The stimulant 4-fluoroamphetamine is increasingly popular in the Netherlands, which might be due to its subjective effects profile, which lies intermediate between amphetamine and MDMA.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present some of the continued resistance and challenges faced by drug checking services (DCS) and review how the existing literature and the contributions to the special issue address them, with a view to making recommendations.
Design/methodology/approach
The existing literature and the contributions to the special issue are reviewed.
Findings
Drug checking cannot be equated with quality control. With the appropriate equipment and chemistry staff, DCS can provide quantitative analysis and reliable results. When the product does not match expectations, service users discard the tested substance of concern. To more easily compare the results of different studies and better evaluate drug checking, standardisation of measures is desirable. Uptake of drug checking, notably in festivals, is low and depends in part on the capacity of DCS. Drug checking has added value in monitoring drug markets and is complementary with chemical (forensic) analysis.
Originality/value
This paper interrogates in a relatively comprehensive way the continued resistance to drug checking in light of theoretical and empirical research to derive recommendations that are specific to drug checking and that are addressed to health professionals, researchers and also to policymakers.
Purpose
The 3,4-methylenedioxymetamphetamine (MDMA) content in ecstasy tablets has increased enormously throughout Europe across the past decade. This study aims to determine whether this is caused by the production of “stronger” tablets (more mg MDMA per mg of tablet), or if tablets have simply been getting larger and heavier (more mg of tablet in total).
Design/methodology/approach
A data set of 31,716 ecstasy tablets obtained in 2012–2021 by 10 members of the Trans European Drug Information (TEDI) network was analysed.
Findings
The MDMA mass fraction in ecstasy tablets has remained virtually unchanged over the past 10 years, with increased MDMA contents being attributed almost exclusively to increased tablet weight. These trends seem to be uniform across Europe, despite varying sampling and analytical techniques being used by the TEDI participants. The study also shows that while tablet weight correlates perfectly with MDMA content on a yearly basis, wide variations in the MDMA mass fraction make such relations irrelevant for determining the MDMA content of individual tablets.
Research limitations/implications
These results provide new opportunities for harm reduction, given that size is a tangible and apparently accurate characteristic to emphasise that one tablet does not simply equate to one dose. This is particularly useful for harm reduction services without the resources for in-house quantification of large numbers of ecstasy tablets, although the results of this study also show that chemical analysis remains crucial for accurate personalised harm reduction.
Originality/value
The findings are both new and pertinent, providing a novel insight into the market dynamics of ecstasy tablet production at a transnational level.
Background: Ecstasy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)) has a relatively low harm and low dependence liability but is scheduled on List I of the Dutch Opium Act (‘hard drugs’). Concerns surrounding increasing MDMA-related criminality coupled with the possibly inappropriate scheduling of MDMA initiated a debate to revise the current Dutch ecstasy policy. Methods: An interdisciplinary group of 18 experts on health, social harms and drug criminality and law enforcement reformulated the science-based Dutch MDMA policy using multi-decision multi-criterion decision analysis (MD-MCDA). The experts collectively formulated policy instruments and rated their effects on 25 outcome criteria, including health, criminality, law enforcement and financial issues, thematically grouped in six clusters. Results: The experts scored the effect of 22 policy instruments, each with between two and seven different mutually exclusive options, on 25 outcome criteria. The optimal policy model was defined by the set of 22 policy instrument options which gave the highest overall score on the 25 outcome criteria. Implementation of the optimal policy model, including regulated MDMA sales, decreases health harms, MDMA-related organised crime and environmental damage, as well as increases state revenues and quality of MDMA products and user information. This model was slightly modified to increase its political feasibility. Sensitivity analyses showed that the outcomes of the current MD-MCDA are robust and independent of variability in weight values. Conclusion: The present results provide a feasible and realistic set of policy instrument options to revise the legislation towards a rational MDMA policy that is likely to reduce both adverse (public) health risks and MDMA-related criminal burden.
Background: MDMA (ecstasy, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) has a relatively low harm and low dependence liability but is scheduled on List I of the Dutch Opium Act together (“hard drugs”). Concerns surrounding increasing MDMA-related criminality coupled with the possibly inappropriate scheduling of MDMA initiated a debate to revise the current Dutch ecstasy policy.Methods: An interdisciplinary group of eighteen experts on health, social harms, and drug criminality and law enforcement reformulated science-based the Dutch MDMA policy using multi-decision multi-criterion decision analysis (MD-MCDA). The experts collectively formulated policy instruments and rated their effects on 25 outcome criteria, including health, criminality, law enforcement and financial issues, thematically grouped in six clusters.Results: [WILL BE ADDED ON 2020-11-13]Conclusion: [WILL BE ADDED ON 2020-11-13]
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