Two losses have bonded the internet this week. First: the death of our world’s queen, Dolly Parton, who has surely received the deepest global outpouring of affection since that interminable winter when David Bowie and Prince died.

Secondly: that drug seizure from Creamfields. There seemingly hasn’t been a WhatsApp group or timeline unfettered by the image (above) of 204 nitrous oxide canisters alongside bags of ketamine, MDMA and pills. It was posted by Cheshire Police on Monday after unearthing a stash buried by onsite dealers, before punters start landing in earnest today.

For non-English readers, Creamfields is a festival aimed squarely at the under-25s. It has heavyweight roots, stretching back to Liverpool’s eponymous Cream, part of the 1990s superclub explosion, and is a rite of passage for yung ravers of Albion whose one wish is to wring their synapses dry of positive neurochemicals dancing to a line-up of elephantine DJ names including Fisher, Disclosure and Calvin Harris.

On seeing the story, my first concern sat with the person who’s going to lose a lot of money. Would they face any retribution for losing (plucks number out of air) £30k at juicy festival mark-ups? Or, perhaps, has a crew littered the site with other drug bundles and viewed acceptable wastage as part of their business plan – the black market equivalent of five dodgy pints in a barrel?

It also brought to mind a VICE article I wrote in 2019 called Sniffer Dogs and the Dickhead Tax: The Secrets Of Festival Drug Dealers, where I spoke with festival plugs about how they applied their seasonal trade.

There has been an evolution of the job since then, with onsite dealers increasingly reachable via Instagram and WhatsApp, the numbers passed around on number sourcing apps like little scuffed-up pill quarters. I’ve even seen bots listing them.

But for festival-goers who remain unplugged from these communities, analog festival dealers like ‘Carl’ below, who memorably told me that he attracted customers on account of his “big pinger energy”, are both source and salvation.

It behoves me to point out here that research found drugs bought onsite are more than twice as likely to be missold. That you should also test anything you buy, and, yes, wouldn’t it be easier if we could just buy drugs from pharmacies like grown-ups, pat the even-more-defunct sniffer dogs and be on our way through the gates to our temporary Elysium.

Anyway, here it is, minus an out-of-date intro. This is the original VICE piece.

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HOW DO THEY PICK A FESTIVAL?

“I just go to whatever festival I like and sell there,” says Carl, 31. This attitude – that the dealing ran adjacent to having a good time – was broadly replicated across the five dealers I spoke to, and Glastonbury, Boomtown, and Secret Garden Party came up frequently as thriving markets.

“I did Boomtown nine years a in a row and made handfuls there,” says Keith, 34. “Though one year I went to Download with half an ounce of ketamine and came back with nearly all of it.”

Download’s metal-loving crowd is traditionally associated with hard-drinking rather than drug-taking and, unsurprisingly, it can pay to go where the money traditionally is: “Secret Garden Party was a goldmine because everyone was posh and loved buying drugs, but didn’t know fuck-all about them,” remembers Naylor.

PRE-FESTIVAL PINGER PREP

Of those I spoke to, Keith’s preparation was the most advanced: “I sold mainly ketamine, coke, weed and acid, using vacuum packed bags which I’d stash in a Pringles can. I’d take half the Pringles out, pop the stash in, stick a couple Pringles on top and then reseal with super glue. Easy.”

Steve, a DJ and retired dealer who worked festivals across the UK and Europe for many years, prefers taking the gear in unweighed. “If you get caught with packaged goods they know you’re a shot [drug dealer] and more likely to be sent to police,” he says. “If they find all your stash together you can just pretend it’s yours for the week.”

Steve says he would take clingfilm in his bags, and scales that looked like a pack of playing cards or a phone, to avoid alerting security. He’s not, however, averse to a little home chemistry: “I would bulk buy bottles of liquid acid at £150 a bottle and make my own sheets. You do this before the festival, though acid likes to be kept cool. I’d usually have a friend with a caravan and fridge, so they’d keep it there for me and I’d give them some drugs for the favour.”

Generally, the most popular drugs were MDMA/ecstasy and LSD. “My nightly amount was about 100 microdots [LSD], 100 pills of ecstasy, half an ounce to an ounce of speed,” says 45-year-old Faye, who was around for the birth of acid house and spent the 1990s and 2000s dealing at festivals and raves across Europe. The first part of this was with a gang: an experience she “wouldn’t wish on anyone”. In those days her boss bought all the gear upfront. “Then it got dished out just before the festival started. He gave us a price. We sold at whatever price we wanted, gave him back his money at the end and kept the rest.”

GETTING IT THROUGH THE GATES, AND THE FUTILITY OF SNIFFER DOGS

“In the old days it was really easy to break in,” say Faye. “You just went through holes in the fence or over the wall. You didn’t go through any security – it was such a doddle.”

The dealers seem fairly sanguine about the chances of their drugs being found while entering the festival, though three had an inside track – either through being a part of production, or entering as a musician. “That gives you a certain level of protection,” says Steve. “But the difference between now and ten years ago is huge. There was a huge change after the Ariana Grande bombing in Manchester [in May of 2017]. There was an increase in searches and there was much less special treatment for crew and artists.”

Carl, who normally takes 200 pills into a festival, seemed unperturbed by the presence of security on the gate. “If it’s a strict one then I put them in my wellies. They never tell you to take your wellies off, especially when it’s muddy,” he says.

What about sniffer dogs, which – despite mounting evidence that they increase the likelihood of drug-related harms – still lurk around the gates of most major festivals? Mike, who once drove 200 pills and two ounces of MDMA to Serbia’s EXIT festival, says, “I’ve worked in festival production, and I know that after half an hour their nose gets tired.” Mike had this theory tested even further at UK border patrol: “I had several sniffer dogs around the car.” His stash was all heavily wrapped in clingfilm and hidden inside the lining of his car. “I struck up rapport with the person conducting the search. They thought I was a squaddie just because I’ve got a shaved head and drive a Golf. Apparently that’s a popular combination for a squaddie, so they let me crack on.”

PEACOCK TO SURVIVE AND THRIVE

Every festival dealer has different ways to engage the customer. “I’m a magnet,” says Carl. “People always come to me. But then I’m the guy in a wig and sunnies and mad clothing. I’m also, to be fair, normally taking drugs quite openly. I have big pinger energy.”

Mike dealt from his tent on the campsite before heading into the festival proper: word spread so quickly around his local area that he sold £8,000 of drugs in the first two days.

Steve preferred a two-pronged attack with his girlfriend, aided by a peacocking outfit. “I used to wear something like a crazy full body dinosaur costume.” His girlfriend would try to find customers, while he’d watch her back and keep an eye out for authorities. His costume would also do its own work and bring the pill-hungry hordes to him. “I’d generally suss people out before propositioning. Maybe ask for a light or a Rizla and have a bit of banter before seeing if they wanted anything.” He preferred dealing pills and LSD, partly because of the higher profits and ease of hiding them, but also the target audience: “With coke and ketamine you end up dealing with idiots and meltheads. They’ll get you arrested by being too fucked themselves.”

Sundays are a good day for reeling in the suffering. “Weed was always good on the last day, when everyone is dying,” says Keith. “You walk around with a fatty and they come to you.”

PROFITS, AND THE DICKHEAD TAX

“We used to make £5,000 over a weekend,” says Keith, who – like Sam, Faye and Mike – has now thrown in his dealer cap. “Half of which was profit.”

Carl says he’d normally buy his pills at £2 a pop and sell each for £10. You’d need to be packing some cash to buy a pill from Faye back in the Very Early Days: “I’d be selling them for £15 or £20 a go, but I was buying them for a tenner.”

The generally accepted method for weighed drugs is as follows: charge the price it would be out of the festival gates, but give a third less to the customer. “If a £20 bag of weed would be between 1.6g to 1.8g in London, in a festival it’s 1.2g,” says Steve. “I’d explain to people that they’re getting taxed in this way and use that as a way for them to take a bulk deal: three bags for £10 discount, say.”

Everyone extolled the virtues of not ripping off the customer and concurred on another doctrine: if you’re a dick to your dealer, expect to pay The Dickhead Tax: “I would charge different amounts to different people, depending on whether you were a friend, a stranger or an idiot,” says Faye. “If they were a complete knob, I’d take the piss. And they’d deserve it.”

CARE FOR THE CUSTOMER

Both Keith and Sam have used The Loop’s drug-testing service onsite before selling to their customers, while Sam says he “always, always tests my shit with a reagents kit”. Everyone is generally forthcoming with rudimentary safety advice for their customers, especially in regards to ecstasy: “I’d always tell people to start with a half. I don’t like the thought of people fucking themselves up too much at a festival,” says Sam. “They’re still people, even if they’re cunts.”

How does Carl know his pills are good? “I always do my own pingers. That’s my test.”

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How can festivalgoers ensure they end up buying the drugs they actually want? “Emphasising the dangers of what people are cutting drugs with is very important,” says Sam. So get it tested if you can. Or bring a reagents test, which aren’t perfect but will help users ascertain whether their MDMA is in fact something dreadful like N-ethyl-pentylone, which was found regularly at UK festivals last year [in 2018[ and can result in long and often traumatic trips. And always avoid those angry looking men charging through a crowd, shouting “pills, coke, ket” to no one in particular.

“Those guys are likely to be selling bad product,” says Sam. “I’ve heard of so many people buying bags of crushed up paracetamol, or fake acid tabs. Nowadays it’s even worse – people are cutting drugs with fucking dangerous shit.”

GETTING CAUGHT DRUG-HANDED

Some of our friends had run-ins with security while selling, but seemed to think everyone could co-exist in the same festival ecosystem providing you were seen to be: a) a good egg, and b) happy to hand your stash over if asked. Keith was approached by two men asking for MDMA and ketamine.

“I asked if they wanted any coke. They said an eighth, which I was wary about, but too smashed and greedy to turn them down. Turns out they were security. They said, ‘Look, because you’re not out here trying to do wrong by anyone we’re just gonna take what you have and not hand you in.’

This basically meant, ‘Give us what you got so we can go shot it.’

Security taking seized drugs and re-selling them is seemingly one of the great open secrets of the festival and nightlife business. “I know for a fact that security companies run a hustle where they take confiscated drugs and sell them back into the festival through a sort of phantom festival shotter,” says Sam. “I’m a licensed SIA [Security Industry Authority] badge holder and have been involved in that.”

Faye remembers one particularly nervy moment, after someone danced into her and sent a bag of pills spilling around a security guard’s feet. “I froze. He got his torch out, shone it on the ground and beckoned me over. I was terrified. He said, ‘I’m going to shine my torch on the floor, count to 30 and you’ve got that time to put them all in your pocket.’ I thanked him and he said, ‘It’s OK, love, off you go.’

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“Coca, a cure for timidity.

Whatever may have been said … about the effects of coca on the human system, this much is certain, that it causes timid people, who are usually ill at ease in society, and particularly so before strangers, to appear to good advantage under these circumstances.

In other words, it cures bashfulness.”¹

This advert copy for coca appeared in an 1877 issue of New Preparations. Back then, coca did not have the reputation for curing bashfulness that cocaine would develop in the centuries to come. It was left to the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis and particularly its charismatic co-owner George Davis to turn everyone onto this timidity-curing alkaloid.

He was helped by all manner of innovations: not least New Preparations. A brainchild of George’s, this journal published research and basic histories of plant medicines, extracts of which all happened to be manufactured by Parke-Davis. In doing so, he helped write a marketing playbook that pharmaceutical companies have used since: from OxyContin to Ozempic. Here’s the story of how cocaine helped create Big Pharma.

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The Dawn of the Dust

Coca, a small bush with stimulant properties, has been chewed by inhabitants of the Andes region for roughly the last 8,000 years.² But it wasn’t until 1855 that the key active alkaloid, cocaine, was first successfully isolated from the leaf by a German chemist named Friedrich Gaedcke.

By that time, future pharmaceutical giant Merck had started manufacturing cocaine as a matter of principle rather than demand. The thinking was simple: if there were new plant medicines to be made, they wanted to make them, believing that eventually a medical application would reveal itself. For 30 years, cocaine’s true medical purpose would remain undiscovered.³ In the meantime, it needed someone to help find its feet in a growing pharmaceutical marketplace.

The Detroit-Berlin Connection

In 1862, Dr Samuel P. Duffield had just returned to Detroit after studying the burgeoning art of pharmacy in Berlin. Bearing tales of Merck’s successes, Duffield began creating his own plant-based preparations in the back of his Detroit office. In the newspapers, he advertised “ether, sweet spirits of nitre, liquid ammonium, Hoffman’s anodyne, mercurial ointment, etc.” as some of the remedies on offer.⁴

Duffield was joined by a successful businessman named Hervey C. Parke (the middle name, improbably, stood for Coke) and a young up-and-coming salesman named George S. Davis. Parke brought much-needed capital to the operation, and Davis brought a relentless flood of new ideas about how to market their products.

Davis’ energy was much needed. No sooner had the group gotten started than they found themselves in a brutal price war with drug-makers from New York and Philadelphia. Discouraged by these early difficulties, Sam Duffield departed the firm in 1871, returning to private practice. This left the two businessmen, who knew nothing about medicine or pharmacology, to run the company

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A Good Big Dose Of The Medicine

One of George Davis’ first innovations was to supply free sample packs of Parke-Davis products to leading physicians, along with that “Journal of Medicine”, New Preparations.

It spawned a successor, The Therapeutic Gazette, and a number of subsidiary journals, including Detroit Lancet, American Lancet, and Medical Age – all curated by the business and containing original articles, reprints of old ones, letters to the editor, and plenty of ads for Parke-Davis and other pharmaceutical brands.

In 1885, Davis went so far as to acquire the publishing rights for the Index Medicus, which would become the leading print index of every medical publication worldwide.⁵ This allowed Davis to ensure articles from every one of his so-called medical journals were included alongside more legitimate publications such as The (actual) Lancet.^6,7

The Therapeutic Gazette was Davis’ most successful publication, and became the channel through which he would sell the public on cocaine’s first medical miracle: curing morphine addiction.

The Therapeutic Gazette’s first mention of coca extract as a treatment for opiate addiction came in 1880, from Dr. E.R. Palmer at the University of Louisville. Parke-Davis had shipped the university a sampling of its products, including a fluid extract of coca. Having used it successfully to treat a cardiac irregularity, Dr. Palmer thought to try it on a man who self-identified as a chronic opium-eater.⁸

Palmer writes of his patient:

*“He took the coca for some days, and entirely broke off from opium. His statement was that whenever he felt depressed or bad he took a good big dose of the medicine, and in a few moments was all right.”*8

Between 1880 and 1884, the pages of The Therapeutic Gazette were littered with articles touting the benefits of coca extracts, with headlines including “Coca – A Cure for Morphinism” and “Coca Erythroxylon in Exhaustion”. [Erythroxylon is coca’s botanical name.]

In the autumn of 1883, a Bavarian army physician named Theodor Aschenbrandt would purchase some cocaine from Merck for an experiment of his own. During rigorous training exercises, he dosed the soldiers in his unit with cocaine and was impressed to see it increased their capacity to complete exhausting maneuvers and led to an “increase of all mental powers.”

This report served as the first domino that would spark a young Sigmund Freud’s interest in the drug, and set off a chain of events that would touch millions of noses worldwide.⁹

A Freudian Sniff

Following Aschenbrandt’s report, Freud purchased a small amount of cocaine from Merck. After self-testing the drug, he excitedly ingested all existing medical literature on the drug he could find.

While his sources for his eventual treatise Über Coca were many, the notion that cocaine could be a remedy for morphine addiction came from just one channel: the Detroit Therapeutic Gazette. He includes 13 references to the publication in Über Coca, theorising that one of coca’s most significant uses may be “the power of suppressing the craving for morphine among habitual morphine addicts.”¹⁰ This had been of particular interest to him, given that a close friend, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, was actively struggling with that very affliction.

After a bout of self-experimentation, Freud was so floored by the numerous effects of the “magical substance” that he handed out samples to all of his associates.

