Taking 𝙀𝙘𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙨𝙮 in Europe Just Got More Risky

For about the past five years, the ecstasy pill market in the UK has been very clean.

The pills here tend to contain just MDMA as an active ingredient and no other drug.

Of all the pills sold as ecstasy that the drug checking charity The Loop have tested so far this year, less than 1% contained no MDMA at all.

But the amount of MDMA is highly variable.

Once they'd controlled the data for outliers, the range was between 63 milligrams and 283 milligrams.

Nine out of 10 pills tested by the loop contained over 120 milligrams of MDMA.

They say that, quote, a single pill is likely to be more than a single dose.

There was some disruption to the market in 2021, 2022, when the pandemic and Brexit had a negative impact on road haulage.

Most of our pills are driven into the country in containers from mainland Europe.

So during that time, we did see pills with drugs from the Caffeinone family in.

That's the family of drugs that methadrone, 4-MMC and 3-MMC belong to.

But once that disruption was over, we started seeing very pure MDMA pills sold as ecstasy here.

But just because a pill is MDMA doesn't mean that people can't get into trouble with it.

There are around 90 MDMA related deaths in the UK each year.

These are often related to overheating and heat stroke.

It is therefore advised to sip half a pint of water, about 250ml, an hour when you're at a rave and take breaks from the dance floor to cool down.

It's also advised not to take a full pill and not to consider redosing for a couple of hours.

These trends in the ecstasy pill market were seen right across Europe too, but recently there has been trouble in paradise.

Two weeks ago, a leading Dutch drug addiction and mental health institute, the Trimbos Institute, issued a red alert warning over these Trump pills.

They look very much like ecstasy, but they actually contain large, potentially lethal doses of a much more toxic drug called PMMA.

Pills are two-toned and multicolored.

On one side, they have Trump's face and on the reverse, they have a break line with the word Trump appearing at the bottom and the letters NL at the top, which stands for the Netherlands.

The Trump pills were recently submitted to a network of drug testing centers in the Netherlands where people can get their drugs lab tested before they take them.

do not take this pill under any circumstance, the institute said in its warning, cautioning that the drug could cause overheating and potentially fatal consequences.

Over in European party hotspot Berlin, a non-profit harm reduction project, Sidekicks Berlin, also reported that other pills in Europe have been tested recently and found to contain PMMA.