Here is an article from The London Observer April 1997 . To this day I consider this one of the few “fair” articles written on me at the time.

The Willy Wonka Of Generation X

He’s made $350 million from selling safe, legal drugs. Is Sean Shayan a con man or a hero?

By Sam Taylor

Sean Shayan is 21 years old With his long hair . scruffy goatee, and delicate Arabic face, he looks more like a beach bum than a businessman. Yet he runs a company worth more than $350 million.

What began With one controversial wonder drug. Herbal ecstacy has

now expanded into an empire of unlikely proportions.

Shayen’s company the grandly named Global World Media Corporation,

also turns out sensually vivid herbal pills based on the Kama Sutra, a plug- it-in-and get- high CD, and psychedelic ‘dream drops’ that allow you to trip in your sleep.

Coming soon are tobacco-free cigarettes that get you high and a non-alcoholic drink that makes you drunk. This man is the Willy Wonka of Generation X.

Shayan’s version of the chocolate factory is a mad little warren of purple and green offices with triangular windows, located a few blocks from Venice Beach. It looks pretty small time, but Shayan thinks big: ‘I honestly believe that, in 10 or 20 years time, this company will be bigger than Coca-Cola.’ He tells me about his most grandiose project yet: a giant pyramid made from copper and concrete which he intends to build in the Los Angeles hills and use as a kind of millennial leisure centre – ‘where kids can go to be free … and buy our products.’

For all his madcap schemes and substances, Shayan’s fortune is due entirely to Herbal Ecstacy. Deliberately misspelled in order to distinguish it from the real thing, it is marketed as a safe, legal, natural alternative to MDMA, the active constituent in the other Ecstasy. Introduced to the American rave scene in 1994 and sold for $20 in silver pyramids containing batches of 10, these butterfly-festooned pills have now, Shayan claims, sold more worldwide than Ecstasy, though he admits such figures are ‘obviously hazy’.

Herbal Ecstacy is currently banned in Britain. According to the Medicines Control Agency, ‘The sale or supply of stimulants or psychotropic substances, herbal or otherwise, as alternatives to hard drugs, is illegal’ Shayan says he has withdrawn from Britain temporarily but predicts ‘a major offensive’ this summer. ‘We’re going to get EC approval for all our products. We want to do everything above ground and do it in a big way.’ This has certainly been the story inAmerica, where Herbal Ecstacy’s profile is extremely high. There are television adverts, posters in shop windows and articles in the New York Times, LA Times and Newsweek. Shayan has written a book, Dimensions Beyond Reality, about his company and his rags to riches career,which is the subject of a publishers’ bidding war and may well end up as a Hollywood movie. ‘We haven’t written the screenplay yet,’ he says, ‘but there’s a lot of interest. It’s got everything – drugs, sex and big money.’ Shayan’s success has also drawn attention from the religious Right and ‘every government agency from here to Alabama’. In his version of this story, the bad guy’s role is taken by a vast, faceless bureaucracy giving off ‘negative energy’ in its attempt to stop him freeing the minds of his generation. He and his company, though a little ‘mischievous’ and sometimes creative with the truth, are definitely the heroes of the tale.

This negative energy has manifested itself in threatening phone calls and letters from the Food & Drug Administration, the Health Department and others. But Herbal Ecstacy is still legal in every state except Florida and New York. ‘If our product wasn’t safe, the government could easily take it off the market,’ says Shayan. ‘The truth is that they don’t have any proof. All they’re trying to do is cover their asses.’ Shayan believes the political storm swirling around his small company is about more than simply the drug’s safety or the supposed immorality of getting high. On one level we are a young, controversial company that’s making a lot ofmoney, and people don’t like that. On another level, this is about the future of America’s health industry. Every time someone buys a herbal product, that’s money out of the pockets of the insuranceand pharmaceutical companies – and those are the people who keep the government in business with the tax dollars and campaign funds.  Herbs are the wave of the future.

The only way as a people are going to get any healing is through alternative medicine. This is a surprisingly serious-minded speech fur someone frequently caricatured as a drug dealing P.T. Barnum. But Sean Shayan’s views are hard to predict.