This included Carl Koller, who was studying at the Medical School of Vienna when Sigmund slid him his first bag (or, more likely, vial). At the time, Koller was on the hunt for the perfect local anaesthetic he could use in ocular surgery. Cocaine, it transpired, did the job extraordinarily well and Koller entrusted a friend to break the news at the Heidelberg Ophthalmological Congress on September 15th 1884.

Nevertheless, Koller is widely credited as the first person to discover cocaine’s usefulness as a local anesthetic in 1884, a medical application for which it’s still used today.¹¹

Unfortunately, Freud’s association with the drug is invariably entwined with the famously exuberant Über Coca. “All reports are in complete agreement that the state of euphoria caused by coca is not followed by any condition of weariness or other form of depression,”¹¹ he wrote, whilst poor Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow became hopelessly addicted to both cocaine and morphine.

The Golden Age of OTC Cocaine

Following Koller’s breakthrough discovery of cocaine as a local anaesthetic, George Davis and the editors at the Therapeutic Gazette went (eight) balls to the wall.

Between 1884 and 1912, cocaine or coca was mentioned inside the pages of every single issue of the Therapeutic Gazette, with articles including: “Cocaine in the Treatment of Skin-Diseases and Syphilis”, “Cocaine in Circumcision” and “Cocaine Used in the Vomiting of Pregnancy”.

Spurred on by the medical marketing frenzy, this time period saw a rash of extraordinarily ill-advised over-the-counter cocaine preparations, my favourite of which is easily Dr. Birney’s Catarrhal Powder.

Dr. Birney’s was marketed as a remedy for common cold symptoms, sold in a thick glass vial alongside an amber glass straw with a tapered end. The other end was connected to a rubber tube, with the mechanism of delivery requiring users to scoop up the powder using the tapered end of the straw. They’d position it in their nose. Finally, they would place the rubber tube in their mouth and “blow the powder.”

In addition to Dr. Birney’s, the late 1800s saw products hit the shelves including “Cocarettes” ¹² (cigarettes with coca), Coca-Bola (cocaine chewing gum)¹³; and of course Coca-Cola, which originally marketed itself as a headache cure containing both cocaine and caffeine.¹⁴ (Coca leaves are still part of the ingredients list but they are now decocainised).

The Bag Runs Dry

Parke-Davis and the medical community would pull back on their cocaine as panacea messaging in the mid-1910s. This followed two decades of high-profile addictions, mostly from surgeons and doctors experimenting with the drug. Among the first were Freud’s friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow and Johns Hopkins co-founder William Stewart Halsted.

Addicted doctors aside, a more significant catalyst may have been a slew of extraordinarily racist articles in the mainstream press painting cocaine as a drug that caused Black people to go on crazed murder sprees.¹⁵ These articles originated in Southern states like Tennessee and Mississippi, but were amplified and lent credence by household names like The New York Times. These articles stirred up a frenzy among lawmakers and the press that would be eerily echoed in the crack panic 70 years later.

Effective prohibition of recreational cocaine was enacted as part of the Harrison Tax Act in 1914. While this act didn’t ban cocaine outright, its mechanism and enforcement, making cocaine (and heroin) unlawful without a prescription, would effectively end America’s unbridled over-the-counter cocaine free-for-all.

Plus ça change

Over 100 years later, pharmaceutical marketing has grown in George’s less-than-salubrous image. Squint and one can easily imagine him at the head of Purdue Pharma’s marketing team during the OxyContin launch, excitedly spinning up their Partners Against Pain ecosystem.¹⁶

In 2000, Parke-Davis and its then-parent company were absorbed by Pfizer, but not before conducting a massive off-label marketing campaign for Neurontin that would later cost the company a $430 million penalty and two felony guilty pleas. They had illegally claimed the epilepsy drug could be used to treat everything from migraines to bipolar disorder. In one of the most damning charges, they had paid medical specialists to fraudulently publish articles under their own names that were in fact ghostwritten by Parke-Davis employees.¹⁷

RIP George Davis, you would have loved #MyOzempicJourney.

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References

1. Coca. New Preparations [Internet]. 1877 Jul [cited 2026 Jul 24];1(3). Available from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/New_preparations_%28IA_newpreparations11877detr%29.pdf

2. Gagnon CM, Billman BR, Carcelén J, Reinhard KJ. Tracking shifts in coca use in the Moche Valley: analysis of oral health indicators and dental calculus microfossils. Ñawpa Pacha. 2013;33(2):193-214. doi:10.1179/0077629713Z.0000000009

3. Karch SB. A brief history of cocaine: from the Inca monarchs to the Cali cartels: 500 years of cocaine dealing. 2nd ed. Boca Raton (FL): CRC Press/Taylor & Francis; 2006.

4. Hoefle ML. The early history of Parke-Davis and Company. Bull Hist Chem [Internet]. 2000 [cited 2026 Jul 26];25(1):28-34. Available from: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/133241

5. Billings JS, Fletcher R, editors. Index medicus: a monthly classified record of the current medical literature of the world [Internet]. Vol. 7. Detroit (MI): George S. Davis; 1885 [cited 2026 Jul 31]. Available from: https://archive.org/details/indexmedicus7188unse

6. Markel H. An anatomy of addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the miracle drug cocaine. New York (NY): Pantheon Books; 2011.

7. Index medicus: a monthly classified record of the current medical literature of the world, 1879-1899 [Internet]. [place unknown]: Primary Source Media/Gale Cengage; [date unknown] [cited 2026 Jul 21]. Available from: https://assets.cengage.com/gale/psm/1001000R.pdf

8. Palmer ER. [Report on the therapeutic use of fluid extract of coca]. Ther Gaz [Internet]. 1880 Jun 15 [cited 2026 Jul 21];4(6):162-3. Available from: https://archive.org/details/sim_therapeutic-gazette_1880-06-15_4_6

9. Martin PR. Cocaine. In: Historical vocabulary of addiction [Internet]. International Network for the History of Neuropsychopharmacology (INHN); [date unknown] [cited 2026 Jul 31]. Available from: https://inhn.org/inhn-projects/ebooks/peter-r-martin-historical-vocabulary-of-addiction/cocaine

10. Freud S. Über Coca. Centralblatt für die gesammte Therapie. 1884;2:289-314. English translation in: Byck R, editor. Cocaine papers. New York (NY): Stonehill; 1974.

11. Goerig M, Bacon D, van Zundert A. Carl Koller, cocaine, and local anesthesia: some less known and forgotten facts. Reg Anesth Pain Med. 2012;37(3):318-24. doi:10.1097/AAP.0b013e31825051f3

12. [Cocarette advertisement]. Mining and Industrial Journal. 1884 Jan 18.

13. [Coca-Bola advertisement]. Grand Forks Herald. 1909 Oct 21.

14. [Coca-Cola advertisement]. Sunday Gazette (Atlantic City, NJ). 1892 Jun 26.

15. Williams EH. Negro cocaine “fiends” are a new southern menace. The New York Times [Internet]. 1914 Feb 8 [cited 2026 Jul 26]. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/1914/02/08/archives/negro-cocaine-fiends-are-a-new-southern-menace-murder-and-insanity.html

16. Van Zee A. The promotion and marketing of OxyContin: commercial triumph, public health tragedy. Am J Public Health. 2009;99(2):221-7. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2007.131714

17. Lenzer J. Pfizer pleads guilty, but drug sales continue to soar. BMJ. 2004;328(7450):1217. doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7450.1217

Hello! After last week’s investigation by and I into the UK summer cocaine drought, we’ve had a flurry of new subscribers and followers, alongside plenty of what you’d call “randoms from the internet” popping up in comment sections and DMs. We thought that we’d run a short follow-up piece to capitalise on the new interest, tie up loose ends from its publication, consider what drugs may or may not be next for “drought” status, and do a little housekeeping as WHAT ARE YOU ON nears its first anniversary.

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Market forces

Drugs writing is often printed in shades of grey, inevitably for a subject that’s both illegal and highly profitable. Whilst I already knew vendors were talking about the paucity of cocaine and that prices had increased on some Telegram menus, our original piece hung around two vital sources of information: Dr Josh Torrance’s research that ounce prices of coke increased by over 40% between May and July, across 65 vendors on Telegram and Signal. Plus some drug-testing information from Energy Control that found the average purity of powder they were testing had dropped by nearly 30% since the start of 2026.

But we still couldn’t find the smoking gun – i.e. someone working in import – to tell us definitively what’s going on, so a couple of prevailing theories emerged: first, that some large-scale busts, particularly the May Canary Islands seizure that was heavily linked to Jos Leijdekkers (“Chubby Jos”), had caused a shortage, potentially alongside the extradition and arrest of OCG boss Daniel Kinahan. Or that there was collusion between crews to drive up prices in a UK now notorious for its utilitarian pricing.

So, look, we still don’t know. But we have had some messages pertaining to the latter, with one pointing to increasing prices elsewhere in Europe while UK prices have soared. “In business strategy terms this could be interpreted as capture strategy, Grow the market with cheap prices then when consumers are locked in jack them. Then the benchmark reaches a new equilibrium delivering higher margins,” we were told.

What we do know is that Josh Torrance’s August data found that prices had plateaued (though not fallen). The September stats will establish whether that’s the trend.

Also worth noting, perhaps, is that since last week, Energy Control’s average coke purity has increased from 53% to 59%, albeit with a fairly small sample size. (There had been 708 tested samples when we published; now there are 717.) Does this point to the market finding this new equilibrium? Will lower-grade bash once again become the norm for knockabout kitchen sesh lads, while users with more discerning tastes desert the drug for the so-called “new cocaine”? Check back here over the coming months to sate all your drought curiosities.

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What’s running out next?

Another interesting – and certainly more concrete – development for the Great British party pack may come next month, when eight precursors used to produce 4-MMC (née mephedrone/MCAT/miaow), its less cuddly successor 3-MMC, and two other synthetic cathinones will come under EU-wide controls from 18 September.

Whilst these are pretty normal to see on dealers’ menus now, they’ve been popping off over in Europe far more than the UK. History tells us that when something gets banned, chemists just adapt. MCAT itself originally made a huge splash in the UK market after 33 tonnes of safrole oil (a precursor used to make MDMA) was burnt by Cambodian authorities in 2009. Ecstasy and MDMA quality subsequently dropped through the floor and the legal, piss-smelling powder – known in Sweden as krabba, or “crab”, another interpretation of its unique olfactory tenor, and available on the internet well over a decade before anyone knew what Telegram was – rose to prominence.

After being made illegal, its popularity declined and it retreated into the fringes, as MDMA rose again with alternative synthetic precursors. Plus ça change.

Speaking of MCAT – listen to our 1st birthday podcast about it

We’re going to start a WHAT ARE YOU ON podcast. The first episode is a Gulf of Siam-deep dive into MCAT and all the MMCs – the nostalgia, the comedowns, the suicides, the chemsex, the resurgence, the imminent ban – and we’re heavy pencilling it in to land 11 September. (This is also our first anniversary and I’ll be redacting all comments about that particular date.)

Ella and I will be hosting, with a plan to record two pods a month. One around an issue at the rattling, take-off-your-Garmin-tonight-babe 140bpm heart of drug culture, and the other an interview with an academic, journalist, sector worker, creator or general face within the illicit narcotic milieu. More information to come, but if you could help us with some research for the MCAT episode, please take two minutes to fill out this form.

A triple-ton

We reached 300 subscribers shortly after publishing the coke drought feature. We’ve had 30 new subscribers since, at time of writing, making it our most successful story by that metric. (The highest number of views is currently for ‘why Blokes love Coke’, published last year.)

Substack likes to keep things somewhat nebulous in terms of traffic sources, but loads came from “direct” sources, which suggests it’s been shared about a lot on WhatsApp and other messaging apps. We’re very grateful to anyone who did this, or shared our work on social media, at any point over the last 12 months. I bang on about this a lot, but for a publication of our diminutive size, covering the fairly niche beat we do, every single share makes a difference. Choos!

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“It’s fucking shit.”

This is not a sentence one expects from a drug vendor, especially when describing their cocaine: a substance that has bloomed in production and purity over recent years, flooding Western and Central Europe with affordable powder, leading the United Nations to declare it now the “primary destination” for coke.

But something’s been in the water this summer. There’s been persistent chatter about reduced availability across Telegram buying markets. Users on Bluelight and Reddit have claimed low purity powder, with speculation of high profile seizures affecting availability, while prices crept up on many online menus. And Dr Josh Torrance, an innovation officer at drug services provider Cranstoun, released research that found the average price of an ounce of cocaine had risen over 40% on Telegram and Signal from May to July, lending credibility to the rumours.

So, what’s happened? Has something disrupted Europe’s cocaine supply – and might this affect quality on the ground? As the continent burns and browns in its own heatwave, is it a seasonal blip or are we in a cocaine drought too?

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Torrance has been tracing online drug prices for years. He didn’t see the price of cocaine rise “to any significant extent” in an 18-month period between 2021 and 2023 – and neither in the 11 months preceding July 2024.

After taking some time off, he began tracking again nearly a year ago, looking at listings from 65 vendors mostly across Telegram with a few on Signal. The market stayed broadly the same. Then came that sharp and unexpected spike with the biggest rise – 30% – taking place between June and July. Overall, they went from £724 to £1029.

“This is very significant in terms of typical market fluctuations," says. “It’s a big jump.”

In the same time period, Josh also recorded far fewer listings for kilos of cocaine. “In April and March, I was collecting nine or 10 kilo listings [per month], which is loads,” says Torrance. “Then in June, I collected two.” In July it was one. “So suddenly, from one month to the next, no one's offering weight anymore.”

For online vendors, says Torrance, fierce competition creates an incentive to keep products as pure as possible, which means they're more likely to raise the price than they are to dilute their product. (Several vendors we’ve seen have raised the price of a gram from around 〜£50 a gram to 〜£70.)

For traditional “dial-a-dealers”, some of whom will be purchasing from online vendors, prices are more likely to stay intact – with a potential variation in quality as they seek to maintain profit margins and availability. One vendor we speak to also points to the timing of a World Cup summer, with bars and bistros heaving across the continent and beery football fans reaching for a tie-straightener to get through those late kickoffs.

“If you want the best, you’re looking at having to pay double to just a few months ago,” one vendor tells WAYO. “But I’ve noticed a massive shift in quality, I paid 50% more on the last batch and I’m not happy with it. It’s a nightmare, to be honest,” they add.

Another source says that prices for bricks are up approximately 25% to 30% with availability down. “Everyone was falling over bricks a few months ago. Now they’re a little harder to come by,” they say, qualifying that quality hasn’t been impacted much.

Nevertheless, Energy Control, the Spain-based drug testing organisation that coordinates the TEDi continental drugs network, has found that average purity of cocaine tested by them has dropped from 75.75% in Q1 2026 to 52.56% in Q3.

In the same timeframe, the number of samples containing no cocaine has risen from 5.51% to 11.77% while the number of samples containing substances other than cocaine has climbed from 5.51% to 15.69%. The most common adulterants, by far, are caffeine and phenacetin – the latter a pain-relieving medication that has been linked with causing severe kidney damage.

Dr Mireia Ventura, Coordinator of Analysis Services for Energy Control, tells WAYO: “I don’t know the exact reasons for this decrease. It may be that fewer cartels are producing cocaine, as some have shifted their focus to methamphetamine. Large seizures may also have played a role. Ultimately, the composition and purity of drugs are determined by the balance between supply and demand. And demand has not decreased dramatically, as far as we know.”

The findings seem counterintuitive to the prevailing picture that higher purity cocaine is saturating European markets, with a recent Financial Times investigation writing that “Europe can’t stop the tide of cocaine”.

That has been spearheaded by a boom in coca cultivation and coke production in Latin America. The United Nations reported a production increase of 53% between 2023 and 2024 in Colombia (though then-president Gustavo Pietro has disputed the scale of this increase). Cocaine production has increasingly been happening in Europe with labs turning the easier-to-transport cocaine paste into powder this side of the Atlantic.

While the amount of cocaine seized in the EU fell from 419 tonnes in 2023 to 330 tonnes in 2024, the number of individual seizures increased, with The European Union Drug Agency (EUDA) writing that “more reports of smaller ports being exploited.”

