Victorian Forensics Paper on Illicit Tablet Seizures 2000-2005

This was a submission to the AOSD inquiry but I think it deserves its own thread.

Introduction

The following information provides an overview to the nature of illicit tablet seizures within Victoria in 2004 and 2005. Information is provided through the analysis and intelligence reporting of the Chemical Drugs Intelligence Unit, Victoria Police Forensic Services Department.

Tablets are generally classified as either single entity, containing only one active drug component or combination drug tablets, containing more than one active drug substance. It is also important to note that the non drug components of these tablets are subject to considerable variation and may or may not provide a level of harm.

The illicit tablet market is dynamic, tablet logos, drug types and purity levels found within tablets are all constantly changing. The drug content of a tablet is not identifiable by the physical characteristics of a tablet (i.e, logo, colour or size), neither will a simple spot test provide details of drug type, purity in these illicit products.

Information to follow is expressed graphically and as a percentage of the total number of tablets seized / analysed within a given period.

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Certainly interesting to see a graphical representation of seized pills and being able to compare years. Although this would not be entirely accurate of what was getting around, I believe it would be fairly close to the mark.

A concern within this paper is referring to the substance detected as "XTC" rather than it's full chemical name or even the shortened version, although it was clarified later in the paper that the "XTC' class drugs consisted of 3 4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA), or 3 4-methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA), or 3 4-methylenedioxy-N-ethylamphetamine (MDEA).

I believe that it's important that people at all levels be educated about the differences in the actual drugs within pills and that we get away from referring to pills as 'XTC'.

Yeah I know. I was just having the same conversation with someone else.

XTC = MDxx. Or rather XTC is what Europeans call it, and as they are doing most of the work in this area, others follow. Personally I hate the term "XTC", as "Ecstasy", especially in Australia, can mean amphetamine and ketamine based pills. This is why I have always pushed for using the term MDxx.

But I dare you to bring this up to Dr Cate. Double dare

I think the most interesting graph(s) are
1) The one showing that the majority of mdxx pills are mdma
2) the one showing that the majority mdma pills are combined with another substance.

johnboy said:

But I dare you to bring this up to Dr Cate. Double dare

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As it's only a double dare, It's hardly worth my time. If you had of made it a physical challenge then it would be a different story.

Too bad they didn't show caffeine or procaine percentages.
Or +/- types of MDA. I've tried two different batches of MDA, one + type, one - type, and if it wasn't all placebo then they had major differences in my eyes.

Very interesting that MDEA shows very little percentages in the seized pills. As sometimes pills that show as MDMA or MDEA only substances using all the pill testers, feel alot heavier and less euphoric than other pills which test the same, and last alot shorter so I always assumed MDEA was common cut in pills, to make the more "smacky" short lasting pills.

Or +/- types of MDA. I've tried two different batches of MDA, one + type, one - type, and if it wasn't all placebo then they had major differences in my eyes.

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I've never seen any report listing enantiomers (+&-). This topic was raised by fastandbulbous in Advanced DD a few weeks ago.

Some years ago I heard rumours there were (-)MDA/ (+)MDMA tablets around although I never saw them. As f&b stated, by separating the isomers of MDA, methylating only the (+) to make (+) MDMA and then mixing the (-) MDA with (+) MDMA, more potent tablet would be produced which contains less in total of the active ingredients.

Interesting! Well unless some extreme trickyness was involved I was under the impression MDMA is always going to be 50/50 - and +

But that's some pretty interesting stuff will have to go check out the thread.

Interesting! Well unless some extreme trickyness was involved I was under the impression MDMA is always going to be 50/50 - and +

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99.999% of the time this is probably correct. There are strereospecific methods but these are rarely reported in forensic literature and generally involve special conditions. While the isomers of regular MDMA or MDA can be separated using various forms of chromatography, it probably isn't done very often, if at all; more equipment is needed, and it of course it would take longer.

The reason f&b mentioned the above method, is that it would essentially maximise potency of the final products i.e. more bang for the buck

This is really interesting.

For a few years now, I've had a bit of a gripe about the statement that tends to be repeated in research reports, which goes something like "Most of the tablets sold as ecstasy in Australia do not contain MDMA".

I guess this just didn't ring true to my experiences and those of the many people I had discussed this with... yes there are adulterated pills, and many more in Australia than a lot of other parts of the world it seemed... but we found it hard to believe that most pills weren't what we thought they were.

Cate Quinn's data shows that most pills do contain MDMA, and indeed, most pills contain only MDMA. This doesn't mean we can pack up the test kits and call it a day! But it is a different statement to what was said in 2000-2004.

Does it show that ecstasy markets have changed in that time?

Another point to consider is that these data are from seized pills only - those pills don't actually get consumed. This article found that a sample of pills tested at a rave were quite different from a sample of police seized pills in the same area during the same time period. So, we can't say from Quinn's data that this applies to ecstasy tablets across the board.