New Year's Eve, 1999. During the Millennium Riots that engulfed most major world cities that night, the cities that had "Pop! Parties" were noted as escaping the mob. In fact, reports showed that when rioters had gotten to the parties, they decided, as the later marketing campaign put it, to "Leave the Mob and Join the Party!"
It was only two years later, in March, 2002, that the government, with help from the Coca-Cola corporation, finally cracked the formula for SFX and, based on anecdotal reports of the "SF Effect", indicted Haddal as a drug dealer once again. The "SF Effect", much like the "K Hole" that users of Ketamine experienced -- was reputed to send the victim into a bout of suicidal depression, and that overuse of SFX would cause symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease
In the ensuing trial, Haddal -- ironically again represented by Jimmy Sansler -- produced research that disputed every one of the government's accusations and defied them "to put him jail for making people happy!" However, it was not until Sansler proved that three of the government's witnesses were paid to appear -- and that their episodes had been falsified by the DEA -- that Haddal was found innocent. This trial was the beginning of the public outcry that culminated in DrugGate -- the 2004-2006 corruption trials of the DEA, IRS and FBI -- which marked the end of the Prohibition Period in United States history (1919-2006).
Haddal and Kadrey Smith eventually sold Smith Soda to the Royal Crown Cola company, which quickly became the largest soda distributor in the world, eventually buying Coca-Cola after its bankruptcy (resulting from fines stemming from the above mentioned 2004-2006 corruption trials).
Norman Haddal died in 2025 in a lab explosion at his private facility in Northern California. The explosion was the first one attributed to the Children of McVeigh, one of the Terrorist Christian sects that sprang up in the 2020s in the United States.
Source: Enclyclopedia Columbiana, 21st ed.
</END>