This also includes the use of large so-called motherships, which, according to a Europol report published in January this year, “carry the drugs from Latin America to smaller daughter vessels, which either take the cocaine onboard directly or collect it at prearranged drop-offs and bring them ashore.” Such methods have been linked to price decreases.

When contacted by WAYO for this article, the EUDA – whose 2025 data found purity of 80% or higher was found in about 65% of the cocaine samples tested by nine drug checking services across 5 EU Member States – said that their monitoring systems were not time sensitive enough to pick up such recent changes, and they didn’t have any information about mooted price rises or shortages of cocaine in the EU at present time.

So, what’s going on?

Torrance speculates that this apparent shortage may be linked to the seizure of one of these operations; namely Jos Leijdekkers, AKA Bolle Jos (“Chubby Jos”) who is currently under international warrant for multiple drugs trafficking convictions which would land him over 100 years in prison. He’s now said to be hiding out in Sierra Leone – which recently became an artery for cocaine transportation – where he has, reportedly, some might say wisely, started a relationship with the president’s daughter.

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A vendor says that he has heard that “arrests of big players have led to people shutting up shop. I’m not high up enough to know if that’s correct,” they qualify, adding that, “I’ve spoken with other vendors and it seems to be due to operational limitations.”

In May, Spanish police seized what was thought to be a national record haul of cocaine from a ship off the coast of the Canary Islands, containing between 3,000 to 4,000kg. The bust was “almost certainly” linked to Leijdekkers’ operation. This period has also seen Daniel Kinahan, head of a €1bn plus crime group suspected of being responsible for much of the coke flowing through Europe, extradited from Dubai for arrest.

Ross Eventon, former head of the drugs and conflict programme at the Global Drug Policy Observatory, and current PhD candidate at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogota, urges some caution: “I haven’t seen anything from Latin America suggesting supply disruptions,” and caveats that this kind of information tends to come out on a delay. “I would be very sceptical of any approach that attributes sustained decreases in purity to convictions of high-level drug traffickers or criminals. The convictions are racking up against Leijdekkers but I just can’t see how another conviction affects his operations in any way. It’s not how the dynamics work.”

Torrance posits that May’s bust could have caused a “supply shock,” causing a ripple effect that may create supply issues in the UK market. “It’s not certain,” says Torrance. “But the timing of it all strongly suggests that it is a significant factor, alongside other simultaneous factors.”

There have been other large-scale seizures too: a 425kg bust in Brighton, 240kg in Portsmouth and, last Thursday, a huge 2,900kg haul at the London Gateway port in Essex. Further afield, on 21 July, Italian border forces seized nearly 800kg of “high purity” cocaine in Vado Ligure port, south of Genoa. A recent study by Imperial College London, which analysed 15 wastewater sites across the UK in 2022, found that a large cocaine seizure in Southampton coincided with a “notable decrease” in cocaine use. But busts aren’t anything new – and neither are convictions for traffickers.

Neil Woods, former undercover drugs operative, author of Drug Wars, and international speaker for Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP), tells WAYO this is less likely a shortage than “a fluctuation in price” — and is sceptical of the narrative that police seizures would “suddenly” have such an impact on the cocaine trade.

Instead, he suggests that organised groups may be acting like an OPEC-style cooperation and getting together to manipulate the prices. “When you make an effort to increase the size of the market, you will tend to get, from organised business, a strategy of value pricing or demand-oriented pricing,” he says. “So you’ll have a period of time where there’s low prices and increased demand and then increase your prices to capitalise on the profits – that to me is more likely than the idea that the police have suddenly started to have an impact on the drug market that they don’t normally do.”

While Torrance says this “could certainly be a factor”, he notes that there are “a lot of disparate factors at play in the market.”

“There would be others who aren’t part of this agreement, who would take the opportunity to move more products and set their prices lower than the market rate, so I’m not convinced that those kinds of agreements would last too long,” he says, adding that, “I think this shortage is real, and it will be interesting to see what happens next month.”

Looking ahead, one vendor predicts that this new market state “will open up a new market” for cheaper, lower quality coke. “There was always that market but the demand for that will go up as people won’t be able to afford the same habit they used to have. Since we put up prices, our sales have decreased,” they add.

Torrance’s most recent data, as yet unpublished, suggests that the price increases have plateaued without dropping. He notes that September’s numbers will be illuminating, with the huge London Gateway perhaps – or perhaps not – affecting supply. Nevertheless, “the plateaued August prices really speak to the cocaine’s market resilience,” he says, “despite the largest bust in European history, and disruption of a major gang who consistently flood Europe with high quantities of cocaine”.

Perhaps we can look to the past for guidance, as this isn’t the first time the UK suffered a coke drought during a World Cup summer. In 2014, VICE also linked a powder shortage to big international and domestic drug busts. That drought was soon followed by the flood. Time will tell whether this one is temporary too.

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“It’s not going to be the last days of the apocalypse. The sky won’t fall down.”

Kojo Koram is talking about the prospect of cannabis legalisation and drug decriminalisation in the UK. Ironically, on the day we speak, it actually does feel like there’s some schism in the natural order, the summer’s second heatwave turning everyone into shuffling, sleep-deprived ciphers of the people we used to be.

Fortunately, Kojo, who speaks in a goose-downy soft timbre, has an adroitly tuned intellect that can rise above the steam. Born in Ghana but raised in Merseyside, Kojo is a Professor of Law at Loughborough University and author of several books – including the recently published The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future Of Drugs.

He globetrots from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana and America, meeting people that have fallen victim to the war on drugs, using the stories of prohibitions’s past to conjure a justice-driven future where all the money from newly legal compounds isn’t just inhaled by a gaggle of Silicon Valley investors and pharmaceutical oligarchs.

The Next Fix opens with a startling scene from Kojo’s early-stage career as a lawyer, representing prisoners in the American Deep South. Let’s kick off there.

WAYO: Hey Kojo. You start the book in a Louisianan prison nicknamed Angola. As part of the annual prisoners rodeo, they play something called “convict pinball”.

It involves a 2,000 pound bull being released into an arena with 10 inmates acting as “pins”. The last one standing gets $250. Can you tell us a bit more about Angola and your time there?

KOJO: I was at a capital defence firm called Reprieve [a non-profit organisation that fight death row cases and human rights abuses]. I got placed in New Orleans which meant a lot of my work was in rural Louisiana, where everything kind of orbited around Louisiana State Penitentiary –which is better known in the region as Angola.

The prison itself is based on a former slave plantation, which was called Angola because the slaves came from Angola in Africa. It maintains its name to the modern day.

The picture you paint is somewhere between medieval and a Running Man-style dystopia. Yet this was 2012, though?

The scenery doesn’t look like its updated much in 400 years – I would encourage readers to Google it.

You’ll see primarily African American inmates working the fields. A guard on horseback looking over them. Inmates are still led around in shackles and manacles. It’s a shocking aesthetic. It reminds you of a scene from 12 Years A Slave. And it’s enormous. In the UK, we don’t tend to have these mega prisons like they do in the US. Angola is slightly larger than Manhattan.

Whilst there, I’d think, “how can you get so many inmates to sustain a prison of this size?” Can there be that many murders and armed robberies in the state?” After speaking to inmates, I realised that many were in there for drugs. Louisiana had particularly punitive laws which included life in prison without parole for three federal drug offences. There were 22 or 23-year-old young men who were never getting out of this slave plantation due to the way we decided to criminalise drugs. It’s the worst example of a draconian legal regime that doesn’t even achieve its aims.

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Do you think, within certain corridors, it’s considered beneficial to use drugs as an excuse to incarcerate people?

Angola is an extreme example but, over the past century, all around the world, we’ve really anchored our prison system on the criminalisation of surplus populations. That is facilitated through the war on drugs and it’s the same if you go to the UK, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa. The United Nations estimates that twenty percent of the world’s prison population is now in prison because of drug offences. That’s 2.5m all around the world.

So there is an economic incentive to not stop the war on drugs?

I tend to not to allow myself to the more conspiratorial ways of thinking but I think it’s clear there’s vested interests in sustaining the system of incarceration we have.

But it’s unsurprising that as neoliberalism really started to accelerate and so many people, particularly in the industrialised West, started to become surplus to the requirements to capitalist production, you also get an intensification of the war on drugs – facilitating the criminalisation of those surplus populations.

Migrant community worker or white working classes that are kicked out of factories or the assembly line – there’s sometimes a pathway towards doing similar type of work, especially within the US prison system. So I think there has always been a relationship between how the economy works, anD the the way prohibition works.

Is this affecting women too?

One of the largest reasons women are in prison, globally, is because of drugs. In places like Thailand, Indonesia, it can be 80% to 90% of women who are in prison are there because of drug offences.

You write in The Next Fix that different countries have different preoccupations when it comes to drug laws – particularly whether they’re based in the global North or South.

We have a regular thing in the UK press, claiming our drug use is responsible for environmental, social and economic devastation in the South – with the tacit solution being tighter penalties. Where do you stand on this?

I recognise where people are starting from. But I don’t think they follow that analysis all the way to its logical conclusion in recognising how prohibition creates these problems rather than resolving them.

I think that there is clearly a devastation that the illicit drug markets have rained upon countries in the global south – whether that’s community violence in places like Colombia and Mexico, or the environmental devastation that we see in the Amazon. We talk about the need for sustainable climate reform yet so many of those key areas are being cannibalised and extracted by the ever-increasing drug trade.

But we also need to recognise how prohibition accelerates that. It incentivises the violence and the movement of the illicit trade into evermore unregulated terrain.

You talk about “global transformative justice” [crudely: righting the wrongs for those affected by the drug war] as a key pillar of drug reform. How would that work in the UK?

You’d want to ensure that if you are legalising, say cannabis, the starting point should be: “Well, if we’re going to have legal dispensaries making huge amounts of money from the trade, then we need to ensure that there is nobody still sitting in prison for cannabis trafficking.”

In some of the US states that didn’t have a social equity framing of their law, you now have this really dystopian context in which the same state will have people still serving out their cannabis trafficking sentences alongside a legal cannabis dispensary backed by venture capital or Silicon Valley money.

That’s nuts

Absolutely, yeah. It really depends upon the political demands that I think are made within those areas and it shouldn’t just include expunging sentences of people currently in prison. We need to talk about the removal of sentences from people who might have been convicted for cannabis trafficking ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. Because that conviction still determines their day-to-day opportunities – even decades later.

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What about tax revenues from future legal sales? Has anywhere stopped these just falling into the hands of big weed?

In New York State, they’ve enacted a law committing 80% of tax revenue brought in from cannabis to specific communities that were over-policed during the war on drugs.

How did this happen?

They were going to legalise in New York [2019] but it got stalled due to protests. These didn’t come from conservatives or the Christian right but the social justice left. They said: “This is framed in a way that’s going to just be a huge transfer of wealth to those who already have resources, because they’re the ones who are going to commodify this new emerging market in legal cannabis.”

So, they spent a further two years redrafting the law and lobbying in different communities. And I also know people in New York say Governor Cuomo was going through his sexual assault scandal at the time. He needed positive news stories and was amenable to demands from racial justice activists that he would not have been otherwise. There was also the George Floyd moment. So there was a public consciousness about the way that policing and prison systems impact black communities. I think a combination of all of those helped them pass a law.

You call for decriminalisation but British Columbia and Oregon – whose decriminalisation measures came into force in 2023 and 2021 respectively – have both rowed them back. What could future UK campaigners learn?

I think a failing in North America might have been that reformers over-promised: that
all problems associated with drugs would disappear. And that meant decriminalisation was then blamed for a vast array of social ills.

Oregon has a huge homelessness crisis and there’s so many overlaps between the homelessness crisis and issues around substance dependencies. Also, Oregon was really damaged because it passed the law in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. This meant the social support institutions needed to be successful weren’t present.

Sounds like an experiment with badly planned protocols?

Often we think of decriminalisation as this crazy, radical experiment, but if you look over the scale of human history, the idea of criminalising and prohibiting drugs is itself a very strange experiment. Prohibition itself is the experiment. And it’s one, that, I think, if we look at it on its own terms, clearly isn’t working.

Portugal decrimmed 25 years ago because of an overdose crisis. The UK has its own now. Why are we so seemingly far behind other countries? Is it out conservative institutions? The NHS?

Let’s look at how cannabis legalisation has happened in the US.

This wasn’t something that was pushed forward by politicians. It emerged state-by-state through a system they have in the US called the ballot initiative mechanism

I am definitely not saying the US political system is perfect, but, if enough people want something to be voted for, it can automatically get voted for at the state level. There have been a couple of exceptions that went through the state legislature but it’s mainly been through this mechanism.

We don’t have anything like that in the UK. You know, all of our power is so centralised in Westminster, which means that you need politicians in Westminster to be able to put this forward in order to get kind of legal change,

As if

One thing I really think is shameful about the British political class is that so many members of it know this system doesn’t work. They they don’t even say it privately but publicly – David Cameron, David Lammy, even Nigel Farage himself in 2014 is on record saying the war on drugs doesn’t work. But they get into office and they know they can get the benefit of whipping up a moral panic against drugs, being tough.

Labour did this recently, against the Greens in the Gordon-on-Denton by-election?

Precisely. Laboutr were quiet on drugs then realised they needed something to attack the Green Party – who have an evidence-based policy for legalising and regulating drugs.

So they attacked that, started putting out news stories and adverts about the Greens giving out crack cocaine, This is not serious. It’s silly. But it’s silly about a serious issue. Our drug death rate is a scandal.

Cheers, Kojo


If you want to go deeper into Kojo’s world, here’s five books that influenced The Next Fix

Katrina Pistor – The Code of Captial

Michelle Alexanda – The New Jim Crow

Quinn Slobodian – Crack-up Capitalism

Julia Lovell – The Opium War

Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punishment

Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs is published by Verso Books is out now.

Follow Kojo on his Substack

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Common lore pegs 2016 as a societal cataclysm, but my Brexit summer was beautiful.

I followed the European Championships across France, sleeping on TGVs, meeting friends and sunrises in Paris, Marseille, St Etienne, Nice, filing copy from broiling Internet cafes that smelled of teeth, Vogue smoke on my skin. As the trip wound down, I received clandestine messages from Secret Garden Party about something important happening at that year’s festival. Eventually, we spoke on the phone and the source of the secrecy became clear: a charity called The Loop would be checking festivalgoers’ drugs, giving them the results, all with the approval of authorities.

In the decade since, the UK’s drug deaths have climbed to record levels, year-on-year. But The Loop now has four regular Home Office-approved drug checking services (DCS) in England, with at least six expected by the year’s end. Scotland should have three of its own before the hootenanny, while Wales has one.

Reaching the point where drug checking moves in from the fringes has been slower than many hoped, but that weekend on a febrile Cambridgeshire hill was the starting gun. We spoke to central characters from that weekend’s cast for their memories, what could have gone wrong, and its ongoing legacy for UK drug culture and harm reduction.

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The Chemist

“I remember everyone being really boiling in that tent,” laughs Dr Henry Fisher, an Oxford-graduated chemistty PhD who volunteered for The Loop and now designs psychedelic trials with Clerkenwell Health.

The Loop’s canvas was just roughly 10m in diameter but this arbitrary patch of turf became the UK’s first de facto decriminalised space for drug possession.

“We were almost having to pinch ourselves that this was happening,” Henry says, the novelty was also not lost on festival attendees. “People couldn’t believe the service was being offered. We had to reassure everyone that the police weren’t going to jump on them. But word got out that it was genuine, not a trap, then gradually interest grew,” he adds.

Punters took a small scoop of a powder or chunk of a pill, handed it over to a volunteer, from where it was subject to three types of forensic analysis. They then received feedback on its contents, alongside a general consultation involving harm reduction smarts.

The Loop knew that brevity was key in the sensory merry-go-round of the Great British carnival, – particularly Secret Garden Party, which that year had a ‘Gardener’s Guide To The Galaxy” theme.

“We hadn’t quite worked out how the customer experience would work but everything needed to be as smooth as possible.” In future years the lab would be in a separate tent or portacabin but the team – comprising volunteer chemists and health professionals – were all together, analog, passing information back and forth, sometimes writing results on pen and paper rather than a streamlined online database that would come.

