Authors
Professor Fiona Measham – Chair in Criminology, University of Liverpool and founder and Chair of the Loop Drug Checking Service
and
Adam Waugh – The Loop Drug Checking Service Training Lead
Published June 25, 2024
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Average pill strength has increased in 2024, back to pre-pandemic levels (>180mg MDMA);
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The proportion of stronger pills has increased to pre-pandemic levels (>1 in 10 are 250mg+);
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Total pill weight can be a simple indicator of high strength pills and flag up the need for extra caution;
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Timely and context-specific harm reduction communications are extremely important this summer, especially given wider concerns about drug market adulteration.
The Loop’s dedicated multidisciplinary team of chemists, health professionals, researchers and media officers returns to the fields this summer, delivering harm reduction services onsite at UK music festivals and issuing alerts and community information posts where useful, to enhance the safety of revelers up and down the country.
In January 2024, The Loop launched the first UK Home Office-licensed, fully funded, publicly accessible ‘drug checking’ service (sometimes called ‘front of house’), in Bristol city centre. This is a monthly service which enables The Loop to build a picture of drug market trends and to identify substances of particular concern in circulation.
In June 2024, The Loop launched the first UK Home Office-licensed, non-publicly accessible onsite drug testing service (sometimes called ‘back of house’), at Manchester’s Parklife festival. This further informed The Loop’s drug market surveillance. Across this summer The Loop will continue to test hundreds more samples obtained from onsite support services, ground finds and particularly festival medical emergencies. What we are already noticing is just how much the market has changed this year, compared with the disruptions of the pandemic and post-pandemic periods.
In the 2021 post-lockdown festival season, The Loop found a huge increase in synthetic cathinones and caffeine being missold as MDMA, with nearly half of products sold as MDMA containing no MDMA at all (see Table). There was also a notable fall in pill strength in the post-pandemic period, a trend identified by drug checking services across Europe. By the following summer, however, The Loop noted a substantial fall in synthetic cathinones being missold as MDMA, although ecstasy pill strength had increased only marginally.
Read full article
https://www.drugscience.org.uk/size-matters-high-strength-ecstasy?mc_cid=ffc5497607
