A new purer form of ecstasy tablet is being sold in Dundee, drugs workers have warned. It is understood the red and white pills — costing around £10 — are being offered by dealers in the city. The new, purer strain's popularity could account for the demise of legal highs, according to drug expert Gareth Balmer.
Mr Balmer, who is project manager of drugs charity Addaction, said, "It's gone quite quiet when it comes to recreational drug use. We've seen nobody using mephedrone recently. "My theory why we're not hearing so much about recreational drugs and legal highs is because the quality of ecstasy is meant to have gone up again."
Mr Balmer said he believes that drug dealers have been forced to push this purer strain after the popularity of alternative recreational drugs such as mephedrone — known as bubbles — NRG-1 and sparkle drove down the demand for ecstasy. He said at the height of ecstasy's popularity dealers were able to sell cheap, low-purity pills. But the advent of the new, and formerly legal highs, cut the market for the class-A drug. Mr Balmer said, "It's a market like any other market. Older drug users don't care about legality."
The news follows the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction's announcement that there were 41 new legal highs reported across the continent in 2010 — 16 of which were first reported in the UK. The organisation said the new drugs, which are chemically modified from classified drugs to escape being banned, were appearing at an "unprecedented pace." Britain is now to introduce legislation to temporarily ban untested drugs.
Despite the arrival of the new drugs, Mr Balmer said none of those that have appeared in Tayside have taken off the same way that bubbles did before it was banned last April. "There's new stuff about but it's not as popular as what mephedrone was," Mr Balmer said.
Tayside Police's drugs coordinator Inspector Wendy Symington said there was intelligence coming through that ecstasy, or tablets believed to be ecstasy, was available in Tayside. The recoveries are very few and far between," she said. "That might change with T in the Park."
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