Whilst this weekend was The Loop’s first front-of-house drug testing event, they had been doing back-of-house (testing seized substances, offering welfare services and disseminating drug-related information to the public where necessary) since 2013. But its founder, Professor Fiona Measham, had been researching harm reduction and drugs through the lens of rave culture and British leisure time since the 1990s. It was a long road to Secret Garden Party and for no party was it linear.

The Head Gardener

“When I first asked the Silver Commander about drug checking, it was a flat shutdown,” says Freddie Fellowes, Head Gardener of Secret Garden Party, which had its first event in 2004 and ended in 2022, when they ceremoniously cindered the festival’s main stage.

A Silver Commander [in this case Laura Hunt] is a senior police officer who works with festivals on strategy, logistics and security. Freddie says that the next time they spoke about drug checking, Laura’s mood had changed, the words etched on his memory.

“She said that the primary directive for the police force is the persecution of criminality. The secondary is protection of the vulnerable,” Freddie recalls. Hunt took the view that once punters were through the gates, the objective of protecting the vulnerable takes precedent. “I’d never heard that line from the police before. It was absolutely enlightening and a massive credit to her.”

Freddie recalls that support from within the festival community was eventually “overwhelming” but that he found backing hard to find closer to home, citing a budget meeting where the festival’s general manager said that the not-insignificant money slated for The Loop was untouchable ‘because Freddie wants it to happen.’

“I stopped the meeting and said that this wasn’t some fantasy project. Not only will it save lives but, if you want to be a bread head about it, it will reduce our blue lights [ambulance] cases. That will reduce all sorts of costs and friction we have as a commercial entity. So there was a money orientated argument for it too.”

His determination was perhaps aided by Secret Garden Party’s notoriety for a Sisyphus-inspired strain of British hedonism – which anyone that’s been in their 24-hour bar at 8am will attest to. (A friend of mine memorably said that bar, that year, with everyone in their intergalactic outfits, the sun long come up, was like being in some fantastical purgatory.)

So, did Freddie ever worry about getting the call a festival owner dreads most?

“Of course. It [someone dying] was one of the things you never, ever, want to happen on your watch – whether it’s down to something you have or haven’t done,” he says, stating with pride that he never had to take such a call. “It [The Loop] was really important to me because it was about looking after each other, and doing all of this in a way that was sustainable.”

To that point, a common theme amongst interviewees was how the whole project, years in the making, would have been forever dashed if there’d been a tragedy that year – of all years. “There was definitely a moment of thinking, ‘It would be awful if the thing we’ve all trained for, disaster prepped for, occurred this year because it will look like it happened because we’re drug testing,” Freddie says. “And it didn’t matter how we dealt with it. We’d have that hanging around our necks.”

Fortunately, that concern was unmet.

The Advocate

The results from that first pilot were published in 2018. Amongst cases of pills containing concrete, ketamine sold as cocaine and the grim cathinone n-ethylpentylone moonlighting as MDMA, were some solid insights into how drug checking effects behaviours, even in the festival scrum.

Around 20% of drugs tested were not what the buyer thought. Around two-third thirds of people who had been mis-sold drugs handed over further substances for disposal. In a damning indictment of the festival plug, drugs purchased onsite were more than twice as likely to have been mis-sold as those acquired offsite –with the users buying them on average two years younger.

2016 was a year of record drug-related and festival drug-related deaths across England and Wales. Despite this, Secret Garden Party saw one hospital admission for drugs in that year – down from 19 the previous year. Freddie’s aspiration came to pass.

The media largely lapped it up, thanks, in part, to some cloak and dagger PR led by Fiona which kept this seismic story under wraps for as long as possible. The Guardian didn’t run it until Sunday afternoon and I was the only reporter onsite (for VICE). Fiona herself only gave an interview to Radio 4 ‘s Today show on Monday morning.

This clandestine approach was partly down to not wanting the service to become overwhelmed, plus a healthy scepticism about whether the service would actually go ahead with Fiona experiencing a number of false starts down the years – getting tantalisingly close before one of the stakeholders wobbled and the pilot pulled.

But this time no-one blinked. It wasn’t just the usual suspects that approved.

“There wasn’t the moral outrage response and the reaction – even amongst titles like Daily Mail and The Telegraph – was really positive,” says Steve Rolles, Senior Policy Analyst of Transform, a charity consumed with the tricky task of ending the war on drug, and one of The Loop’s most vocal supporters, who was onsite that weekend.
(For anyone that’s met Steve, “vocal” is an apt general descriptor.)

“Advocacy work can feel like shouting into the void so it was an emotional moment. Huge credit to Fiona,” Steve says, pointing to her framing The Loop’s work as an academic, public health exercise. “That shifted it from being indulgent and hedonistic or pro-drugs.”

Steve suggests that festivals are a fecund breeding ground for this kind of pilot as music, festival and drug cultures are so entangled. “Arguments that this testing facilitated drug use didn’t stack up.”

He also posits that “festivals are quite often white, privileged spaces,” with journalists covering this story possibly having family members at the festival – or attending themselves. “So I think there’s an understanding of that particular culture, as opposed to stigmatising and well-trodden media stereotypes like spice ‘zombies’ or shoplifting ‘junkies’.

While this criticism has been voiced – with Fiona herself acknowledging festivals as a “stepping stone” to drug checking for-all – Steve says, “The power of pragmatic advocacy is growing and I think that resistance to it is eroding fast. It rings hollow now with drug deaths going up and up.”

There were subsequent positive years of festival drug checking at festivals like Bestival, Boom Town and Kendal Calling – the latter of whom also worked with Fiona on that original 2016 pilot and only missed on being the “first” by virtue of coming the weekend after Secret Garden Party.

2018 saw 8,000 people get their drugs tested, though there was one setback, when Festival Republic Managing Director Melvin Benn flip-flopped on a vow to have The Loop at Reading and Leeds. 2019 saw Boomtown’s service cancelled days before due to “ongoing legal complexities” and, from then, thanks to a combination of increased Home Office intervention and the Covid-19 epidemic, The Loop were no longer able to carry out public drug checking.

Yet drug deaths continued rising to record levels. Nevertheless, It was only in 2023 that the Home Office finally approved a license. A monthly Bristol service started the following January, though licensing stipulations ensured it was aimed more towards dependent drug-users than ravers, weekend kitchen dwellers or festival goers.

This buffalo-through-treacle progress can seem maddening for those who see drug checking as no more egregious than a trip to the pharmacy. The Netherlands has been doing it for decades. Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Portugal have long-established drug checking services, while drug consumption rooms have been operating across parts of Europe, Canada and Australia for years, stopping overdoses and connecting users with healthcare.

Is there something particular to Britain that makes it so averse to seemingly humane reforms with the potential to save lives?

The answer is byzantine. But Steve posits that, “We have a peculiar political culture – perhaps it harks back to some Victorian puritanism or colonial centralisation of power. Maybe the fact we’re an island. We’re divorced geographically and linguistically, we have a degree of separation from European culture and social policy debates. I think there is something unique about the confluence of puritanical traditionalism and conservatism and empire nostalgia. It spawned a gutlessness in social policy reform.”

The Slow Revolutionary

Perhaps it’s worth acknowledging here that, after a decade of reporting The Loop’s work, I can’t pretend to be an impartial observer.

Writing that feature at Secret Garden Party – having taken MDMA through the gates inside some Boots cucumber moisturiser to test the service – altered my career’s trajectory. I’d never really found my niche until then: my ‘thing’, a wagon to hitch myself to. Later that year I won Festival Journalist Of The Year, at the same awards The Loop and Secret Garden Party won a Festival Innovation Award. I stopped having to pitch.

The Loop has – and will – help thousands of people in way more profound ways than it helped me, but I’m still grateful I got invited to the show. And while my part began with a phone call in Nice, for Fiona it’s been years in production – an exercise in slow diplomacy, in which she is now assisted by The Loop’s CEO Katy Porter, not to mention the hundreds of volunteers who have given up their evenings, weekends and annual leave for the cause.

“That weekend felt like the beginning of a new era, that anything was possible,” Fiona says, in one of many emails we’ve shared over the last couple months. “It felt like the first step in the right direction towards a more just, rational, compassionate and evidence-based drug policy.”

The Loop project actually traces back to 2010 when Fiona started an annual programme of research on festival drug use and behaviours called the English Festival Study. So, 16-odd years and infinitesimal conversations with stakeholders and journalists later, she’ll admit that, “Once the novelty wore off, it was hard work and, at times, quite a lonely place with my head above the parapet, trying to raise awareness and build public support for drug checking through the media and social media – as well as negotiating with stakeholders for 10 years solidly.”

Until the Home Office finally granted a formal license for drug checking, they’d been working with like-minded local players and forward-thinkers (such as Silver Commander Laura Hunt). The wheels of drug reform tend to turn first at a local level, alongside the gathering of data and tireless advocacy.

“Progress can come in stages and significant change probably rarely happens all at once — reform is a more realistic goal than revolution,” says Fiona.

That progress is now becoming stark. Most of the UK will have access to a DCS in 2026, with three due to open in Scotland by the end of the year. These are backed by the Scottish Government and won’t be run by The Loop, though Fiona has been sitting on advisory committees, nudging things along. Newport, Gwent has a DCS run by the alcohol and drug service Kaleidoscope. Bristol’s is still active Then there’s bi-monthly services in Hackney and Camden, with Ealing due to open shortly.

“The problem with London is that all the boroughs will now be wanting one – but that isn’t efficient. At some point, public health authorities will need to get together and work out a format for London-wide services – maybe one in the north, south, east and west – opening for longer hours and more days.”

2016 might have been an annus horribilis for many: Brexit, Trump, the death of David Bowie and Prince, “all our heroes fading” like that Lorde song. But a slow revolution began in a field in Cambridgeshire.

“It was the beginning of a journey – but also the end of a different sort of advocacy journey,” says Steve Rolles. “What The Loop did in 2016 was break through the glass ceiling.”

Find the dates for The Loop’s upcoming drug checking services here

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We could get in the weeds about the rationale for this ambient ageing of the festival landscape: from grisly ticket costs to older line-ups to the price of aeroplane fuel. But what matters far more to this subset is simple: how can they, for one weekend only, defy the dying of the light? Drink and dance and probably take drugs when there’s a job to maintain, perhaps a mortgage to pay, a child’s mouth to feed, among all the nefarious responsibilities that can’t be put on hold while you spend three post-festival days curled on a sofa, talking, through endlessly cascading tears, to ChatGPT about your existential shortcomings?

Fortunately, there is a real-life oracle in our midst, and his name is Al Bryant. Al has spent 14 years working in the drugs treatment sector and now works at Cranstoun. He’s better known through his online moniker, Harm Reduction Al, where he delivers on-the-nose harm reduction advice for people who know what’s what. We asked Al a bunch of questions that may be troubling the elder millennial festival-goer in your life – from rave recovery supplements to taking strong stuff when your gremlin days are behind you, to driving your family home safely on the Monday.

I haven’t taken anything for six months, and I’ve read that MDMA and coke are very strong now. Does this make them more dangerous?

MDMA and cocaine strength has gone sky high and price has gone down.

The good news is, your body will still probably recognise it after six months because you’ll have built a tolerance in the past, and six months isn’t enough time to lose that.

But those batches are going to be different from the batches you had six months ago, so you really want to test it and understand the purity. Then it’s a good idea to start by taking just a little bit, to make sure it acts how you want it to..

However, it’s worth knowing that we’ve had many contaminated supplies, and while we’re not seeing synthetic opioids in party drugs, we’re getting cathenones, caffeine and other bits that are going to make your experience not very pleasant.

Does popping multiple hydration tablets a day help or will it potentially cause me harm?

The reality is you just don’t need that many, but you do need to consider hydration in general.

Drinking regular amounts of water pre-sesh is good. If you are a bit dehydrated, have a hydration tablet or sachet – then go on the sesh. After, if you are dehydrated again, have a tablet or sachet. I wouldn’t be doing sachets mid-sesh because you are already putting a lot of stuff through your system. And don’t drink multiple litres of water when you finish. Instead, have about a pint of water or an isotonic drink an hour.

Your wee also plays an important game in telling you your hydration levels. So know the colour: if it’s a really thick yellowy orangey colour, not looking so pretty; you are probably dehydrated. If it’s completely clear or an incredibly pale yellow, you’re probably overhydrated.

What sort of sleep schedule should I aim for if I’m driving home on Monday?

This one is an absolute minefield, and I have experienced losing my license. It was one of the most debilitating things I have had to go through.

I really wouldn’t consider driving anytime soon after a big sesh. You need to consider how long things stay in your system – and if you have been using multiple drugs at the same time, all of those are going to have a different half-life.

Do some research on how long things stay in your system and are actively identifiable on a saliva, swab and a blood test. So what you could do for this is go onto somewhere like Amazon or eBay and buy a selection of swab tests, and test yourself when you think you are ready to go. I have tested a number of these and they work really well.

There are so many risks you are up against, and it’s not just a risk to you – you are a risk to other road drivers. If there’s going to be anything you consider the most, it is getting behind a wheel.

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I’m on antidepressants/benzos and want to get on it – even though I know I probably shouldn’t. Can you give me any advice? Should I just stop taking them?

First and foremost, your mental health, wellbeing, and medication ratio is more important than the sesh.

Just having a couple of days off your medication probably doesn’t cut it, because medication has a half-life (so when half of the substance is out of your system). If you are taking something that has a long half-life, even a multiple day break may not be long enough if you’ve been taking it super regularly.

You can use Cranstoun’s drug bot to put in your medication and the drug you want to take and see what it says about the combinations. There are some things that can put you at considerable risk if you combine them together.

With SSRIs, like citalopram or sertraline, they work on your serotonin. If you add other stuff into your system like MD, that also works on your serotonin, you can get serotonin syndrome and it can make you very ill. I would say that potential outcome is totally not worth the watered down buzz that you could potentially get off MDMA.

Benzos meanwhile, from what I have heard and experienced, can numb the trip. So say you take a bunch of diazepam or some Xanax pre-sesh, the stimulant feeling probably won’t feel stimulating. If it’s a psychedelic experience you are looking for, it probably won’t feel as psychedelic, and then that will lead you to chronic redosing, which would then perpetuate the comedown and leave you in a situation where you are feeling even rougher.

@harm.reduction.alReplying to @JamesWij happy birthday rugbot! #cranstoun #harmreduction #recoverytok #raveaidcrew

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I haven’t taken MKAT since 2012 but I’m hearing it’s back and my mates want to bring some. I remember the dread comedowns though. What do you think about it as a festival drug?

The old MKAT, wow! It is very interesting to see the return of this naughty little one. My main takeaway is just treat it like you would any other stimulant.

With MDMA, you’re in it for the long-haul, but with MKAT I did find that it would wear off quite quickly, so you’d dose, come down and redose, and I found that quite manageable.

A lot of people have said the comedowns were worse. I personally didn’t find them worse; I actually found them slightly better, but that could have just been me.

Constantly redosing worsens the comedown, and the more you have, the less food and sleep you’ll get. With MKAT, it’s about working out where your exit plan is – and stick to it. Don’t just keep going and going, because that could make the edgy anxiousness of the MKAT worse the longer you drag it out.

Will psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD give me less of a comedown? What about 2-CB?

Psychedelics are generally far easier on you the next day, but we can’t forget about the lack of sleep if you’ve been up all night on a wild adventure through space and time. Things like LSD last for quite a while, so be prepared for it to be quite an innings. The lack of sleep will make you feel a bit rough the next day.

You also can’t forget that at a festival, things can change quickly, and you might get stuck in a situation that starts to get a little bit iffy. Make sure you are moving around an area where you know it’s not going to get too moody, or you can prevent it getting too moody.

Just have a plan in case things do go wrong: know where welfare is, know where your friends are, have a buddy system.

You also need to make sure you are treating these substances with a bit of care. Dosing does need to be considered.With things like 2CB powder, you don’t want to be keying out of a random bag on a dance floor or walking around a festival. So use a drug bot or do some research on dosing and make sure the doses are correct before you go out and take them.

@harm.reduction.alWhat goes up must come down! #harmreduction #cranstoun #raveaidcrew #recoverytok

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Do rave and comedown supplements actually work?