He is, after all , a multi -millionaire who lives in a house with no furniture.  He is

also oddly ascetic. He has never taken illegal drugs; he doesn’t drink ; he doesn’t smoke; he doesn’t eat meat or dairy products: he has only ever taken Herbal ecstacy once or twice; even coffee freaks him out. And his company attorney, Will, lives in a blue house with a heart mural on the wall and chickens in the front yard; Will is a vegetarian activist but says Shayan, a beast in the courtroom – he’ll tear you to pieces. Shayan is a classic immigrant American contradiction: a warm, principled revolutionary in his heart and a ruthless, pragmatic capitalist in his head.

Born in Tehran, Sean Shayan was the eldest son of Iranian Jews who fled to Los

Angeles after the Islamic revolution. He was not popular in high school. It was partly his race – Most Americans judge things by what they see on TV, and Iran’s image was not too good at the time – but in a way he assimilated core American values just a little too quickly. I didn’t do the things that normal kids do; my mindset was totally different. When I was 10 or 11, I was always saying I wanna be rich,I wanna make millions. Other kids would say they wanted to be spacemen or soldiers, but to me it was totally real. I was going to be a millionaire.

A couple of years later, Shayan began a series of slightly dodgy money-making schemes. He had a good nose for the hard currency of adolescence – test results, chewing gum, porn magazines – and he was never short of pocket money. Heplayed truant in order to get what he saw

as a proper education. ÔI did a lot of reading Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, all the money magazines. I think school is the number one hindrance if you’re seriously interested in making money. At 15 years old, he quit school, left home and started sleeping rough on the beach.

He soon discovered the burgeoning California rave scene. Whereas most 1S year olds would have been blown away by the explosion of flashing lights, deafening music and illicit drugs, Shayan saw the rave scene for what it was: ripe for exploitation. Ò most of the kids were so high on drugs that they didn’t know what was happening, I kept a very straight head and I made a killing. He started organizing parties, and by the age of 16 he was grossing around $50,000 a month. By 17, Shayan had come up with the idea of Herbal Ecstacy and set up Global World Media in his garage, The rave business was cool for a while, he says but it was a gateway to something else. It was like a testing ground where I could play around and make some money,  then take what I learnt and apply it in a larger arena. It was pretty scuzzed out by the time I left. The quality of MDMA was shit. It was cut with everything from aquarium tablets to heroin, and those poor kids they’d go to a dealer and they’d trust him. They’re like sheep. You give them a pill, tell them it’s E, and they go: Baaaaa.

‘So I figured what if you could make something that was safe and legal and gave people a pretty good time? You know, we couldn’t make something exactly like ecstacy, but we could make an alternative; something which when you opened the packet, you knew exactly what you were getting; something you could take without having to worry the next day: “Oh God! Am I going to die?” I knew it would be successful. In my mind, the millions were already there. I just went out and got people to believe in me.’

If Shayan’s charisma made Herbal Ecstacy possible, the magic ingredient that made it successful was the packaging and marketing. A mix of cheesy New Age soft porn, pseudo-ancient symbols and ironic Nineties psychedelia, the company’s advertising images are, in their own ineffable words, ‘synergistically blended to insure visionary vibrations’.

Shayan says this is his favorite part of the job. ‘Most things in this world are mediocre, so I think it’s important to package our products in the most enticing way possible. People don’t want chocolate in a plain brown wrapper; they want chocolate in glowing neon purple dotted glossy paper. The wrapper is part of the chocolate. I honestly believe it makes the chocolate taste better.’

Taking me round the local health-food store later that day, Shayan browses through a row of biscuits. ‘No fat, no cholesterol,’ he reads on one of the packets. Then he checks the ingredients. ‘Oh man, look at that. It contains milk. If it contains milk, it can’t be no fat, can it?’ Yet Shayan could be accused of similar misrepresentations himself. The original Herbal Ecstacy catalogue included a testimonial (praising the drugs floaty, mind expanding quality’) from one Obleo Carson- actually the name of a friend’s pet dog. ‘But that was a true testimonial,’ laughs Shayan, ‘because the dog had gotten into two packs of Ecstacy and he was fuzzing around the room. We asked him what he thought, and he barked out: “Wow! Incredible buzz, man!” It was just a little joke. It wasn’t malicious.’ When I point out that he also completely misrepresented the testimony of writer Nicholas Saunders (who conducted a placebo test on 100 ravers, and reported that ‘some people said it was the best Ecstasy experience they had ever had …whether they had taken the Herbal Ecstacy or the placebo’), Shayan casts his eyes downward like a naughty schoolboy. ‘You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that.’ However, Saunders’s quote still appears in the company’s catalogue.

