Brexit and Covid lockdowns trigger hazardous spike of fake ecstasy in UK: Study

The UK government has cautioned festivalgoers about an unusual shift in the drug market resultingin a rapid and potentially hazardous spike of fake ecstasy drugs due to a combination of Brexit, and Covid lockdowns. The police have begun a crackdown targeting supply chains.

However, last year, criminologists and chemists discovered that over half of the MDMA sold at festivals in England did not contain any of the drugs.

According to the Guardian, a reportpublished in the journal Drug Science, Policy and Law, predictsa shift in the UK drugs between 2019 and 2021. It further added that “adulteration poses additional unknown risks to the health of people who use illicit drugs.”

The experts suggest that any of the pills sold at the festivals were made of chemicals like cathinones, a new psychoactive drug (NPS), and caffeine. Some of its users later observed panic, insanity and persistent insomnia.

Watch |Post-Brexit Northern Ireland trade agreement unviable, says UK PM Boris Johnson

Michael Pascoe, a research associate at Cardiff University and a co-lead author of the study, told the UK newspaper, “This is the first peer-reviewed article that confirms there was an unprecedented shift in the quality of UK ecstasy following Brexit and the lockdowns. As well as noticing this effect at festivals, the study also presents wider UK data that confirms the same effect was seen across the whole country."

The researchers further discovered that 45 per cent of the compounds advertised as MDMA contained none of its substances and were made of cathinones and caffeine. Aprobe conducted in 2019 during festivalsfound that only 7 per cent of the tablets examined did not contain MDMA. It also mentions studies from the harm reduction organisation Wedinos, which discovered that nearly 15 per cent of the MDMA products tested in the year 2021 had only cathinones and only 14 per cent had caffeine.

WATCH WION LIVE HERE

(With inputs from agencies)