Remember hot vaxx summer? After being cooped up like doomed hens last winter, we were all supposed to emerge squinting into the strobe light, horny enough to bone glass. Clubs and festivals were finally welcoming us back, with MDMA the lubricant of choice. It was, apparently, going to be the third summer of love and the roaring 20s entwined as our synapses sparkled with serotonin.
Except it didn’t quite happen like that. Why? First: crippling communal social anxiety. Secondly: the MDMA and ecstasy were largely dreadful. But this helped propel pingers and diz back to the top of the agenda – even when mostly in absentia. Here’s why 2021 marked the return of MDMA.
Videos by VICE
Adam Waugh works for the drugs checking organisation, The Loop, on the harm reduction frontline. ‘“Before clubs and festivals opened, we were mainly warning about high strength drugs and the potential harms around these,” he tells VICE.
Before The Loop could get any drugs under their mass spectrometer for testing, the familiar feeling of avoidable tragedy bit hard when two young ravers died after taking drugs on the same late July weekend in London and Bristol. In the aftermath, press focused on a super strong batch of Blue Tesla pills after Bristols’ Motion nightclub issued a social media warning.
Numbers of deaths in England and Wales related to MDMA have significantly galloped after 2017, rising from 56 to a record 92 in 2018. The dangers facing pre-COVID ravers were mainly posed by a steady average rise in purity of ecstasy and MDMA – plus the emergence of so-called super strength pills like Blue Teslas or the 300mg Blue Punisher. The increased potency was generally exacerbated by issues like nightclub overcrowding, a lack of free water provision and sniffer dogs.
When The Loop finally got to do some in-the-field drug testing at August Bank Holiday’s Lost Village festival, the results showed how the market had pivoted. Around 50 per cent of MDMA and ecstasy samples were not MDMA. Of these, circa 25 per cent were in fact synthetic cathinones like 4-CMC, 3-MMC, or Eutylone, and roughly half were caffeine.
4-CMC is a substance that imitates some of ecstasy’s effect (broadly speaking, it’ll keep you wildly stimulated, but invoke little of that baby-making empathy and euphoria). It is Eutylone, however, with its short MDMA-like effects that can encourage re-dosing and awful 24 hour-or-more trips, that causes most concern. “It has the highest likelihood of causing drug-induced psychosis,” says Waugh, noting its similarities to N-Ethylpentylone, which wreaked havoc at festivals in 2018.
So what changed in 2021?
“I think there was a disjuncture between supply and demand, due to the disruption across the world caused by COVID-19,” says Steve Rolles, the senior policy analyst at the Transform Drugs Policy Foundation.
The Global Drug Drug Survey COVID-19 Special Report, which covered the initial spring 2020 lockdown, found that 42 percent of MDMA/ecstasy users reduced their intake, largely due to socialising being outlawed.
The 2021 Global Drug Survey subsequently reported that global MDMA use had dropped from 37.6 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021. In short: A vacuum had been created.
“In a normal year, producers would have made and stockpiled enormous quantities of pills and MDMA,” says Rolles. “Because the market dried up, those stockpiles weren’t there when UK clubs and festivals opened again,”
Mireia Ventura is a manager at the Trans European Drugs Information Project, which collates drug-testing results from across the continent. She says that these issues were far less prevalent across the Channel, largely down to the roads being open.
“Our scenario in Europe was different. We did not detect those same adulterants. Our feeling is that drugs sent by air were more affected,” she explains,
They saw a small rise in caffeine and amphetamine being used as adulterants. The average tested pill strength dropped from 183mg in 2020 to 165mg in 2021 – hinting at a slight reduction in MDMA availability – which may have been exacerbated by dealers pivoting to the more profitable methamphetamine, which Ventura says is popular in Eastern Europe.
The infiltration by pan-European police of EnchroChat – an encrypted messaging service often used by organised crime groups – has also been mooted as breaking down the lines of communication between MDMA producers and English distributors, while the United Nation’s banning of PMK (a precursor used to synthesise MDMA) probably didn’t help. Of the latter, however, Rolles says: “If you start banning [substances like] PMK, they just move into an illegal space, like illegal drugs. You then just add a premium for their desirability and cost. And with this particular precursor, there are other ways to create it anyway.”
Mireia Ventura posits that the rise in adulterated MDMA and ecstasy could have been down to UK-based local drug producers rather than the more “stable” operations running out of Holland and Belgium that traditionally churn out most of the planet’s premium pingers.
It is these local operations that she suggests were most likely responsible for the 477mg Blue Punisher pill tested and tweeted by Manchester’s MANDRAKE lab in November. It was part of a batch of tablets all testing between 397mg to 477mg, with the latter hailed as the highest strength pill ever recorded.
Regarding these now infamous tablets, a well-placed anonymous source tells VICE that the super strength pills “were in Guernsey in September. They came from London and were cheap at an import level [into Guernsey], but then mental expensive at a street level. They were probably done with a shoddy press and made a load of people ill around then.”
Everyone that VICE spoke to was fairly sanguine about the return of better pills and MDMA to the market, with Steve Rolles saying that “the assumption would be that if the opportunity [a drug market] is there, then producers and suppliers will up their game. But that’s assuming that things aren’t going to tighten up again with the new variant.”
VICE also spoke with an anonymous London-based distributor and they said that, “If you’re linked up, it’s about £4,250 to £5,500 [for a kilo of MDMA, compared to roughly £1,500 to £2,000 pre-COVID] but for lots of people there is a drought and demand is still bigger than supply. But prices have started to come back down slowly. Everyone wants diz.”
Maybe – Omicron variant-willing – MDMA will be back in time for the next year’s hot vaxx summer.
@dhillierwrites
Correction: This story originally said that around 50 percent of MDMA and ecstasy were synthetic cathinones. The correct number is 25 percent. We have updated the story to clarify, and regret the error.
