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Reginald Richardson used to enjoy home-brew, and, as a research chemist, he
was not bad at making it either. Then he pilfered a few chemicals from work
for his hobby and unwittingly found himself part of a police operation that
uncovered a drugs factory at his company’s laboratories supplying speed and
ecstasy to the north of England.

Last August, Richardson was arrested and charged on three counts. He was
accused of producing amphetamine sulphate (speed), a close relative of
ecstasy called MDA (methylenedioxy-amphetamine) and as co-conspirator with a
colleague, Paul Halfpenny, in plans to make ecstasy itself. Both men worked
for Parke-Davis, the pharmaceuticals arm of the multinational chemicals
company, Warner Lambert. Their Cambridge laboratory shares a site with
Addenbrooke’s, the transplant hospital.

The police arrested Halfpenny after a tip-off from ‘Jim’, a man he was
supplying, as he was on his way to a ‘meet’ in a pub. In a shoulder bag he
had just over 2 kilograms of speed, mixed with glucose, worth Pounds
Sterling 24 000. Within days of the start of the trial he changed his plea
to guilty, turned Crown witness and gave evidence against Richardson. He is
now awaiting sentence.

During the trial, Halfpenny painted a vivid picture of his three-year
venture when he turned his back on legitimate research to produce controlled
drugs at his workbench. In the evenings and at weekends, sometimes even
during office hours, Halfpenny worked next to colleagues who claim they
suspected nothing. His extraordinary revelations are thought to be the first
time a commercial laboratory in Britain has been exposed as being misused in
this way.

Richardson and Halfpenny worked on separate projects, and neither reported
to the other. They were friends outside work, with an interest in
motorbikes, but that was the extent of their relationship, says Richardson.

Last month, after a four-week trial, Richardson was acquitted on all counts.
He now describes the past year as a ‘gruelling’ time for him and his family
– he is married with two children under five. He says the arrest and trial
cost him both his job and his reputation: Parke-Davis sacked him when it
discovered, as a result of police investigations into the drugs case, that
he had broken health and safety regulations at work and pilfered 400 grams
of glucose, with a street value of 70p.

Above all, Richardson resents the stance former colleagues as well as senior
management from Parke-Davis adopted towards him. ‘I have had no support
whatsoever from the people at Parke-Davis,’ he said after the trial. ‘These
people are supposed to be professional scientists with analytical minds, and
yet they took just one look at the police evidence and said ‘he’s guilty’
without giving it a second thought.’

The company says it sacked Richardson for ‘gross misconduct’, according to
its formal disciplinary procedure, and that this was unconnected with his
arrest or trial. It subsequently admitted, however, that it is ‘extremely
rare for Parke-Davis to sack its research chemists’. As one industrial
chemist working for a rival company puts it: ‘If you sacked every chemist
who pilfered chemicals, there’d be nobody left in the industry.’

Halfpenny, who kept his drug ‘recipes’ on index cards, told the court the
largest batch of illegal drugs he ever made was the 2 kilograms he was
arrested with. ‘If he could do that in a few days, God knows how much he
made in total,’ Richardson said after the trial. He recalls Halfpenny
showing him an article on drug forensics taken from Chemistry in Britain,
the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry, of which both men were
members. According to Richardson: ‘Halfpenny joked: ‘That is the sort of
thing we could do here’.’

Richardson is highly critical of the ‘free and easy’ approach at the
Parke-Davis laboratory. Although it contributed to a relaxed working
environment, the system was wide open to abuse. Many of the chemicals
Halfpenny ordered to produce amphetamines and MDA could have been used
legitimately in the company’s research, such as its work on mental
disorders.

Yet Richardson says Parke-Davis scientists would make ad hoc orders for
chemicals for themselves and each other as and when they needed them.
Management never questioned the system, and suppliers rarely checked the
legitimacy of the project for which their chemicals were destined, or
queried the quantities requested. Furthermore, he says, there was open
access to the stores: ‘Once a chemical was in stock anybody could take it.’

The court heard that Parke-Davis sacked a third man about a year ago. He was
using the company’s letterhead to buy substances with his own money, and
making compounds for a mail order drugs firm. Only the alertness of a
supplier uncovered the fraud. This man has not been charged, and the police
say he is in no way connected with the Halfpenny case.