Shayan is, as he admits, compulsively mischievous. Has he ever been in serious trouble? He grins: ‘I don’t consider any trouble serious. Um … no, not really. I’m very crafty and intelligent. I tried to get away with it.’ However, the results of the placebo test raise a crucial question about Herbal Ecstacy, one that will ultimately decide whether this is just a five-year fad or a solid base for massive corporate expansion. In short, is it any good? The list of ingredients doesn’t tell you much: ephedra, guarana seed, kola nut, green tea, black ginseng, nutmeg (a very mild hallucinogen), ginko biloba (which increases blood circulation), centella asiatica (a vine popular with elephants), and, er, ‘love & light’. Most of these herbs contain caffeine, which explains why Herbal Ecstacy feels more like an amphetamine than the euphoria-inducing chemical to which it is supposedly an alternative.

Away from the delirious hype of his own marketing, Shayan is happy to play down expectations. ‘Some people love it, some hate it -and most are somewhere in between. Obviously, if you’re a drug addict and you take our product, the high’s not gonna be anything compared to what you’re used to. I guess the general consensus is that it doesn’t compare to the real stuff, but it’s cool for what it is.’ A small-scale survey suggests that this is a fair judgment. A Los Angeles magazine called Creative Loafing tested the drug’s effect on its staff and concluded: ‘It’s the organic equivalent of street corner speed with a side order of Maxwell House. You tingle, you stress out, you want it to end.’ the British drugs journal , The Herb Garden, was more positive: ‘Diehard drug pigs may balk at the idea of taking something with health benefits, but this stuff ACTUALLY WORKS!’ The Observer’s view is that the effect is like a mild, speedy cannabis high. It lasts around five or six hours, and it doesn’t give you a hangover.

Shayan has been described as the Bill Gates or the Rupert Murdoch of the herbal business, and he is plainly delighted by the comparisons. ‘Bill Gates is a brilliant man. He has an extremely ruthless approach, which I can only admire, and he’s a little guy made big, which is the way of the future.’

Shayan denies he is that ruthless – ‘I’m far too soft when it comes to business’ -but is sure he can emulate Gates’s success. With the possible exception of Noel Gallagher, I don’t think I have ever met anyone with such ridiculously total self-belief. When I ask Shayan if he is afraid of death,he replies, straight-faced: ‘I don’t believe I’m going to die. Just because a group of other people seem to have decided that it’s inevitable doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to me.’

His next big projects are a ‘potent herbal soda and herbal cigarettes -not the kind you find in health-food stores, but a mass marketed alternative aimed squarely at toppling the nicotine giants. ‘It’ll give you less of a high than pot but more of a high than tobacco.’ There is also a pot product ‘ready for when it becomes legal’. Shayan himself, of course. doesn’t smoke at all. And maybe that’s his secret. When I ask him how come he had such an instinctive understanding of his customers’ desires, he replied: ‘I am my customer. ‘But he’s not really. He knows his customers – he went to school with them – but he was never friends with them; he was never one of them. ‘Maybe I wasn’t, ‘he concedes, ‘but I did watch them. Often, by not being part of something, you know more about it than if you’re in it.’

As he leans back in the afternoon Californian sun, munching on a soda and carob muffin and shooting lustful glances at the blonde college girls who wander past, Shayan tells me how excited he is about his newest scam – Ecstacy cash, With shades of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets, he says he will give it away free with other products at the beginning.

‘After that, it’s going to be massive. All kinds of businesses are going to accept it and we’re gonna have an exchange rate that fluctuates with our sales.’

And whose head will be printed on it?

Yours ?’No,’ he smiles. ‘That might appear egotistical.’

Share and Enjoy:

| | | | | |