I don’t really like rave supplements because I think you can manage your comedown in a more natural way. Taking a ‘less is more’ approach, eating and sleeping will make you feel better naturally — rather than trying to rely on other people’s mixes of vitamins.

Most of the ill feelings you will feel are the lack of sleep and a lack of food. But the main thing you’ve got to consider to manage your come down is the kind of obsessive redosing that everybody likes to do during the sesh. When it comes to this, less is more.

Considering how much you take is also really important. Instead of doing as much as you want, and then taking these supplements to feel better, it’s better to ask how much mandy, how much posh, do you actually need to get the buzz you want – then keep it at that level.

Check a drugbot or other website and take the suggested dose. Then you can really limit the bad feelings the next couple of days.

I’m going to a festival with my partner and our child, and want to have one big night while I’m there. I don’t want to risk getting stopped with drugs at the gate. Is it safer to take drugs into a festival or buy them inside?

I am not going to say what the right or wrong answer is on this one. I am just going to talk about risks involved with both of those behaviours.

If you are caught by a sniffer dog, you could get searched, and your child could be searched too. And then police involvement happens; perhaps you get arrested. You then have to deal with all the ramifications that go with the police and social services could potentially get involved and publicly shame you. Sometimes, in the media, they will say what happens when people are arrested at festivals and give examples. Risky.

The second option: don’t get anything before and you go in clean through the gate. Happy days. One of the couple goes off into the festival grounds to score. But, as we know, not everybody at a festival who’s selling bits is there for the culture and the music; they are there to make cold hard profit. Because they’ve had to run their own gauntlet of getting something in, chances are price is going to be up, purity is going to be down, quality is going to be questionable. You then have the risk of buying something at a festival that could make you very unwell.

You could mitigate that situation by taking your own selection of completely legal drug testing kits and test everything that you had available. Then you could make an educated decision from that test result, whether you were going to use that at the festival or not. What I will say is, family is far more important than one night on the sesh.

But there’s another issue that’s interwoven in this as well. What happens if an emergency happens within your family while one of you is getting on it? That’s going to leave 50% of the unit that needs to look after somebody or a child unavailable or unable to do so, and that can be quite unnerving.

Don’t forget that what happens in normal life, away from the sesh, is probably more important than what happens for twelve hours on the bag.

@harm.reduction.alSun sesh! #cranstoun #harmreduction #recoverytok #raveaidcrew

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We keep having heatwaves. If it’s 35 degrees should I leave the stims at home?

In terms of risks, stims in this kind of heat are pretty extreme level risk, because it’s really hard to function when the weather’s like this, and then you are putting your body through its absolute paces. Especially when it’s humid. Stimulants get you moving, get you dancing and not caring — and they’re going to get you warm.

With stimulants, you’re increasing your chance of seizures, cardiac arrest or stroke. Especially cocaine because it’s also a vasoconstrictor, which constricts some of the blood vessels, which means the heat isn’t getting out across the surface of the skin.

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Let’s say I do it anyway. But I start to feel overheated. What should I do?

If you find yourself overheating, put some lukewarm water on yourself to help cool yourself down. Not cold water or ice, which could put your body into shock, but lukewarm water. Think about sitting in a sort of W shape – so leaning your back against something, knees up into a point and then feet down – and that will help keep a bit of airflow around you and help cool down.

If there is a fountain, dipping your feet into it is good – but you want to stay away from bodies of water. Drugs lower your inhibitions; you might think skinny dipping is a good idea, you might think normal swimming is a good idea, you might think jumping off a bridge into the river is a good idea. All of those while you are on the sesh are really bad ideas.

And, if you just start to feel unwell, you need to go and talk to someone. Try and get yourself to a low stimulus environment and be aware of your breathing. Try and do some simple breathing exercises to bring your anxiety levels down.

Ultimately though, you need to be safe in your actions, and I would say, getting on the stims in this heat is no good. Leave them at home. Maybe just go sit in the shade. Harm reduction is amazing, but sometimes that isn’t enough.

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These words were uttered to me by one of my best friends as the solstice sun was rising to the tune of heavenly break beat. It was day 3 of this June’s Waking Life, a community-focused art and music festival held on the heat-hazed fields of Alentejo in Portugal. The friend in question hadn’t been back to the tent since I arrived on Wednesday. Such is the way of Waking Life. Why sleep when there’s so much to do?

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The first time I went to the festival, in 2024, I was so immersed in the entire experience, I missed my flight home. On the first night, a few minutes before Goldie hopped on the decks at 3am, some Belgian people we’d befriended for the evening offered one last spray of liquid acid. “Go on then, just one, though,” I said, before receiving six sprays. I could have been pissed off. I nearly was. But it was done. Might as well enjoy it. That set the tone for the entire week.

By the time it strikes 9am in this part of Portugal, sleep is a pipe dream. The heat is sweltering, and without an umbrella to shelter from the sun, making the half an hour walk back to the tent is borderline irresponsible. What else to do than stay out? After three days and about six hours of proper sleep, I was on a different planet.

Before the festival, I’d booked to get a coach back to Lisbon on the penultimate day. But I became confused as to why past Ella would have made such a decision. I convinced myself I was remembering it wrong. “Why do I keep thinking I’m leaving a day early,” I said one day, sunbathing by the lake. I stayed an extra two nights, and left the festival six hours after my flight had taken off. It was perfect.

This year, I took a different approach. Since November, I’ve been toying with the idea of sobriety and by the ensuing April, the lightbulb flashed on. I stopped everything there and then.

The reason is mostly symbolic. I am currently on a path of shedding old ways of being. Also, in September, I’m starting a psychospiritual course that requires full sobriety. When I booked, I thought the timing was perfect: I can let loose for the entire summer and cut it off just in time to jump into the cosmic bliss of pure consciousness. But when a friend suggested I stop sooner than the day before the course began, the resistance I felt was so strong that I thought it was worth interrogating.

Am I really someone who can take it or leave it?

Admittedly, if I had booked to go to Waking Life before I’d already committed to the course, I’d probably have waited to “give this whole sobriety thing a go”. The festival is a true sanctuary: not only does it prioritise risk reduction, with its Avózinha space for people having bad trips or other negative experiences, their team of on-the-ground caretakers, who offer physical and emotional support for people using drugs, and a dedicated drug testing facility — it also offers a rare container for exploring drugs, sex and human connection with openness and care.

But alas, a month before the festival I found myself with a free ticket for helping my friends with their Tarot Tent. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up so braced myself for the challenge – no drugs or booze. (I’m not actually specifically sober from alcohol, but I decided not to drink either. I don’t really like drinking, and I saw the risk in substituting one form of intoxication for another, ultimately, subpar version).

TLDR: I did it. Five days sober, surrounded by all the substances you could dream of – and more – pumping bass and generous souls, and I managed to reach the end without even a puff on a joint. It was genuinely quite illuminating.

The first thing to say is that it was nowhere near as difficult as I expected. I suppose, once you’ve committed to something, truly committed, it’s much harder to get swayed, even as you watch your entire friendship group spoon sweet mushroom honey into chai tea before a live set by ghettotech legend DJ Godfather. (My idea of heaven.)

But the biggest takeaway for me was noticing when substances could have enhanced a moment; and when it would have gotten me through.

These days, especially with a sober head, I’m not much into repetitive 4/4 beats. I really noticed that, if the music wasn’t to my taste, I found it harder to get stuck in. There were downsides to this: I felt like I was less open minded to different genres and, worst of all, bored at certain points. Not only did this feel a bit rubbish, I admittedly didn’t want to come across as boring or sulky to my friends, who may or may not have been sceptical about my decision to do the festival sober.

On the first night, with tired legs and music that wasn’t making them move, the concept of ketamine became increasingly tempting. But then it clicked: I would only be doing it to enjoy the music; or I’d only be enjoying the music because I’d done it. No thanks. After some push back from friends, I had an early night and got up in time for yoga the next morning.

Thankfully, the music curation at Waking Life is brilliant, varied and there are plenty of other activities to get up to, whether it’s an hour of breathwork, getting lost in the art installations or sheltering from the sun in a ‘cold sauna’ (a wooden hut where an icy shower crashed onto a rock at its centre, sprinkling gasping punters with drops of respite). Plus, I spent a few days working the Tarot Tent, which offered more psychological variations than a tab of acid. No one can resist a tarot reading, whether it’s a young gay couple trying to figure out their relationship or women figuring out their next career move. So the boredom problem only surfaced a couple of times; and rather than being a negative experience, I saw it as an opportunity to gather information about my relationship with drugs.

On the flip side, though – and this was the most interesting takeaway – I realised that there really is a time and a place for altering your mind, so to speak. A big zoot would have gone down nicely at the ambient stage on Friday night or 12-hour dub sound system on Sunday. One afternoon, I was floating around the festival with one friend and three randoms we’d picked up. They were making short films between lines of ketamine, and there were moments when I felt a bit more of an observer than a participant. I did want to be in on that ketty hivemind. A bit of acid before a three-hour Mala set might have been nice, too.

My decision to explore sobriety is less about demonising drugs than trying something different, and this experience taught me that substances really can be great for connecting with people, staying up and making music sound like, to quote Tom Wolfe, drops of liquid amethyst.

But it also taught me that even without the chemical enhancements, good music, good friends and the right amount of food is more than enough to carry me straight through past 7am, sunglasses on, skanking just as hard as everyone else.

I am a big proponent of the idea that taking breaks from anything that has become a given in your life is a surefire way to learn about yourself. My first go at Waking Life expanded my mind more than I could have dreamed of, and I wouldn’t change it. But it’s good to know it wasn’t just down to the acid.

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“It does not matter how slowly you go. As long as you do not stop.” — Confucius.

“There is no failure, except in no longer trying.” — Elbert Hubbard.

“Street life, people, woah-ooo-oooh.” — Journey.

The WHAT ARE YOU ON content thresher machine has been quiet over the last fortnight. The first week was by design as our ‘High On Cocaethylene’ feature, much like the article’s psychoactive subject, hoovered up our time and vigour.

Everyone that worked on it – and it was a team effort from tit to tail – was pleased with the outcome. Judging by the number of personal messages I received, largely, but not exclusively, from tired millennial men with a robust past of recreational drug use, I felt that it had broken through. This was aided by an excellent Instagram carousel, designed by , which popped off, though it did result in me spending far more time in Meta’s vapid warren than I would personally choose to.

Then there was a content plan (Asana board) for this week, but it was derailed by the perennial newsletter annihilator: “life stuff”.

Fortunately, we have a tranche of incoming content this week – an account of five days sober at a festival deep down in the Portuguese dustlands during the broil of the European heatwave, written by Ella. Then we have a collaboration with Al Bryant, who some of you may recognise from Tik-Tok as Harm Reduction Al, and who works in comms for drug treatment provider Cranstoun, for a festival guide for people with responsibilities.

I’ve read and written a thousand how-to-survive-a-festival guides over the years and the vast majority churn out the same basement-level advice – which is crucial, especially for young people who need to grasp the basics.

But for the seasoned festival-goer, former raver or kitchen dweller who knows their pubgrub from their primo, has a strain of mushrooms they prefer (B+), doesn’t need to be told to hydrate (though that is, obviously, the most important thing), perhaps has a family, a mortgage, a car on finance, certainly a job where they can’t spend four days phoning it in while they wait for their brain to stop zapping like a felled electrical pylon? The needs of this subset have been overlooked for too long. No longer shall this fallaciousness abide. I won’t have it. Keep an eye out.

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And finally: it was recently brought to my attention that the ‘Year Of Going Up’ series seemed to have stopped. The crux of the matter is that the first three instalments, in which I gave up ultra-processed foods, mobile apps and “Googling” stuff, took up a disproportionate amount of time and were less obviously adjacent to the WAYO drugs n’dopamine raison d’être.

They have had an effect on my personal life, though. I would recommend anyone trying the UPF-free challenge as it has changed how I think about food. I can’t drink Coke Zero anymore. I also no longer – for the most part – have any email or social media apps on my phone. (My Reddit use has gone up approximately 718% but Reddit is authentic and thus different.)

What really put the brakes on the experiment, though, was the fourth instalment: giving up agnosticism, by virtue of trying out a suite of different religions.

I am actually interested in this in a genuine, not-just-for-pithy-content sake and met up with some former neighbours of mine, Dave and Laura. He is a Baptist minister at a church in Brighton, she’s his wife. The two of them are so compassionate, hilarious and generous that, honestly, they make being religious incredibly appealing.

We were chatting and Dave told me that if I really wanted to try, I could go to a local café, get a drink and put out a glass opposite me, inviting God to the table.

It seemed to me a wonderfully simple exercise. I remember walking past St George’s Church afterwards, on the phone to my mom, another objectively excellent exemplar of having faith, telling her I was all in. As I did so, the church bells rang out for midday and I felt gooseflesh down my arms and back. For a split second, I wondered: is this how it happens?

Alas, it was a bank holiday. There were, as ever – especially that weekend, the first of an awakening world – other things to do. Maybe I’m not ready yet. Maybe it was just a bit too much effort. Tomorrow, perhaps. Don’t stop believing.

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Matthew Collin talks in soundbites: an ouroboros of clip-uppable quotes a drone like me needs multiple drafts to pump out. This verve for storytelling is fundamental to his book Altered State, which chronicles the rise of ecstasy (MDMA) and acid house with lab-level detail.

First published in 1997, as Britain emerged from 18 years of Tory rule, in what many commentators would now have us believe was a mini belle époque, Altered State stands as the definitive account of early dance music culture: taking us from the Stonewall riots to the late-90s superclub explosion, via Dallas’ Starck nightclub, Balearic beaches and Blackburn warehouses, Shoom, Spiral Tribe free parties and the infamy of “repetitive beats”.

The times I’ve used it as a reference point when writing or researching MDMA are innumerable. That it hasn’t been usurped is a testament to the depth of the reporting and its capturing of ecstasy and rave culture in a relatively nascent state.

Despite reissues – including a recent edition from White Rabbit Books that expanded some sections and added a foreword from journalist and DJ Kate Hutchinson – Matthew is adverse to hindsight-informed revisionism. (Even when I tried to get him to offer some.)

So, here’s our chat, recorded in the sweat-smeared squall of that late-May British heatwave, where I spoke to him down a WhatsApp line from Georgia, his home of 20 years. We discuss the paradox of 90s nostalgia, formative trips to New York, Chicago and Detroit, drug mono-cultures and whether – in the end – rave culture meant anything at all.

WAYO: I’ve used Altered State so many times in articles. I remember emailing [Drugs 2.0 author Mike Power who worked with Matthew at The Big Issue] for help, and getting prodded towards an Altered State chapter.
Matthew Collin: Ha, well, it’s kind of a time capsule, isn’t it? Very much from its time and of its time. But it was written nearly 30 years ago now. The first proposal went in 1992 or 1993. We [much of the original research was done alongside John Godfrey, who moved on from the project] started working on it in 1994. It was published in 1997.

Why do you think it took so long to find a publisher? With hindsight, it seems obvious that someone should chronicle the genesis of a culture that’s now so mainstream.
There were two things [arguments]: that it was a passing fad and ‘everyone’s now into grunge’. There was also this idea that ravers don’t buy books.

So we approached pretty much every publisher in London. No-one was interested until we got deal with Serpent’s Tail – the smallest independent from that time who were publishing countercultural texts. Then it turned out not to be a passing fad.

That mid-to-late 90s era is fetishised by the media now. The algorithm – certainly mine – is obsessed with it as some pre-internet utopia.
You did have a democratisation of bohemia, democratisation of creativity, democratising of. new musical technology throwing open the creative process to a far wider group of people. So there was a sense of optimism but it was still completely male-dominated. White dominated. There were economic and class divides. When one looks back on the past and thinks it was some wonderful time, you can’t just erase the context of what was happening socially and economically. That was part of what we were doing with Altered State. Nothing happens in a vacuum. In our naive and slightly carefree way, we were trying to set this culture within the backdrop of British society at that time.

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If you take ecstasy out of the picture, how do you think this dance music culture would have developed?
We can’t change history at this point and see what might have happened. I think, inevitably, with technological advances you would have had a move towards more technologically created music. But there was a dance music culture before ecstasy. It would have just happened in a different way.

