Mike “Rizzer” Donahue

~1980 – December 31, 2006
Founder, Smi2le.biz, Nootropics & health food company in Spring Lake and Weehawken, New Jersey.

It has taken me years to summon the nerve to write this, risking ire from a decent, grieving family, not to mention the passing of any pertinent statute of limitations.
Let it be known right here and now that I have been completely sober for a decade, and do not approve of anyone experimenting with their neurochemistry through illegal substances of any type, or legal or gray market substances for that matter. But I once did… fervently. And this is how our story begins.
Mike was a very intelligent, and had some autistic qualities to him. Someone was trying to name someone recently, and they said “sweaty and intense” and I immediately knew who they were talking about. Mike loved listening to the British philosopher Alan Watts on CDs that he burned, and Timothy Leary, whose likeness graced his website.
Smi2le was an acronym Leary used that stood for “Space Migration, Intelligence Squared, Life Extension.” Check out the comic here; it’s pretty colorful and entertaining. Reading it, you get a sense of Mike’s enthusiasm, and everything else begins to make sense.

Mike came from a caring, normal, intelligent family. His sister went to Harvard, and his dad was a teacher and interested in Lyndon La Rouche.
I met Mike through my web site and email lists. On AIM he was “RocktheShow.” He was also known in the industry as “Rizzer.” Kind of a wild cognitive freedom anarcho-libertarian type. He was impressed that I had met Timothy Leary and that I was friends with his nephew, Wilson Leary.
I first personally met Mike at one of my bridge parties around 2000. Unbeknownst to me, he had brought enough GHB in a water bottle to kill a few people. He left it out, and some girl drank it, who of course went unconscious, with people surrounding her, putting candy in her mouth, complete panic.
There were hundreds of people there. I was the bad guy, who wanted the music to continue and have her either taken in or taken to a separate quiet area for close observation. I couldn’t win.
We ended up carrying her little body up to street level and calling the paramedics and had her taken in. She survived.

I told Mike to never bring GHB around again, but he continued using it himself, sometimes while delivering pizzas at his parent’s house in New Jersey. And then I heard stories of him attending music festivals and leaving the bottles and even caps full of GHB laying around near where kids were playing.
And then he brought it to another event, and left it out again, and lo and behold we went through the same thing all over again with Yevgeny, a young Russian, who luckily came out of unconsciousness without needing a paramedic. I finally threatened Mike very hard to never bring GHB again, that someone was going to die. It was an accident waiting to happen (See Sasha Chislenko) He stopped. The parties continued. In retrospect, I think this wildly irresponsible behavior was probably part of his strange mental condition. Maybe autism?
Mike started coming around less and less because he had been reading my web site. He had read an article I wrote about accidentally discovering a combination using ozone powder with lemon juice, acetylcholine and piracetam (a nootropic, AKA “smart drug”) in conjunction to get smarter (link here). In retrospect, if was probably simply the Piracetam monthlong rush.
Mike was also tinkering around with making his own GHB, and God knows what else.
Mike became inspired to start a smart drug company called Smi2le.biz. Smi2le sold legal brain supplements. Many of them were gray market, meaning they were orphan drugs, neither illegal nor generally available, orphan in this case referring to lack of an official corporate sponsor, which is no surprise, given that it’s much easier to push patented, hyper engineered, higher-priced pharmaceutical solutions than a generic, easy-to-make one. Almost everything came in barrels from China.
So Mike offered me a job doing what I love, and I left my job on Wall Street for the opportunity of a lifetime. I was a little leery, but my job felt like a boiler room, that I “wasn’t making a difference” there, and so I figured hard work and determination would win out.
His father picked me up in Brooklyn and asked me a lot of questions. He told me Mike had just been on the news after having been arrested for running a “drug operation” in a residence. He was very concerned about his son and wanted to see him succeed “in the vitamin business.”
I gave him my background in Corporate America, my background, and told him I’d “do my best.”
And those words haunt me to this day.
When I arrived in Spring Lake, a nice upscale town on the coast of New Jersey, I was surprised to see a full-fledged operation inside of a residence – bags of white powder everywhere, scales, pills, pill bottles, a capsule maker, piles of paper. I was impressed. I also met Bert, a ‘roided up musclebound Rutgers chemistry grad student who was surprisingly cerebral, calm and loved Anarchy Online.
I didn’t ask Mike about his recent bust, if the same thing that had happened to him earlier, would happen again: Public bust of house, with cops in hazmats. It felt like Breaking Bad five years early.
Then later on that weekend, a knock at the door. Looking back, I wish it had been the police. But it was worse. It was “K.N.”
K.N. was a confused and unstable girl with mild schizophrenia that was one of those people who should have never taken LSD. She had been brought into the scene via Stefan Hakakian, who is listed on this page. I knew right then and there that she would destroy Mike and his dreams. I fought tooth and nail to get her out of there, throwing things. To no avail. Mike had a sometime Cougar girlfriend, I reminded him. What about her? I yelled. He would have none of it. Men have their needs. She was IN.
The landlord was starting to ask questions so we have to change locales. So we – Mike, K.N., Bert, and me – all moved everything to Weehawken, a Latino town right across the water from Manhattan. While I officially still lived in Brooklyn, I had made a second home there in Weehawken with Jackie, my girlfriend at the time. She sometimes worked making pills. We became one large dysfunctional family.
Mike and K.N. had a boudoir all set up in the master room. K.N. had the room extravagantly decorated and painted red and argued for Mike to take Ketamine as medicine. And her too.
I held my head down and got to work. Not my business and beyond my control now, I told myself. We were busting ass. Turned around a lot of the business, I worked 18 hour days for months. I was pumped. I was doing what I always wanted to do, and I had everything I needed there – Jackie, video games, and the best pizza I have ever had a block away. Below our offices was the record company who recorded the “I like to move it move it” song, and a puppet company who built huge dioramas for TV. Life was good.
This CD was played many times through work sessions. I know the contours of every song and where I was and what I was doing at the time:

