i'm australian but have been living in britain for 8 years, and i have done pills in both countries.
my impressions are thus:
firstly, £1 per pill
retail is not unheard of. i've been offered pills at £1 in a club setting in at least two UK cities.
secondly, there exists a differentiation between the drug taking attitudes in britain and those in australia. partially this may be price related, since almost everything is cheaper (even coke can be bought for £35 per gram, which is an awful lot cheaper than aus), partially weather related

, but it's also behavioural. britons work a lot, don't get much sun, have relatively few holidays and are, broadly speaking, madly hedonistic fuckers with a desire to get completely trolleyed as often as possible.
australians like to think they can drink. but just check out how many 'light' beers are on the menu in a british pub - it'll probably be none. people here are used to going out, drinking 6 pints,
then going to a club, buying 10 pills off someone they don't know, and doing them all before leaving. i've seen people quad-drop pills in the UK. harm reduction is virtually unknown. try mentioning to someone that perhaps all that ketamine on top of all those beers isn't such a great idea and you will get a blank response. i know excessive drug use occurs in all countries, but i genuinely see an objective difference between the approach to drug use - particularly multiple drug use - which cannot, imo, be accounted for by price alone.
thirdly, imo pill consistency is more variable in the UK, compared to australia. generally and entirely subjectively, i feel that whilst there are fewer varieties and fewer overall individual pills on the australian market, their quality will continue to show less variance. partially i think this is because of the high prices - if you buy a bad batch of 10 here, it's not like it's going to trouble your finances - but also because of the nature of regionally specific methods of production and importation.
fourthly, my impression (again subjective, although i do remember some evidential basis for this theory being discussed by pillreports reps in EDD - jb?) was that australian pills are more likely to contain non-mdxx amphetamines. this is partly based on personal experience - aussie pills feel more 'up' - and partly based on 6 years of talking to australians about their pill experiences in the UK. most australians tend to describe british pills as 'smacky'. they're cheap, so they take lots, but never quite find the same feeling they expect to find. also iirc MDA is found in a fair proportion of pills in the UK (again, is this correct?).
finally, with a gram of mdma crystal retailing for £35 or less, i find it difficult to understand why people would want to buy pills at all
