Johannesburg — YOUR kid's shiny new iPod is not as harmless as you think, according to a new breed of paranoid parent and policeman that seems determined to blame music for the evils of the world.

No, with nothing more than a digital music player, a set of headphones, an internet connection and a few dollars to spare, your child (or you, for that matter) can allegedly get as high as a kite, experiencing sensations similar to real-world drugs without the need to be "waiting for my man, 26 in my hand", as Lou Reed put it in the Velvet Underground song, circa 1967.

It's called i-dosing, which involves finding an online dealer to hook you up with digital drugs - "music" in MP3 format that sounds to the casual listener like nothing more than a monotonous droning sound. Not unlike a vuvuzela, I suppose.

Police officers in Oklahoma in the US, where the phenomenon seems to have first gained the attention of the authorities, are worried i-dosing could be a gateway drug.

"Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places," Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs spokesman Mark Woodward told a local TV station, according to a report on Wired.com.

Like Pink Floyd, maybe. Or Can, the legendary krautrock band formed in West Germany in 1968, whose 17-minute Aumgn I'm listening to right now and which I'll blame if this column begins to verge on the weird and psychedelic.

Throbbing Gristle. Now there's music that will induce an altered state of consciousness. Just make sure you've got your anti-emetics close at hand.

Trance music, whose effects have been likened to the trance-inducing music created by ancient shamanists during long periods of drumming, has been promising to do the same since it was developed in the 1990s.

But i-dosing? I'm not so sure. I had a go and found it more annoying than pleasant, something akin to being attacked by a swarm of killer bees but without the same intensity of pain.

I-Doser.com, one of the main purveyors of these digital drugs, promises all manner of things it seems unlikely to be able to deliver. For 16,95, you can pick up "Recreational Simulations 1, a collection of four doses in MP3 format: Marijuana, Cocaine, Opium and Peyote".

"Each audio track contains our advanced binaural beats that will synchronise your brainwaves to the same state as the recreational dose. Mixed with our advanced auditory pulses are soothing backtracks of ambient soundscapes to help the brain induce a state of mood lift, euphoria, sedation or hallucination," the I-Doser website promises.

Its "user experience" page is populated with comments by people who have either never used the real thing or who, like Bill Clinton, didn't inhale.

"I finished the whole dose! all 35min!! and it worked! seriously, i started walking in zig zags and laughing at anything! even my bed and my mirror. i started humming this really really weird sound and then I just burst out laughing! i loved it :-)," wrote Iss, who experimented with the alcohol i-dose and who apparently has so few brain cells left that it would be downright dangerous for him or her (or it) to simply go to a bar and get hammered on tequila.

Kayla tried the marijuana i-dose and reported that "my head was kind of spinning, and everything kind of echoed. I brushed my hair and thought my hair was saying 'ouch' and 'stop'. I got chills."

Are digital drugs about to replace the analogue bong? Jerry Garcia and John Lennon must be spinning in their graves.

O'Grady is a drummer by night, a journalist by day, and an internet and gadget geek every chance he gets in between.