Always wanted to try drugs — just that once — but never had the nerve? Well, now you can — and that too, get the stuff straight off the Internet.

Okay, not quite. But certain types of audio files are available on the Internet that claim to simulate the effects of hashish, cocaine, LSD and so on, on the person who listens to them.

It’s called I-dosing and it’s becoming quite popular too. One site — I-dosing takes its name from the leader in the field, I-doser — saw as many as 29,000 hits within a week and claims around a million downloads of its software. Check out YouTube and you’ll find dozens of videos featuring teens thrashing around in a bed or gnashing their teeth while getting their minds blown by digital dope.

And it is not as if these are free downloads. The I-doser site has “doses” that range from $3 for something called Hangover Cure to $199 for Gates of Hades and Hand of God. Other tracks have more conventional names — Heroin, Cocaine, Hash, Acid, and so on, and can run for five to 30 minutes. Most sites — with names like idosing.sellthefarm.org and androidzoom.com among others — also come with a “Top Secret” guide to the right way to I-dose.

After listening to LSD, a popular audio file available on the I-doser site, one user claims, “All the colours in my bathroom seemed to be brighter and more vibrant then ever before. While standing there I also experienced extreme time dilation. It felt like I was standing there staring at myself and the bathroom for at least a half hour, but when I looked at the clock it was less then 10 minutes.”

Sounds promising? But the question is, do you actually get high on these “audio drugs” or are the users just being over imaginative?

These supposed digital drugs claim to work on a concept called “binaural beats”. Binaural beats are based on the idea that if auditory signals of similar frequencies are played separately to the left and right ears, each ear will hear only one of the frequencies, and so the listener will, overall, perceive the middle frequency as a “beat”. Apparently, this perceived “beat” can affect a person’s mood and even his psychophysiology to some extent.

According to a study done by the departments of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the Duke University Medical Center in 1997, different auditory frequencies can bring about different effects, such as enhanced creativity, improved sleep, enhanced attention, or improved memory.

But do these so-called audio drugs on the Net actually involve the use of binaural beats? Sajal Bandopadhyay, a Calcutta-based scientist who looks into the physiological effects of audio signals, says that I-dosing’s claim of using binaural beat science might be bogus. “It’s all very conceptual. The makers of these audio files claim that they are using binaural beats, but it does not mean that they are actually implementing it correctly.”

Bandopadhyay may have a point. A study by researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University’s neurology department and the Helgot Research Institute in 2007 did, in fact, show that these e-drugs do not affect a person in any significant way, so much so that when Helane Wahbeh, one of the authors of the study, was asked whether this was something that could be taken off the list of things parents needed to worry about, she said, “I would think so.”

Harish (name changed), a 27-year-old executive in Calcutta, is someone who has actually tried I-dosing. He says that the only sensation that he got out of it was “an annoying headache that lasted the whole day.” Otherwise, he says, it was a complete dud.

“You’re told to try it a few times before you begin to feel any effect. But even though I tried a whole lot of tracks, nothing happened. It was an odd mix of wailing sounds, an occasional bizarre noise that would pop in once in a while or fade away, and that was it. It wasn’t loud or jarring; it was all at a low volume. But still it was very irritating.”

But even if e-drugs are a bit of a hoax, experts say that they can end up damaging young minds. Dr J.R. Ram, a consultant psychiatrist at Apollo Gleneagles, Calcutta, feels that it doesn’t matter if I-dosing doesn’t actually let you go on a hallucinogenic trip. The danger, he says, lies in these audio drugs making young people curious about the real thing. “Audio drugs may not be physiologically harmful, but they can definitely cause psychological harm.”

Ram cites an experiment conducted at Stanford University in the US to show how youngsters were susceptible to the power of suggestion. In this test, out of 15 adolescents, some were given mineral water and some vodka. But all 15 were told that they had been given vodka. It turned out that the ones who were given mineral water insisted that they had drunk vodka, and they even felt drunk.

“I don’t know if these audio drugs can give you a feeling of euphoria like real drugs, but after some time, kids may want to try and find a better high. And they will turn to real drugs,” says Dr Ram.

Professional opinion aside, there’s been a lot of talk about I-dosing on many Internet forums recently. Some are calling for the sites to be banned while others say that I-dosing is merely a marketing gimmick aimed at teenagers, and should be treated with the contempt it deserves.

So check it out if you want to. You may get a headache. Or, if you’re lucky, you may think it’s a high.