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losing the war on drugs

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lab slave

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I know there's a lot of posts about the decline of the ecstasy scene and not just in Australia. So I don't want this to be another whiny rant. I'm wondering if there's a general consensus about this and whether people have any ideas about how to improve the situation.

The scene in Melbourne seems to be getting worse and worse. "Ecstasy" is now the name given to any drug (or mixture of drugs) that is cheap and difficult to identify. A whole generation of youngsters now equate good pills with piperazine and have never tried MDMA. This is turning people off drugs entirely or turning them onto more reliable highs like methamphetamine. I get the impression that the drug scene in general is kind of falling apart and that there's a lot of misinformation, ignorance and cowardice. It's probably riskier to be a young drug user than ever before(?). I've been watching the scene for 10 or 12 years so I'm reasonably confident that this isn't just my own subjective perception. But feel free to tell me that I'm wrong, call me names and so forth.

As far as I know the MDMA scene started to collapse a few years ago when precursors became more tightly controlled in europe - I also heard there were a lot of labs shut down in asia around the same time.

I guess it's not something that most people are going to care about. Unfortunately I happen to believe that recreational drug use is actually a healthy thing for people to do and that it helps keep society open minded and creative.

Ok I'm going to go now.

(shuffles away on cane)
 
There have been a lot of posts on this. Searches would help you determine a general consensus. That said, it seems that :

1. Users of MDMA were having so much fun, the demonisation of the drug was failing and typically most thought it was "harmless", which lead to
2. Unprecedented media attention towards "Ecstasy" and the urge for the government to do something about it, which lead to
3. A systematic destruction and elimination of the saffrole oil (and drug) production chain throughout South East Asia. Added to this issue was
4. A rampant supply of (other) cheap research chemicals which have only just started to be properly targeted by authorities.

Due to basic economics it is far easier to produce "ecstasy" sans MDMA. The uneducated (typically younger) users know only what the market supplies.

Ironically this has opened the floodgates for methamphetamine which is easier to produce, has in my opinion, chronic usage patterns and causes far more community harm. Good work!
 
Yeah i've been in the scene for 14 odd years and have seen a lot of trends that have come and gone. The speedbomb pills that shared the market with MDMA in the late 90s (which a lot of poeple loved even though they contained little or no MDMA), and a prolifertion of MDEA pills at about that time too due to an easy synthesis (an easy to obtain precursor) for MDEA being found in Europe. Then 2001/2002 onwards pill quality was pretty good and consistent for quiet some time, the MDEA pills disappeared and life was sweet. And then a few years ago it went to shit, piperazines flooded the international market - and yeah i agree it seemed to correspond with the destruction of the Safrole plants and the rise in popularity of research chemicals.

My observation is that at any moment right now there ARE generally some MDMA pills going round at any given time, but they are harder to find, they sell quickly and they are more expensive, and you really have to know the right people. I've heard a lot of people blame the fact that the whole Underbelly crew Carl Williams etc getting busted was another factor that saw a lot of MDMA pills vanish from the market and nobody has stepped up into that 'drug-lord' role of importing large quantities of high quality pills (although i've seen no direct evidence of this). They are still entering the country so someone somewhere is doing it.

I think too that the groups/cartels/etc that are bringing drugs into the country or manufacturing them realised that there was more money in Meth/Ice/Speed and also heroin (due to our proximity to south east asia), and meth is piss-easy to make, hence the ice boom in the last 3 or 4 years all over Australia. My other observation is that people are turning more towards MDMA in powder form. This is popular because it can be cut to maximise profit, and the step of obtaining and running a pill-press is bypassed. Pills have developed the status now of being un-reliable and a gamble, whereas powder is generally more likely to be the real deal. Plus a gram of MDMA is more expensive in powder form than pill form by the time it gets to street level, so they are making slightly more money by selling it as powder.

Almost no MDMA is manufactured locally, although it does happen occasionally (evidenced by the odd lab that gets busted with large quantities of safrole, but its probably 1 lab out of 500 that is sophisticated enough to make MDMA). We are at an interesting crossroads now with a plethora of MDMA analogues / phenethylamines (scuse my spelling) and research chemicals being explored, some of which are apparently pretty good. The Australian law covers analogues so they are all automatically illegal here, but in places like Britain my understanding is that they have to ban each substance one at a time, so there is a lag of a few months when substance x is 'discovered' and then sold legally and produced in huge quantities, which end up all over the world via the many research chemical companies out there.

But what happens next is anyones guess. I've personally chosen to stick to meth/speed/ice. It is simply reliable (even if quality does vary) and while its not as empathogenic as MDMA it is still great fun and easy to get. If there was another precursor apart from safrole that could be easily obtained then MDMA would return to dominance. Although i was reading in another post on Bluelight that the MDMA situation is fine in Europe and they are still getting very good pills consistently, but the drought has affected most of the rest of the world. There are a lot of plants that contain Safrole but it is now harder to access.