It’s tempting to consider this late-80s and early 90s era as an MDMA mono-drug culture. But there were other drugs too, right?
There were always other drugs around. There was always speed. There was always acid. There was always hash. But ecstasy did exert a massive cultural influence. And I think it probably ceased to be that around the end of the 90s, start of the 00s: to be that cultural dominant influence on a specific rave scene.

You also had weed which became very important with the emergence of ambient electronic in the mid-90s.

You talk in the book about rave’s influence on British leisure time and nightlife, including changes to licensing laws. Is that one of rave’s longest-lasting legacies?
It’s certainly one of the most concrete and quantifiable legacies. Before change in the licensing laws, clubs in London had to close at 3AM. Outside London it was 2AM.

When a club closes at 2am, you’d get there at 9PM when it opens. Everyone is on the same journey – all the way up to the night’s last tune, which is the peak of the energy if you like. A collective narrative emerges around the music. That was enhanced by chemicals and helped forge this real sense of bonding, with people all being on a specific trip for a specific period of time. It created a storyboard of the night.

But, because of ecstasy, people didn’t want to stop at 2am or 3am. The beat had to go on. So they looked for old warehouses or industrial units to have parties in. That escalated and you had this mass, lawless rave culture of 1989 emerging. It caused a large political shock at the time, police mobilisation, tabloid moral panic, questions in parliament, but also: licensing laws. The whole rave culture of that late 80s period formed this change.

You write that the ‘Summer of Love’ [1988] was “the point when house culture ceased, forever, to be one unified entity”. Do you have any particularly poignant memories of that summer ?
I have no poignant memories of the summer of love. Quite the opposite! What a summer that was.

Ha, it was a very long time ago tbf. What were you up to around then?
I moved from London to Nottingham to try and be a music journalist, in April 1988. I had been fortunate that in Nottingham we had a club called The Garage – as it was called then. The DJ Graham Park was an early adopter [of house music].

I wanted to write about house music which was obscure in those days. But it was just when British DJs and producers were starting to make their own interpretations of this weird, trippy, compulsive sound coming from Chicago, Detroit and New York. So I moved down to London just as acid house was kicking off.

Being in the right place at the right time is a critical part of most successful media careers
Right place, right time, and then some. But words don’t really do justice to how new, fresh and exciting it was.

Were you out all the time?
I was freelancing for a music magazine. The people writing about electronic dance music in that period was a relatively small group – certainly compared to now. So you met a lot of instigators very quickly. I started writing for ID magazine, then got asked to work there.

That’s the dream. You ended up editing i-D too.
I was a very lucky fucker.

I’m sure there was a lot of hard work mixed in with that good fortune
The work was always very important to me. But before I came to London, I went to Chicago, New York and Detroit to find out what the whole thing was all about.

That’s quite a statement of intent from a young wannabe
That’s being a journalist, isn’t it? You’re into something and you want to find out what it’s all about: what does it look like? What does it feel like? Smell like? What’s the background? What culture has it come out of? That felt really important – to know the innovators and how they saw the background of the culture they came out of.

Which of these innovators did you meet?
On the trip to New York I was fortunate enough to stay with David Piccioni, an expatriate Brit and brilliant house DJ who was playing at The World club, where Larry Levan also played for a bit, and he introduced me to the nuances of the city’s underground club culture.

This was spring 1988, the [iconic club and acid house music progenitor] Paradise Garage had closed the year before but all the traditions that the New York scene was founded upon were still incredibly strong. That was what struck me - you had to know the history, where the music came from and why, you had to know the foundational songs. It was really important to people in the scene, it really meant something more to them than just going out and having a good time.

In Chicago, I ran around meeting anyone I could reach by phone - Adonis, Liz Torres, Jesse Jones of Master C&J, Bam Bam, people from DJ International and Trax Records. I went to some club where Mike Dunn was playing fresh mixes off reel-to-reel and stayed at Marshall Jefferson’s place for a night, although he wasn’t around. One of the best things was listening to the Hot Mix 5 DJ crew mixing live on the radio while zooming around town, it was so exciting to hear the music in its own environment.

What a trip. Straight to the heart of the sun.
That was in the spring. I then went over to Detroit in the summer of 1988 on a press trip to interview the producers on that first Virgin Records techno compilation, ‘Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit’ - the so-called Belleville Three plus Eddie Fowlkes, Blake Baxter, Santonio Echols. I also spoke to Mad Mike Banks for the first time, that was just before he started doing Underground Resistance with Jeff Mills. Remarkable characters, fascinating people. Detroit was like entering another world, the shattered cityscape and that futuristic music emerging from it like a phoenix from the post-industrial ruins. That’s how Juan Atkins described it. Mind-blowing, totally.

Amazing. How did these trips to inform what came next for you?

These trips really informed what I was writing about the music back then, the roots in the black and Latino and gay and bohemian subcultures of New York, Chicago and Detroit. It wasn’t just these amazing records, it was a whole history with deeper meaning. Unfortunately some of the knowledge about the roots of the music later got lost somehow in Europe when dance culture went mainstream. Now luckily we have loads of great writers and researchers unearthing the lost details of the pre-rave era and putting them in context.

Back to Altered State. You open the book with a first-person of taking ecstasy for the first time: “And in a second, we were among the throng, synced right into the bodies and sound; transported, transformed, together. Alright…”

You then don’t [from what I can see] mention taking drugs again. Why did you choose this narrative conceit?
In general, this is not a book about my experiences but about what happened in a period between 1987 and 1997. But I wanted to grab the attention, set the intention for what follows. I just wanted to get as close as I could to expressing how the experience really feels, to capture that synergy of sound and chemistry and what it felt like at that time. It’s one of the pieces of writing I’m most proud of in my journalistic career. As well as wanting to express that subjective feeling, I was also hoping people would relate to it.

The book itself is not some dry chronology. It can appeal to more serious academic readers and also someone looking for a good time, I think?
It was intended to be storytelling. We wanted to tell it as a story rather than be an encyclopaedia. And to document and, in some ways, celebrate something that was important to us – the authors – in our lives.

In your foreword from the 2009 edition, you, and I’m paraphrasing, ponder what it all meant. Have you worked that out yet?
What I forgot when writing [that foreword] was how many cultural commentators thought dance music was moronic, trivial, stupid, based on drug-fucked sensation-seeking. Mindless hedonism to a moronic machine beat. That was a widespread view.

But there’s been a lot more contemplation since. There’s this idea of dance music culture as safe havens for marginalised and oppressed communities. Dance music culture as societal resistance in some cases. When you are talking about illegal raves, it was a hotbed of creative inspiration – these laboratories for new musical styles. You’ve got the idea of clubs as kind of places where freedom of expression can run wild outside the limits of normal so-called society.

These are all valid in different circumstances but now you’ve still got the idea of club culture as a commercialised, globalised, money-making machine with no ideological basis whatsoever. And then there’s also the concept of clubs as just a place for completely losing it, completely hedonistic abandon, getting away from the strictures of workday existence. Saturday night fever

That has value too
Yeah, it’s pure joy isn’t it? Joy for its own purposes, not with any specific meaning attached to it. Joy is what you get out of it. So now there’s a plethora of meaning – and that’s brilliant, isn’t it?

I think it really depends on the situation – where it is, who’s involved, why they want to be there. It’s open to many interpretations but in the end it [the rave] is a source – an exit door from the confines of normality, a space in which to imagine, in which to dream, a space in which different thoughts can be developed. A space where people can create or just make themselves feel good for the reasons they need in their life. It’s a beautiful thing.

Nicely put. Thanks, Matthew


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“Whatever that drug is, when you mix cocaine and alcohol, that’s my drug.’”

This comment was loosely tossed off during one of many conversations I’ve had with men about cocaine in the last year. The speaker wanted to highlight the bullish pleasures of booze and coke – an age-old narcotic pairing, vilified as it is venerated. But they didn’t know that these two pals, when combined, do form a substance of their own.

It’s called cocaethylene and remains a ghost at the psychoactive feast. It’s the only known example where co-use of two drugs produces a new chemical with unique pharmacology and effects, yet remains wildly under-researched. When you consider that – as MDMA was to Generation X and ketamine is to Gen Z – coke is surely UK millennials’ definitive illicit drug, this discrepancy is dangerous: especially with cocaine-related deaths rising for 13 consecutive years.

But what actually is this narcotic interloper, used unwittingly by millions of people worldwide? And when we were all high on lines and wines before going deep at the afters, was it cocaethylene all along?

Some cocaethylene with your meal, Ma’am?

Alcohol and cocaine have been through a number of image volte-faces down the decades: from 1970s Laurel Canyon rockstars sniffing up their royalties at the Chateau Mormont to the 21st-century sesh habitué, twitching at birdsong through the ringpull of a Red Stripe can.

But the mix has a salubrious past. In 1863, the French chemist Angelo Mariani developed a tonic called Vin Mariani. It contained Bordeaux wine and coca leaves – the latter have been chewed by people in the Andes for millennia – with the alcohol’s ethanol functioning as a solvent, extracting the energising cocaine from the coca leaves.

It became famed for its invigorating effects and found transcontinental acclaim from a cross-stitch of luminaries: Queen Victoria, multiple Popes and European sports associations where it was considered the ‘Wine of Athletes’. Mariani never shared the recipe so Vin Mariani effectively died alongside him in 1914 but not before inspiring a culture of energising tonics, most notably ‘Pemberton’s French Wine Coca’. This evolved into Coca-Cola which nowadays uses decocainised coca leaf extract.

A 2024 paper analysing the contents of a Vin Mariani bottle found cocaethylene but the point of including this story is to show that – despite the stigma often attached to alcohol and cocaine, especially in the eyeroll age of Cali sobriety – there is deep historical precedent for humans to seek the psychopharmacological pep that ethanol and coca provide. Maybe, in the hyper-capitalist age, with its infinite drain on our time and attention, it’s even more appealing.

“This combination provides you with vitality and I think vitality is something that many of us lack in our daily lives because we’re over-consumed by information, exhausted with the things modern society brings to us,” says Dr Rayyan Zafar, neuropsychopharmacologist at the Centre for Psychedelic Research and Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, as well as a senior researcher with .

“A little bit of alcohol calms down your overactive, fried brain. But then you get sleepy and want to stay out so you need a stimulant. It’s a response to the world we live in.”

Rayyan refers to the psychopharmacological state called “sedated stimulation” which has been repeated across the annals of psychoactive history: from the speedball (heroin and amphetamine or cocaine) to the Espresso Martini (alcohol and caffeine). In coke and booze’s case, it ascended to cultural ubiquity in the 2000s era of indie sleaze and All Bar Ones, with 2009 the record year for cocaine use in England and Wales.

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Powder cocaine use amongst 16-24 year-olds in England and Wales has actually dived by 63% since 2018/19, according to government statistics. The older cohort, which covers 16-59 year-olds, has dropped 28% in that time, meaning the two age groups are now virtually on par. Traditionally, younger people reported cocaine use at least double the rate of older adults. Still, coke remains part of the UK’s social architecture – aided by reduced price, soaring strength and 24/7 access, particularly in urban areas.

This sedated stimulation is also still part of many working environments with Sally Baker, a London-based therapist specialising in anxiety and compulsive behaviour among high-functioning people, telling me previously that many of her clients “use booze and drugs as a reward for their high-achieving lifestyles while compartmentalising their drug use as a way of coping.”

And while it tends to be cocaine and/or alcohol that end up in the crosshairs of the media or public health, maybe we’re looking in the wrong place.

“When we actually talk about cocaine addiction – or when we talk about cocaine deaths, what we’re actually talking about is cocaethylene addiction and cocaethylene deaths,” says Rayyan. “It’s a secret, overlooked addiction. It’s not being talked about enough.”

Pathways to a chemical ghost

“I like coke because it keeps me going on a night out. If I’m just drinking I end up tired and wanting to go home,” says Jared, describing his cocaine-taking ritual.

This reflection is borne out in research finding most coke users also drink alcohol, calming jitters surrounding the Zone 3 adjacent heart rate it invokes. “I do not know a single person that’s ever taken coke sober,” adds Tom Usher, a journalist from London.

So how does it lead to cocaethylene?

When cocaine and ethanol (alcohol) are processed by the body they eventually reach the liver. Whilst there, a process called transesterification creates cocaethylene. Now, instead of your body just processing the cocaine and ethanol, each with their own physiological and neurological effects, there’s a third. The ghost. But rather than staying quiet, it makes a racket.

Cocaine is a fairly fleeting drug, with a half-life (the time it takes for half the drug to be processed) of around an hour. With cocaethylene present, this typically doubles.

So all those things one might associate with doing coke – most notably the clattering heartbeat but also the ego-boosting euphoria that may or may not result in you demonstrating your plank technique to a kitchen full of bewildered friends puffing Lost Mary vapes – endure longer.

1991 research published in the Journal of Neurochemistry suggested that cocaethylene may have dopamine-enhancing effects of its own. Rayyan Zafar says this could help explain why the combination may be distinctively habit-forming, with cocaethylene seemingly adept at blocking dopamine reuptake – leaving more fizzing in the brain’s reward pathways – which may make it more reinforcing than either cocaine or alcohol alone.

And then there’s the cardiovascular strain, around which there is more robust evidence. A 2024 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine stated that, despite some inconsistencies, “it is concluded that the co-use of cocaine and alcohol poses an additional risk of cardiovascular fatalities compared to the use of cocaine alone.” The risk of a sudden death, it found, may be 18 to 25 times more likely.

Rayyan also points to atherosclerosis, where fatty deposits slowly build up in your arteries. This can eventually lead to strokes or embolisms. Alongside other lifestyle factors like diet and exercise, alcohol is a major contributor, but cocaine – which will be lasting longer thanks to this psychoactive blend – can supercharge the process: “it speeds up your heart rate, so you’ve got a higher velocity of blood and more of these fatty deposits,” Rayyan says.

Speaking truth to data

Note: This section discusses suicide and suicidal thoughts.

“I’ve never taken cocaine. My interest is just saving lives. I want people to survive.”

Maggie is a woman for whom an idiom like “force of nature” seems designed – yet inadequate. She is founder of the Co-Alc Alliance, a dedicated ‘Programme’ within the Jacob Abraham Foundation comprising organisations founded by bereaved parents of young people who’ve taken their lives during the comedown of taking powder cocaine and drinking alcohol.

Maggie (”Mags, Mag, even Madge – from my Madonna obsession – or Maggo”), a Samaritan, tells WAYO that “we have a lot of responsibility to look after people who don’t have the skills and understanding of looking after themselves during a comedown.”

She has been the root from which a small body of work into the links between cocaethylene and suicidality has grown, coming out of the University of South Wales, nearby to her home county of Rhondda.

First was a systematic review which declared an “urgent need” for more comprehensive research into cocaethylene. Maggie, who wrote her first letter to the Welsh government in 2020, raised the funds for this work through donations and grants. It helped lead to another paper, of which Drug Science was one amongst a number of partners including Kings College, London: home of the National Programme of Substance Use Mortality (NPSUM).

NPSUM analysed coronial reports from 147 people with cocaine and alcohol present in toxicology reports who died by suicide between 2007 and 2023. The cohort was predominantly male (72.4%), aged 25–45, overrepresented in the most deprived socio-economic strata with over half having been diagnosed with mental health conditions. The authors suggested that cocaethylene may act as a “biochemical marker” for particularly high-risk substance use related to co-occurring mental health conditions, and elevated suicide risk.

The NPSUM team is led by Dr Caroline Copeland. They published research into how English and Welsh drug deaths are recorded and Caroline says that “people dying from cocaine and alcohol are not being recorded properly. The way these deaths are counted is systematically inaccurate”.

This is not exclusive to cocaine and alcohol but more down to the framework by which coroners report deaths – particularly by suicide, which can be open to interpretation. Matters also become ambiguous when multiple substances are involved, with deaths sometimes recorded as “multi-drug toxicity” rather than attributed to individual drugs.

Caroline says there are also specific reasons why cocaine or alcohol may not appear in official suicide records.

