Deadly super strength MDMA coming to Australia after being stockpiled in Amsterdam
Deadly super strength ecstasy pills will hit Australian shores once lockdowns end. We reveal how manufacturers in the Netherlands are doing it amid fresh global calls for local pill testing.
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Deadly super strength ecstasy pills will flood into Australia once lockdowns end across the world as manufacturers in the Netherlands continue to produce and stockpile them.
News Corp Australia has spoken to key drug experts across Europe and Australia about the supply of ecstasy during the coronavirus pandemic.
Pills being made in the Netherlands now contain often more than twice, and sometimes up to five times, the strength of MDMA previously manufactured.
The pills being produced, according to the results of drug testing in Amsterdam, are up to 97 per cent pure MDMA, which can have deadly effects on younger users who do not have the body weight to absorb the drugs.
And with lockdowns across the world reducing drug use, it is feared a “stockpile” of the drugs will flood the market when countries, including Australia, ease social distancing rules.
The alarming development comes as an Australian charity is seeking legal advice and plans to set up pill testing at festivals despite NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian rejecting a coroner’s recommendation last year to allow the practice.
The UK drug charity Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s Steve Rolles has urged the introduction of pill testing in Australia, warning of an influx of higher strength pills.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a spike in deaths in Australia,” Mr Rolles warned.
“Because of the COVID lockdown and the closure of nightclubs there has been a stockpile of MDMA. People have carried on making the drugs in the Netherlands. There is potentially going to be a fall in price.”
He said there was an ethical argument to introduce pill testing to save people’s lives, claiming that prohibition did not work, particularly when one pill was now up to five times an adult dose of MDMA.
He said a novice “might take two pills and that’s getting into really high risk territory.”
“If you’re just out of school you might take two of them and then you have had five times the dose that you should have had. Nobody wants to go to a party and die,” he said.
Fiona Measham, a drug expert from the UK’s Liverpool University who contributed to the NSW coroner’s inquiry into pill deaths, said that she was concerned about backyard drug taking because of the closure of nightclubs and festivals.
“We’re seeing some pills that can be up to twice an adult dose and what we are seeing in the UK is the death rate going up every year,” she said.
“On the latest available figures, which was 2017, almost 100 people died and it was the highest year on record because people are overdosing on MDMA.
“Often it is younger, smaller, slighter women who have a low BMI and they may be early in the drug career and have a low tolerance.”
She said that police in Queensland had warned that super strength pills were circulating at 2019’s schoolies events.
“I know some have made it to Australia, the really higher dose ones, they are getting there,” she said.
There were 92 MDMA deaths in the UK in 2018, according to the latest available figures, compared with 56 in 2017.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited debate about pill testing, which has been legal in the Netherlands since 1992.
A wave of illegal rave parties have sparked fears of overdoses in Britain, which was still recording record high death tolls despite introducing pill testing five years ago.
Tom Bart, a senior prevention worker at Jellinek, Amsterdam’s drug testing organisation that has sites across the Netherlands, said the country’s program has saved lives.
And he said that pill tests in Amsterdam have shown an increase in potency.
“80mg per ecstasy pill is a dose for a normal person but the doses in pills nowadays are 174mg per pill,” he said.
“You can’t take two pills, or pills every couple of hours, now people are having sometimes a quarter or a third instead of halves.”
NewsCorp Australia last year launched The Ripple Effect – a confronting, challenging, raw and emotional special multimedia series looking at how illicit drugs are devastating Australian families.
Tony Wood, whose daughter Anna died in 1995 after taking an ecstasy pill at a Sydney rave party that was imported by an air hostess from Amsterdam, rejected calls for pill testing.
“I don’t think it’s going to achieve anything. It’s not OK to take it, it’s a bloody bad drug,” the 78 year old said.
“I’m horrified that this could start up again.”
Mr Wood, who used to speak to school students about drugs, said that MDMA could affect people in different ways, so that even with pill testing there were still dangers to users.
Anna was 15 when she died after taking a single ecstasy tablet.
But Julie Tam, whose son Josh died at a music festival in NSW after taking ecstasy in 2018, said she wanted pill testing approved.
“Clearly a different approach is needed, we can’t keep sticking out heads in the sand,” she said.
Ms Tam said that she previously was against pill testing but had changed her mind after listening to health experts at the NSW coronial inquests.
“We need to move with the times, what we need to do is harm minimisation,” she said.
“It was a no-brainer that they should have been implemented.”
The MDMA now being tested at Jellinek was up to 97 per cent pure MDMA, Mr Bart said.
However, he added that up to a third of the drugs tested at his facility were thrown out by users after they have discovered what was in them and that testing was a way of giving drug education to users.
Fred Fellowes, who ran The Secret Garden Party on his property at Abbots Ripton, near Cambridge, was the first festival in the UK to have pill testing.
He said the year it was introduced, hospital admissions dropped 95 per cent.
Fellowes introduced the pill testing after a reveller had almost died.
“The guy’s heart stopped for 40 seconds and we had to revive him on site, he had taken a brake oil additive,” he said.
Dianna Kenny, a leading psychologist, said schools tried hard to do drug education, but there was always an element of risky behaviour among 14 to 24 year olds.
“Young people have the capacity to think they are invincible,” she said.
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Originally published as Deadly super strength MDMA coming to Australia after being stockpiled in Amsterdam