I was earning back the trust of the customers, who were having very spotty customer service. Smi2le on the forums had a horrible reputation by now, and I was trying to turn it all around one customer at a time.
In the kitchen, Mike had taped up a recipe for cooking crack on the refrigerator. I thought it was a joke at the time. I found out later it wasn’t.
I was no angel. I had done all sorts of drugs in my lifetime. But career and life purpose was always at the fore. This didn’t feel like it had any purpose other than to get obliterated on whatever cheap chemicals were around.
We had occasional hiccups like, I don’t know, Mike once getting all paranoid and accidentally hiding all his shrooms in someone’s order, that was shipped out to a customer.
I had to call about 30 customers and ask them one by one to open the capsules they received. I luckily eventually found an old hippy who received it, and he chuckled, “That must be like Timothy Leary’s lab over there!” I was just glad no one got the bottle and gave it to their children.
Jackie and I contacted the Cougar, and begged for her to take Mike back, because K.N. was a horrible influence on him, getting him to buy drugs. But Cougar was powerless to do anything. And eventually, my rent was due, and I needed to be paid my 10 bucks an hour or I was going to be evicted. We were all in that situation. Mike couldn’t pay me, or Jackie or Bert, so we got together and somehow pulled some black magic at the bank and got paid.
Of course, Mike was livid, and Jackie and I left in a hurry and went back to Brooklyn to pay my rent.
With the ideas of nootropics so much in my blood, and having made a name for myself somewhat at Smi2le, I found a way ahead: I decided to try to promote a huge Pramiracetam buy from China, as a supplier there told me he could procure some cheaply. Pramiracetam is one of the holy grails of all nootropics, it affects you with clearer thinking within an hour or so, rather than the 30 days required of Piracetam, and is stronger yet mellower than short-acting but harsher Oxiracetam.
So my business Nootropica/Nootrition was launched, I hired Bert, and I received a $20,000 investment that kickstarted the business, a whole saga of its own for another day. Mike and I stopped talking, obviously. We had both gone our different ways. Mike, left without Bert, struggled to keep things together, and started partying all over south Jersey with K.N. doing a variety of drugs including Deprenyl (a nootropic amphetamine), GHB, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. And unknown to all his friends, all this time Mike had a pre-existing congenital heart murmur.
I was worried, but there was nothing I could do. I thought about calling his parents to warn them, but I felt that would have been treacherous and would have somehow treated Mike as less of an adult.
He was last seen on some street videographer’s channel arguing with prostitutes on the street in the bad part of Philly.
I finally got word that Mike died on New Year’s Eve, 2006. Not to get overly technical, but there were many factors that could have caused his death, possibly a hypertensive crisis from Segeline or more probably Parnate (an MAOI-B which turns into MAIO-A in freakishly high doses, which he did,) plus a layering of amphetamine on top of that. Those two themselves, not even counting all the others, are easy enough to kill, especially with a weak heart. And, it was New Year’s Eve.
I did not attend the funeral. I had been estranged from him for a year and a half. Which ended up to be a good thing, because Mike’s old Cougar was there drunkenly ranting about me and how “[I] killed Mike.”
Now you see why I waited so long to write this. I was there, not at the end, but at the beginning, where the car was being built and had left as the wheels were coming off.
I can add platitudes like, “RIP Mike. Sorry I couldn’t do more.” But let’s be real. I was part of him.
In his death, Mike revealed to me a very hard-earned yet terrible lesson that I hope few people ever learn – intelligence, knowledge and a strong determination without wisdom in the wrong hands can be destructive, and that I played a part in his Faustian journey downward.
Mike, I inspired you to go down this path.
The path where you died.
Responsibility accepted.
But I did not kill you.
You did that.
I am sorry.
Goodbye.
Peace.

I will close with words from the man you loved so much:

Mike’s story somewhat overlaps the story of Bill Putt.
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