“The drug needs to be specifically named to be counted but, in suicides, there are potentially two barriers to a coroner doing this. They may not want to name a drug on the Record of Inquest [the coroner version of a death certificate] as they don’t want to advertise means of suicide,” Caroline says, caveating that in the age of the internet/Reddit, this may be somewhat limited in impact. “Secondly, if someone is using alcohol and cocaine prior to dying by suicide due to other means, e.g. hanging, then drugs and alcohol may not feature as a cause at all – if the physiological cause is asphyxiation.”

While Caroline tells WAYO that it would be hard to state that cocaethylene itself was to blame for the suicides, with each person living under a unique set of circumstances, she says that there “is a funding and information gap for people dying as a result of cocaine and alcohol use.”

2,482 cocaine-related deaths were missed from the Office of National Statistics data between 2011 and 2022 (though this number also includes crack as the two are indistinguishable on toxicology reports). To corroborate the general picture, she pulls up these stats from 1997 to 2023 in which suicides deemed likely to be from powder cocaine use increased from 1 to 137 people annually.

Alongside spearheading the drive for this research and making an as-yet unreleased documentary on cocaethylene, Maggie organised a 2023 conference alongside the Central Club podcast. One of its most powerful panels comprised three men with lived experience of cocaine and alcohol-induced suicidality.

This included Gregor, a barber living in Brighton. He tells WAYO that despite his experience, “there have been many times when, if dosed correctly, it [taking cocaine] has been such an intimate moment with a partner or a best friend.”

He’s keen to not demonise the substance and says that he’s not convinced that cocaethylene causes suicidal thoughts in and of itself. “There is a big part missing in our rituals,” he suggests, however. “Everyone goes out together. But what about the bit afterwards? You can’t just go home and suffer by yourself all the time. I think it’s important that people think about the next day.”

2022 research has found that impulsive behaviour is strongly associated with suicide risk_, with impulsive people more liable to use drugs in the first place. Both cocaine and alcohol can also impair judgement and increase impulsive urges. This may also be compounded by the sleep deprivation often following cocaine use which may help instigate a transient psychosis. To negate the dangers of these, Maggie reiterates, time and again, a message of sharing the comedown: “One of the most protective factors is being with somebody the next day,” she says.

She thinks of cocaine as “a biological accelerant that enhances your impulsivity but also your negative thoughts,” and says that “a predominance of people I’ve come into contact with have either got ADHD or undiagnosed ADHD, and are possibly self-medicating.”

A 2022 meta-analysis in Alcohol and Drug Dependence found that 23.1% of people with a substance use disorder also had ADHD (compared with 4.7% in the general UK population). Professor Adam Winstock, consultant addiction psychiatrist and founder of the Global Drug Survey, describes ADHD as “probably one of the biggest misdiagnoses amongst people that are dependent” and estimates that around 30% of people dependent on cocaine have the condition. One possible explanation is that users experience a paradoxical response to the drug, with cocaine temporarily calming dopamine-seeking behaviours in a way that resembles prescribed ADHD meds.

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The cocaethylene paradox

Across the cocaethylene literature that exists you’ll find plethoras of caveats and grey areas.

Guy Jones, a senior chemist at drug checking charity The Loop thinks that cocaethylene’s role itself is over-exaggerated. “It plays a negligible role in the pharmacology of consuming alcohol and cocaine at the same time,” Guy says. “It’s simply not produced in any meaningful amount in the body. It’s not wrong to say that the risks and effects of the combination are different but it’s wrong to say cocaethylene is the reason why.”

He points to a 2015 letter from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to the UK government that says the risks combining cocaine and ethanol is “thought to be due to alcohol decreasing the metabolism of cocaine and, therefore, increasing [...] cocaine concentrations with only a minimal (if any) contribution to an increased risk from the formation of cocaethylene”.

Guy says it is “one of the most understandable misunderstandings in the history of drugs myths” but also that it’s a moot point as “each drug allows more of the other to be consumed” and the harms persist because of this.

I asked Rayyan about this and, while acknowledging the lack of biochemical evidence, he said that, “if you’re slowing down the metabolism of another drug, I’d argue you are creating an environment where another third drug can interact for longer – therefore increasing the amount of that substance.” He also says that there’s a lot of preclinical literature with cocaethylene administered to animals and found it’s more harmful, and that semantics aren’t what’s important at the current time. “It’s on every street corner. I wouldn’t call it the biggest drug myth around. We shouldn’t try to undermine its effects.”

The future of cocaethylene

We are currently in a gilded age for cocaine strength. European drug-checking data found 55% of tested samples at 80%+ in early 2023, falling to 46% in early 2024.

The average UK strength was just 20% in 2009 – ironically the height of its Converse-kicking popularity – but a recent investigation by The Independent from the UK’s Cheltenham race course found two-thirds of coke samples swabbed in toilets to be 85%+. On Telegram, you can now pick up a gram of premium product sold as “fresh from the brick” for the price of a bag of low-tier bash on the street.

But what effect does this new culture of higher strength coke have on cocaethylene?

“Higher purity cocaine likely lengthens and intensifies the stimulant effects,” Rayyan says, adding that “because cocaethylene is formed when cocaine is metabolised in the presence of ethanol, higher strength would likely lead to more of that metabolite being created – leading to more cocaethylene in the bloodstream.”

However, for any enterprising purveyor of cheap cocaine thinking of saying that “cheaper is safer” to clients, lower grade cocaine will be cut with adulterants – like the deworming agent levamisole, which bring their own suite of negative effects.

There’s little research into whether stronger alcoholic drinks affect cocaethylene production, though Rayyan theorises that, if you were drinking spirits, you might consume ethanol faster than if you were drinking lower-strength drinks like beer or wine – potentially leading to greater concentrations of cocaethylene.

As it stands, there isn’t a robust pathway for helping people and no specific medications for stimulant addiction. Certainly not for cocaethylene. “There are just not enough public health resources or even specialist treatments for this,” says Rayyan, pointing out that we need to be more adept at focusing on powder cocaine addiction – rather than bundling it together with its fiercely addictive cousin, crack.

Change can come through better research, non-moralising political will and dissemination of information by people like Maggie Cee’s Co-Alc Alliance. Interestingly, some Phase 1 research into psilocybin for cocaine addiction did yield positive results – though this is some way off, even with Donald Trump’s Joe Rogan-inspired appetite for psychedelic law reform.

Maybe a solution will come from the lab. Rayyan suggests that “perhaps medicinal chemists and biochemists should develop a legal cocaethylene derivative that lacks the cardiotoxicity and highly addictive potential, while retaining some of the positive behavioural and psychological effects that people find rewarding.”

In the meantime, people, mostly but not exclusively men, will tragically die seeking cocaethylene’s euphoria, escape, oblivion or perhaps just respite from the grind.

During our long chat with Gregor, he tells a story about an older friend of his who describes taking cocaine as like being on holiday. “I think that’s such a good analogy,” he says. “It can give you that same feeling.”

Like all holidays, though, eventually you’ve got to get back on the plane.


Thanks to Drug Science for their collaboration on this post. Follow their new Substack.

SOME USEFUL LINKS
Samaritans
David Hillier interview on Drug Science podcast – “Cocaine and alcohol'‘
Drug Science ‘Alcohol’ information page
Drug Science ‘Cocaine’ information page
Co-Alc Alliance

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Greetings!

You may or may not be aware of cocaethylene: a unique psychoactive chemical synthesised when alcohol meets cocaine in the liver. We’re publishing a long-read on it tomorrow, in which I endeavour to untangle the truth about what a source told me is “one of the most understandable misunderstandings in all the world of drug myths”.

Starting out, the primary intention was to answer a question: when people get high on coke and booze – something millions do every year – is it actually cocaethylene? But an unplanned side-quest was less about cocaethylene’s influence on our nights out than our mornings after – and the potentially deadly ramifications.

I discovered a Welsh Samaritan called Maggie who has started the Co-Alc Alliance. They are a group comprising organisations founded by bereaved parents of young people who’ve taken their lives during the comedown of taking powder coke and drinking alcohol. Maggie has quietly been driving research into the effect of cocaine and alcohol on suicidality: a combination that particularly affects men and that is being recorded incorrectly in British government data.

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When I initially contacted Maggie with a breezy introductory email, she called (!) back five minutes later, breathlessly asking if I believed in stars aligning – I’m not opposed to it – and spent an hour telling me about their work. Following this, the article took a new turn which I was very happy to take.

While the Co-Alc Alliance have loftier system-altering aims, at the core of their harm reduction messaging is having company after the afters. “I think we have a lot of responsibility to look after people who don’t have the skills or understanding of looking after themselves during a comedown,” she told me.

It’s such a simple and potent message. I chose to keep myself out of the finished article but regular WHAT ARE YOU ON readers may recall me writing about an incident last year where I experienced suicidal thoughts following an impromptu and terribly timed decision to buy coke.

I had someone there that morning and, whilst I don’t think I would have actually done what was going through my mind, I’m extremely grateful the opportunity to find out didn’t arrive.

Anyway. ‘High on Cocaethylene’ drops here tomorrow (Wednesday() around 8am GMT. Please keep an eye out and share if you can. That makes such a difference. It’s been a collaboration with and I’m very appreciative for their help, and for having me on their podcast (also released tomorrow) with Professor David Nutt to chew the cocaethylene cud.

Take care of your mates and your Tuesday. I’m off for a swim. Life is good x

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I’ll get onboard with most psychoactive proclivities. Everyone’s got different pasts. Neurobiologies guiding them to certain states of being or behaviours. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, etc. But the one I struggle with – and by struggle I mean believing that those guilty are primordial, sub-blob, perhaps even scum – is inhaling nitrous oxide while driving.

We’ve all seen someone doing it, right? I remember a guy in a BMW inching down the road a couple of years ago. In full creeping traffic, face going Farage teal on a balloon in one hand. His other hand on the wheel. Maybe it was some kind of silent protest. Flipping the bird at the ennui of late-stage capitalism. Maybe he was deeply depressed and needed some instant psychoactive disarmament.

But, still: no. Clearly not.

The experience of nitrous oxide is so utterly incapacitating, opening up a kind of hyperspace in the mind where one could, as its inventor Humphry Davy declared, ‘lose all connection with external things’. This is not a psychopharmacological state in which to be traversing the Rugby Interchange of the M6. Or any stretch of gravel.

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A couple of weeks ago, it was announced that two police forces in the UK are trialling the world’s first nitrous oxide breathalyser which can detect the Class C gas around two hours after ingestion and is, according to the BBC, a one-of-a-kind device on a four-week trial.

Hampshire’s police and crime commissioner, Donna Jones, said that, “There is a worrying trend around the use of laughing gas by those aged 16-25, which was previously undetectable, with drivers under the influence of nitrous oxide putting themselves and others at risk of serious injury or death.”

An interesting piece from last year looked into Tower Hamlets’ “gas and car” scene, highlighting numerous online videos of people taking the drug at the wheel including one incident where a black Mercedes rides up the central kerb near the Blackwall Tunnel, the driver emerging holding an inflated balloon. The piece linked to many more videos (now deleted). The problem became so prevalent that over 1,000 local residents signed a petition last year criticising the sight of “drivers visibly using nitrous oxide” on Bethnal Green’s Roman Road

I tried to write an article about the issue back then – looking more at the psychological motivations behind such a seemingly dumbfuck action – but it got stuck in R & D: primarily because data around nitrous oxide and driving is so hard to find but also people weren’t that keen on psychoanalysing their gas and car lifestyles to a man with 157 followers on Substack.

But there have been well-reported tragedies in the news: from three teenage boys to a grandad in Sefton to a retired NHS worker. Yet nitrous continues to work in grey areas, despite being upgraded to a Class C drug in 2023. While this made possession for recreational purposes illegal, it’s still used within the catering and dental industries. Therefore, you could have a legitimate reason for having a tank of FastGas in your passenger seat.

Of the data that does exist, West Yorkshire Police revealed that laughing gas crashes had nearly doubled in five years. Manchester City Council reported a doubling of people driving whilst doing balloons from 2021 to 2022. In Holland the problem was huge. Dutch road traffic incidents involving nitrous oxide increased by 80%, from 2,652 incidents in 2019 to 4,860 in 2021. (This was the major driving force behind the drug being made fully illegal there.)

The UK itself has seen the numbers of 16-24 year olds consuming nitrous oxide reduced by 85% in 2024/25 from its peak in 2019/20. But a recent article by in Talking Drugs suggested that use is now being concentrated by a smaller number of people using larger canisters in problematic ways.

And another complicating facet of the issue around nitrous oxide drivers is its apparent popularity in some South Asian communities. A Bengali TikToker called Big Fish told London Centric it was “a celebration drug,” intertwined with the “big hire car scene”, with luxury cars hired around celebrations like weddings, proms or Eid. I spoke to one drugs worker who told me it was primarily Asian men he’d seen doing it – and not just young lads in car parks but older blokes in shiny wheels.

Act Supt Emma Hart, of the joint operations roads policing unit of the Hampshire force and TVP, told the BBC: “We’re definitely seeing more young people use [nitrous oxide]…we know that we want to start mitigating that risk, but in order to mitigate it, you really need to understand the problem. This device helps us do that. There is currently no device available that can prove a driver inhaled laughing gas, making prosecution difficult.”

There is precedent for this approach. A 2015 UK law change altered the criteria by which drug-using drivers would be prosecuted. It moved the burden of proof from driving impairment to simply being above certain limits present in the blood: similar to that which exists with alcohol. This was spearheaded by new roadside saliva swab tests that could quickly ascertain if someone had been using. The impact was swift, with a government review reporting drug-driving arrests by Cheshire Police increasing by 800% in the first year – with weed users the majority, followed by cocaine.

A personal view: in the grand hierarchy of Dumb Things People Do, sitting in a lay-by doing a few balloons with your mates is one thing – presuming you take your shit home with you and aren’t rattling through whole whips. But driving with a pulsing balloon between your teeth? Nah.

Here’s hoping this one-of-a-kind machine gets the blobs off our roads.

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The annual release of drugs’ wastewater analysis is part of the drug content pusher’s calendar and this year produced some stop-the-scroll stats.

These were largely around ketamine with its overall wastewater load increasing 41% since 2024, and England’s historically ketty Bristol named the highest-using city among 115 analysed by the European Union Drug Agency, which also covers a handful across other continents.

But most intriguing were two seemingly arbitrary locations with the highest wastewater rates of benzoylecgonine – a metabolite present in the urine of cocaine users

Top was Whitehorse, a 31,000 population city deep into Canada’s wild Yukon Territory. It was followed by Middlesbrough: a 130,000, formerly thriving city of industry in England’s increasingly forgotten North East.

Both are newcomers to the EUDA analysis but leave their followers for dust. Whitehorse’s wastewater recorded an estimated cocaine load of 5,242mg per 1,000 inhabitants per day – nearly double Middlesbrough’s figure (2,786mg).

This was over twice that of Antwerp (1,382), the traditional leader, thanks to its potent combination of tourism and thriving crime groups, all feasting on the coke flooding through Europe’s busiest port.

So how did these two small cities become, in relative terms, the biggest coke users on the planet – and why do we even know about it?

Two WHAT ARE YOU ON writers waded through the wastewater to find out.

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Whitehorse – written by David Hillier

My only previous cultural reference point for the Yukon was a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon collection called Yukon Ho! in which the titular characters set off in search of Yukon’s faraway frontier and its promise of parent-less freedom. That they didn’t reach their desired goal is not surprising.

Bordering Alaska, Yukon is a sparsely populated territory in Canada’s far northwest: a snowy expanse of lakes, glaciers and millions of acres of spruce trees. Mild summers give way to subarctic winters with its main artery the 1,600-mile Alaskan Highway connecting Alaska to the west with British Columbia and the United States to the east.

Roughly halfway is Whitehorse, a former gold rush town described by local journalist and author Rhiannon Russell as having “big-city amenities — chain stores you’d recognize, hipster bars you wouldn’t, and thriving arts festivals — but a small-town feel”.

“Whitehorse and the Yukon have a unique context,” Dr Carolina Koutras of the One Yukon Coalition not-for-profit tells WAYO, pointing out “it’s role is more comparable to a connected transit or hub environment, similar to patterns observed in some European cities with elevated cocaine signals, than to an isolated community.”