THe glory days of MDMA may be over (for now)... but who knows with all these different chemicals whether something else that is easier to make and just as enjoyable might turn up? After all, thats why they are called 'Pills' and not 'Ecstasy' anymore.

So - Thats my observation. Correct me if you disagree.

WC

I think people really need to get serious about testing pills before purchasing.
 
Need to add something i missed out on - I was just looking at pillreports.com and it seems that there ARE in fact multiple batches of MDMA pills going round various parts of Australia right now, apart from where I live - MELBOURNE. Damnit. My guess is that the big boys that run Melbourne aren't bringing in the goods right now for some reason. Hrmph.
 
Lurk much Teroxide?? I thought I was a lurker. LOL

All fair posts and good reasoning on why the change in "pills", less effort, more profit, being the main reason I guess. And of course, the authorities ability to easily detect the pre cursors and said pre cursors high on the watch list.

I put the problem down to laziness myself, lazy product of crap pills over quality ecstacy. And lazy policing watching out for Safrole and MDMA rather than watching out for some of the deadly (and I appreciate that not all RC's are deadly, but plenty of unknown there still) research chemicals that cross our borders.
 
lowlife said:
My guess is that everybody in Sydney are eating them all up before they can travel to anywhere else! Well, most of them anyway.. :D
Click to expand...

THats actually probably totally right... chances are the pills are imported through Sydney initially being the biggest city in Australia and if there is sufficient demand locally why would you go to the hassle and risk of distributing pills to other cities? Time to move to Sydney methinks.

WC
 
I am 50/50 on this thread I have to be honest. There has been too much discussion on this exact same topic for years now, the fact there seems to be a bit of MDMA circulating in recent months makes this a bit of an odd time for another incarnate of this thread to roll around in my eyes, aside from that there is not going to be much (if any) harm reduction related talk on this topic and anything that anyone has to say on this topic is mere speculation since I would go on a limb and say none of them contributed to the MDMA drought.

I am gonna raise it with the other mods and see what they think.
 
Hi DM, the only real HR related information that this thread could give is to highlight to new users that a "pill" in these modern times could be anything and most likely is not "Ecstacy" (MDMA of course) and that they should show good caution and test before they consume.

In fact it may well be a good sticky, not this thread, but an appropriate statement to this effect, that pills could be anything and they should "Test before the Taste"
 
Yes these threads are repetetive and have been done to death but I as long as they are well written, and factual and the reply's are as such I think they do serve as a good place to start for a newbie who has just found this site.

After about 10 posts they start to go round in circles and perhaps that is when the mods should close them.

my 2 cents.
 
I think the "reasons for the Global MDMA crisis" thread (what was it called again?) should have been stickied a long time ago. Especially considering new pill purchasers who stumble upon bluelight might not have any idea about it.
 
^ I think Psilo put it pretty well:

PsiloSubNaut said:
After multiple threads asking the same question about why MDMA has all but gone on our streets, I have decided to start this thread to educate BLers on the factors surrounding this 'MDMA drought'

In 2008 the AFP went over to Cambodia and burned 33 tonnes of safrole, the main precursor for MDMA and enough to make over 200 million tablets. Obviously at the environments expense :(

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/7b-ecstasy-oil-stash-goes-up-in-smoke/2008/06/20/1213770880160.html

Also in 2008 the world's biggest ecstasy bust took out Australia's ecstasy kingpins and supply chain all the way back to Europe. Some 4.4 tonnes of pingers stashed away in tomato tins was found thanks to a dirty rat :X

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/new...d-in-worlds-biggest-ecstasy-bust/1239771.aspx

And still to this day the AFP are over in Cambodia burning safrole oil. So don't expect a reprieve from the MDMA drought any time soon

http://www.afp.gov.au/media-centre/news/afp/2010/february/cambodia-drug-burn.aspx

I advise anyone in the pill scene to take a break until further notice for reasons of health and safety.

You risk taking any number of drugs that are more dangerous than MDMA if you continue to take ecstasy pills in the current market.

That is all
Click to expand...
 
OK well for now I am closing this thread, sorry guys but I feel like these discussions go around in circles and we have had this topic too many times.

Personally I don't agree with the need for the MDMA Drought thread to be stickied, if the small amount of valuable information in that thread wasn't spread across around ten pages maybe my opinion would be different. I really think there is no need to sticky the fact pills suck these days in general, anybody doing any research into MDMA is going to find out this information very quickly apart from anything else a quick glance at pill reports shows the bleakness of the situation, besides as it is I don't think a great deal of people even read the stickies.
 
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