Yeah I know its more about making money, but I wish someone would step and make real pills. My friend told me the other day he took a really good pill. Said he was rolling hard, teeth clenching, eurphoria, dialated pupils. I test one of the pills and turns out theres no mdma in them at all. Its a purple g lady and there are tons of reports on pr and no one experienced what he said. As I stated before people just don't know what rolling is.
Dogg that was a methylone pill. Methylone tests red-brown on a Mecke reagent, not blue-black. The NE has been flooded with methylone pills, and people test them with reagents and think they're pipes. I know for a fact that at least some of the purple G-ladies are methylone, not pipes.
I came across some powder methylone last weekend (given to me as "molly"), tested it with Mecke, confirmed the substance ID, and then ate some ... I had a blast. I would've had difficulty differentiating it from an MDMA roll, in fact. I had euphoria, sensitization, eye wiggles, jaw clenching, dilated pupils, the whole enchilada (although it was a bit less puppies-and-unicorns lovey-dovey than MDMA is). And the purple G-ladies that have been EVERYWHERE around the NE recently have had people satisfied and coming back for more, like your friend, because methylone is actually pretty close to MDMA in terms of the subjective experience people have on it (not identical, but plenty of people can't tell the difference, and having eaten it myself, I can see why).
Personally I think the reason there's been so many "fake" pills in the NE (and it's true that I haven't seen a pure MDMA pill in the NE in 6 months, but people are still definitely eating pills) is because there's someone in this area making methylone, and pressing pills out of it (as well as selling it as "powder molly"). It's showing up all over the place.
As far as I know you need MECKE reagent to correctly identify methylone, not Marquis. It tests red-brown. It's a fun substance in its own right (maybe a B+ grade compared to pure MDMA), and from what I've read and understand it's actually slightly easier on the brain and body than MDMA (when I took it, I felt like a million bucks the next day, absolutely no hangover whatsoever, aside from jaw soreness ... my jaw clenching was worse than it's ever been), so it doesn't bring the potential health complications and drastically shitty comedowns of pipes.
If you are in the NE and you have a non-Mecke test kit, get a Mecke reagent kit. It will help you identify the methylone that's been running around. There's a LOT of it.