Have you heard the one about . . .

Parke-Davis says it has since tightened its security. Nevertheless, jokes
about the company’s laxity and the extramural activities of its staff are
rife in the pharmaceuticals industry.

On the face of it, the police case against Richardson seemed strong. Apart
from Halfpenny’s evidence, officers told the court about an explosion in the
laboratory in May 1991, which they said Richardson insisted on clearing up
himself.

According to Richardson, he came in early one morning to find ‘a pool of
what looked like engine oil on the floor. There were splatters on the back
wall and liberally around the lab across several benches . . . but no broken
glass and no obvious source of an explosion. I cleared it up because I was
the first person in.’ With hindsight he thinks it is perfectly feasible that
this was an intermediate to MDA.

Forensic analysis of material taken from a glass cabinet in the laboratory
and of a flask taken from inside his ‘fume hood’ (his partitioned-off work
area) a week after his arrest, found traces of a chemical intermediate in
the chain of reactions that produces MDA. Police linked this with the
explosion Richardson had found. ‘It looked so obvious that I was guilty . .
. All I could say was ‘I didn’t do it’.’ Critically, as he pointed out in
the trial, anyone could have worked under his fume hood at any time.

Other police evidence makes Richardson chuckle, now the trial has ended. The
prosecution called a Parke-Davis security guard who told the court he
recalled seeing piles of white powder, like icing sugar, drying on tin foil
on the laboratory benches. ‘Ecstasy is structurally very similar to
amphetamine sulphate, which is a white powder, so I imagine ecstasy is white
as well. But the vast majority of the chemicals made at Parke-Davis end up
as white powders when dried.’

And then there were the pots of glucose the police found at his home. These
aroused their suspicions because glucose is a common base for ecstasy
tablets, though Richardson insists he used the glucose only for making beer.
Officers also found citric acid and monosodium metabisulphite. Again he
insists that he used the chemicals only to produce sulphur dioxide, a useful
sterilising agent for home brew equipment.

As a professional chemist, Richardson worked on anti-obesity drugs and
antidepressants. At the time of his arrest he was working on painkillers and
anti-inflammatory drugs. He had an international reputation in the
peptide-protein field, and was a referee for papers sent to scientific
journals published by Pergamon Press. Several papers of his own were
published, most notably in The Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

His last project for Parke-Davis was only some 18 months old and going well
when he left. He was trying to find a drug that would dull pain in inflammed
joints by blocking the action of chemicals called tachykinins. The body
releases these after injuries, telling the nervous system to feel pain.
Although other researchers are working on the problem, Richardson’s
molecules were particularly small, and matched the structure of the
tachykinins closely, so had a greater chance of working.

For now, Richardson intends to stay with a local printing firm, Miller
Graphics, based in his home town of Haverhill in Suffolk. The company gave
him a job soon after Parke-Davis sacked him and despite his impending trial.
At Parke-Davis he taught himself to write software, and now programs
high-powered lasers, used to etch printing rollers.

Though he earns half his previous £25 000 salary, he says he
would not return to Parke-Davis under any circumstances. ‘The money’s never
been important. I only ever did chemistry because it’s what I enjoyed most.
I wouldn’t go back because the senior management never looked at the
situation from my side of things. The buck stopped at me and nobody will
take any flak above me, and that’s what really pisses me off.’

June Bolton, personnel director at Parke-Davis, said: ‘He (Richardson) made
a written admission of theft of company property, and breached company
health and safety regulations by not reporting an incident he should have
reported.’ The theft was the pilfering of chemicals, and the incident was
the mysterious explosion that splattered Richardson’s bench and others. He
argues that there was no obvious source of explosion, no one was hurt and
that there would have been little value in him reporting that he had found a
mess on the floor.

‘Halfpenny covered it up very well for three years,’ said Richardson. ‘If
Jim had not been found he would probably still be there now. It could well
be happening in any laboratory.’

Immediately after the trial, Richardson said he was looking forward to his
best night’s sleep in more than ten months. He no longer makes home-brew.
‘I’ve been put off it a bit.’

Susan Watts is science and technology correspondent of The Independent.