This catchment pulls in both resident and transient populations – including a disparate regional population that includes multiple First Nation communities that historically have high rates of substance dependence and drug-related deaths.

This creates a fertile, sustainable breeding ground for drug use and the organised crime groups feeding it, with coke’s rise to prominence within crime-related stats aided by Canada’s legalisation of cannabis in 2018.

According to Statistics Canada drug-related crime in the Yukon is over three times the Canadian average. I reached out to Yukon Royal Canadian Mountie Police (RCMP) and they replied with a 2025 report examining the impact of local crime groups, saying that “Illicit markets in the Yukon operated by Organised Crime have overtaken the costs and harms associated to alcohol and tobacco.”

Of 233 drug violations reported in the Yukon in 2022, 137 (58.8%) were for cocaine trafficking while 17.2% were for possession, meaning three-quarters overall were coke-related. The RCMP also estimate that cocaine smuggled into the Yukon has increased 75% since 2021 – to 15-20kg monthly – and “is the most prevalent illegal drug being consumed in the Yukon,” with five organised crime groups operating supply lines from British Columbia and Alberta,.

WHY WHITEHORSE

“Whitehorse was not selected at random,” Dr Carolina Koutras says. “Its participation…is the result of a deliberate, locally led effort by our organization.”

She explains that while wastewater monitoring receives very limited government support – particularly post-pandemic – health inequalities in the Yukon and the disproportionate effect of the North America drug crisis on First Nation communities led One Yukon’s decision to fund this research.

Money was only the start of the story that included hiring epidemiologists, partnering with the University of Calgary’s analytical lab, and “investing in the infrastructure required to generate high-quality data and bring this largely invisible crisis to the forefront.” This enabled them to become part of the Sewage analysis CORe group — Europe (SCORE) network, which sought to standardise wastewater analysis processes and develop a network of international alliances. It started in 2011 with 19 European locations.

The consequences of Yukon’s drug crisis are also visible on the ground where a drug consumption room (DCR) run by the charity Blood Ties is hands-on with trying to stop the crisis getting worse.

According to a feature published February 2026 in The Walrus, it’s the only functioning DCR in Canada’s North, receiving between 2,000 to 4,000 visits per month (many of them revisits) and reversed over 440 overdoses. 95% of their consumption is smoking with crack cocaine the “substance of choice, followed by crack with fentanyl, then fentanyl”. Crack use also creates benzoylecgonine, so these users will make a large contribution to Whitehorse’s wastewater stats. (WAYO did make contact with Blood Ties who then didn’t respond to further comment requests.)

It’s notable that, at a time when DCRs face rising political heat across Canada, including planned closures in Ontario and Alberta alongside the winding down of British Columbia’s drug decriminalisation pilot, the Yukon seems unusual in retaining broad bipartisan political support for progressive harm reduction initiatives like Blood Ties. The conservative Yukon Party, noted last October “the ongoing role of effective and properly managed harm reduction” in a public health and crime crisis that isn’t cooling down.

Drug deaths in Canada were 7,162 in 2023 – a slight reduction from the opioid crisis’ apex in 2021 – but still over double the numbers of 2016 (3,286). Canada’s overdose crisis is still publicly understood as an opioid epidemic, but cocaine and crack is now increasingly woven into the toxic drug supply — particularly in these northern territories where tiny populations give every death, arrest or user greater statistical significance.

So, what next? Dr Koutras acknowledges a bespoke blend of localised issues: crime-sided problems like stable supply chains and the potential higher purity of cocaine elevating metabolite rates.

But drugs, underneath the bluster and data, are a human issue. Whitehorse has alcohol-fuelled social environments (“hipster bars”) that can supercharge stimulant use, alongside generational troubled high frequency users and higher income subgroups. (Another local source tells me anecdotally that cocaine use is popular within the mining industry – which can be highly-paid, particularly for remote jobs where people are often flown in for short-term contracts.)

“We are actively engaging local communities and agencies to strengthen awareness of the scale and seriousness of the issue,” Koutras says, acknowledging this is the start rather than end of the journey that has labeled Whitehorse with this unfortunate accolade. “We are already participating in the 2026 study, which has just begun.”

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Middlesbrough – written by Ella Glover

Up along the River Tees in the North East of England, Middlesbrough’s skyline is less mountainous and more metal. The Grade II listed transporter bridge that connects Boro with neighbouring market town Stockton-on-Tees – the longest in the world – winks as it catches the sun: a reminder of the town’s industrial heritage. In the late 19th Century, Boro produced one-third of the nation’s pig iron output. It became known as Ironopolis. By the mid-20th century, air pollution from its steelworks and chemical plants led to the nickname Smoggie.

Back then, Teesside was one of the biggest contributors to the British economy, but became a victim of Thatcher-era deindustrialisation.

Now, according to 2024 figures, Middlesbrough’s employment rate was lower than across the North East, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in England. Middlesbrough itself was ranked fifth from bottom on the Youth Opportunity Index 2025. In the government’s 2025 indices of deprivation, Boro is among the local authorities with the highest proportions of highly deprived neighbourhoods in England.

“Middlesbrough has really suffered post industrialisation,” Ian Hamilton, a professor in addiction and mental health at the University of York, tells WAYO. “In towns like this you often see higher rates of unemployment than you do in other parts of the country, greater deprivation, greater poverty, and all of those ingredients tend to constellate around drug use.”

Last month, members of an organised crime gang said to have “flooded” Teesside with crack cocaine were arrested for 46 years. Media reports state the town has been “ravaged” by crack cocaine — and a Government report charting the prevalence of crack cocaine and heroin found that the North East had the highest rate of people who use those drugs.

For Hamilton, this is hardly surprising. “Using crack cocaine is often symptomatic of many other issues beyond addiction, like mental health issues or being involved in commercial sex,” he says. “It is not surprising that areas like Middlesbrough have higher rates of crack cocaine use as the drug is readily available and can be an attractive drug for those who lack hope, are unemployed or in unstable housing, as it provides a quick and effective way of temporarily escaping those problems.”

Wastewater analyses aren’t able to differentiate between the use of crack cocaine and powder cocaine, but both fit neatly into the picture.

Official statistics show that cocaine use is similar across all income brackets. A drop in price, rising purity and availability means that powder cocaine is no longer a drug for the middle classes – it’s for everyone, not least the working classes.

WHY MIDDLESBROUGH?

Unlike Whitehorse, it appears that Middlesbrough’s inclusion in the wastewater study was a coincidence rather than a concerted effort. When WAYO reached out to Imperial College London, which was involved in the study, a spokesman there said the only reason Middlesbrough had been included was because a utilities company volunteered to take samples. Vitally, Middlesbrough was not chosen to represent a potential ‘worst-case’ city in the UK. (Though nearby Sunderland was named one of the top cocaine-using UK areas by government wastewater analysis.)

But it isn’t the first time the town has been included in drug-related initiatives.

The pioneering Heroin Assisted Treatment pilot – which closed in 2022 after losing its funding – was set up mainly due to Middlesbrough’s high numbers of drug-related deaths. At the time, the council said people in Middlesbrough “were more likely to die from drug-related deaths than a car accident”. Between 2022 and 2024, Middlesbrough had the second highest (after Blackpool) rate of deaths related to drug misuse in the entire country, with 30 deaths per 100,000 people.

Middlesbrough was also included in Project ADDER (Addiction, Diversion, Disruption, Enforcement and Recovery) – a Home Office-led initiative that ran between Autumn 2020 and March 2025 to “trail-blaze a whole-system response to combatting drug misuse in the 13 hardest hit areas across England and Wales”. This led to the arrest of 552 people in the area in 2023, alongside 1,613 drug seizures.

Yet the EUDA wastewater analysis suggests Project ADDER hasn’t made much of a dent in the town’s drug problems.

Middlesbrough’s social issues run deep, and the illicit drug market still thrives. Although getting any coherent information about the UK’s opaque and fragmented drug tracking facilities isn’t straightforward, it’s perhaps not so surprising – given the grip deprivation holds on the city – that Middlesbrough placed so highly in the EUDA charts.

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I will meet u at the station with the stuff when u arrive. No worries mate. I’ll be on tuk-tuk ;)

Stepping out of the station and straight into the city square, its immense double-towered Gothic cathedral looming, my man was waiting on his bike: a shadow sitting as straight as the spires above.

I got his number from a Telegram channel. £10 in exchange for three dial-a-dealers in the western German city where I was spending four days with friends. He had the best English, so got the nod.

He waved at me with a grin — perhaps recognising the British millennial male tourist as paydirt — and beckoned me onto the back. We raced ten minutes through wide commercial avenues and backstreets lined with cutesy boutiques to the Airbnb with Pitbull, doyen of the European discotheque, pumping. En route, I purchased some drugs.

I was thinking: if I don’t get jumped, this is insanely smooth – the gap between user and plug closing, access to illicit substances becoming ever more seamless.

There are now a slew of dial-a-dealer sourcing groups on WhatsApp and Telegram, many operating without a fee. From Swansea to Sydney, just pop in your location, and often, especially if you’re in an urban environment, you’ll tap into a local dealer network selling everything from Class A stimulants to ketamine, tusi, weed, shrooms or black market benzos. A quick “hi mate, you around?” and you’re flying.

I’ve thought about them a lot over the last couple of years: about their effect on drug culture, whether they encourage impulsive or compulsive buying. Or, perhaps, they’re a natural adaptation, offering a bit more transparency in an industry that’s always had to work in the shadows.

For some, that plug and play access is the problem.

“If I was still in the world of using drugs, these groups would be a nightmare. It’s just constant access – I wouldn’t be able to say no,” says Jo Barber, founder of The Other Side Of The Fear, who used sourcing Telegram groups while living in Berlin. Of these, she says that the access was sometimes instant, even meeting people in clubs. “You could post that you were in Berghain: ten minutes later you’d be meeting someone to pick up by the toilets.”

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Ciaran — who mostly uses them to buy cocaine and MDMA while on holiday in major European capitals — disagrees. “They’re better than getting random drugs off the street as they can be screened [vetted] to an extent.” He says that “it’s a mixed bag in terms of quality” but that “standard seemed better in Europe than anything I’ve got in the UK”.

Ciaran mentions the names of different sourcing groups, spread across WhatsApp and Telegram. I’m on several (research purposes) but, full disclosure upfront, I’m not naming any. However, if you’re active on drugs Telegram, rave regularly or think 8am is a logical time to buy drugs – you’ll know them.

HOW IT WORKS

Broadly, they fall into three different models: some are free, moderated groups where people post their location, with any number-swapping occurring in DMs

Some are paid and membership-based communities, where transcontinental sesh mavens roam, bantering each other off. Requests are fulfilled mainly by the group founders or people employed by them. Then there’s a free-to-use Telegram bot, joined by a private sign-up link. It’s now pretty ubiquitous: a Yellow Pages of international contacts whose details are often shared across a constellation of online groups and communities.

But are they any good? As a man of increasing vintage, my nights with drugs are sparse and meticulously charted these days, with random, unplanned calls to men of Balkan heritage a rare occurrence.

But there have been two occasions I strayed from this approach in recent years – when I was deep into pints and, crucially, nowhere near the right frame of mind to be taking drugs, chasing oblivion when what I needed was calm. The groups offered the perfect escape hatch and I contacted new untrusted sources, paying below market rate, which is a wildly red flag.

Neither time finished particularly late, but I was then kept up all night unable to sleep, twitching on brutally adulterated bash that I would not, in the right frame of mind, purchase.

The second instance, in particular, last summer, led to me flying completely off the handle. I experienced suicidal thoughts and, though my partner – and eventually some sleep around 1pm – calmed me down, it was dreadful. A dark midday of the soul.

This was the crescendo of a long, difficult period and while some will counter that the problem was “me”, there’s a nascent body of work around the effect of cocaethylene (a unique byproduct of cocaine and alcohol) on suicidality – particularly in men.

I put it mostly down to sleeplessness, combined with the depressive effects of the drink on an already depressed brain, more than the coke itself. I’ve had numerous times of not being able to sleep after drugs, and it’s generally fine once you’ve accepted things and switch on Friends instead.

But would I have sunk so low without the access provided by those groups? No-one else I was with had a number. I’d deleted all the grim 24hr ones, serving up 0.6s by teenagers in trackies. I dunno. These groups aren’t solely for cocaine but the people posting in Benidorm at 6am or High Wycombe at 09.01am? They’re not asking for MDMA or psychedelics.

Maybe there’s a reason for that. Research has found that the conditions of our immediate environment play a huge role in drug-seeking behaviour – a variation of the “people, places and things” that Alcoholic’s Anonymous preaches that its members must avoid to keep their sober stretches going.

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Dopamine gets released just from talking about cocaine with people you normally do bumps with – let alone entering the pub on a Friday night where you’ve got a favourite toilet stall. But whereas we used to have barriers for drug use – your dealer went to bed; you’re on holiday and don’t know anyone – modern technology ensures those barriers are being eroded. Especially in cities.

At the risk of going all “old man shouts at clouds”, one of the nice things about going on holiday in the past was taking a break from the accoutrements shaping our lives at home. Now as we take our phone and Slack apps with us to check “just the once”, we also transport our penchant for a gram of coke or ket after four pints of fizzy European lager.

LIGHT AND SHADE

But it’s not all doom and gloom. These apps do put a form of power back in the hands of users, democratising access and stopping thirsty people trying to score off randos on the Ramblas or in the Red Light District.

I was in Amsterdam last week and – despite somewhat successful efforts to disrupt the street trade – you can easily spot the roadmen lurking among the beaming windows of the De Wallen area.

But on a previous visit, I got a number from a group and – after being sent the most lavish menu, a real 10-course taster affair covering every possible narcotic proclivity – an amenable young guy met me outside my hotel.

He came up to my room, chatting breezily like he was bringing up some scrambled eggs. I bought a few bits: each of stellar quality and reasonable value with the ketamine (which I don’t especially like) being the best I’d ever done.

For me, these sourcing communities sit somewhere between the darkweb – which is self-governed and has a feedback loop that broadly ensures a higher grade of customer service – and your local dealer. Some of them have ratings functionality, users can leave comments or discuss a particular contact in a group. One has what you might call a trusted vendor status, though they use a more colloquial term.

Research into darkweb markets backs this up. A 2025 paper analysing the Polish language darknet market Cebulka found that “while most users focus on efficient transactions and security, a smaller, committed minority fosters a sense of shared purpose and community.”

These groups can have a fair bit of lairy sesh posturing, but they’re also hubs where members share harm reduction info in a way that’s relatable to them – unlike the more career psychonautical leanings of Reddit, Erowid or Bluelight. I’ve seen the top hierarchical figures – who carry weight – tell people when they’re getting lost in the sauce and, broadly, anything that demystifies drug use is good.

“You always have a personal choice – to go home – rather than carry on taking drugs,” says Jo Barber. “But are these groups perpetuating a problem for people that can’t stop?”

Ciaran takes a slightly different tack, suggesting that he “doesn’t think these groups promote random seshes. If someone wants drugs, they will find it either way.”

After picking up from that tuk-tuk, I marvelled at the wonder of our smoothly interconnected world and the tenacity of modern app developers and drug networks – dropping this wrap into my lap before I’d even checked in.

But then that horrible morning last August, I cursed them. Still, they’re not going anywhere. And the easier they are to access, the harder it is to pretend that prohibition can keep up.

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You’ve probably seen some grisly pictures of free parties on your timelines, with Easter’s EGGTEK event in Lulworth mobbed by riot geared-up police brandishing batons.

Unlike normal festivals, with their rolodex of stakeholders, security staff and welfare volunteers, free party people have traditionally fended for themselves: which is exactly the way they like it. But who’s looking out for them in the middle of the frigid morning, when pills are taking hold and agriculturally loud tekno is rattling everyone’s frayed synapses?

Since 2019 a guerrilla band of big-hearted rave veterans have run a volunteer organisation called Rave Aid Crew, providing welfare and safe spaces at free raves and squat parties. They tend to cover the south-west with Sound Sanctuary, a like-minded collective, based more up north.

As serendipity would have it, WAYO caught up with their founder – let’s call them Doctor Buzz – the day before Eggtek kicked, quite literally, off. From police politik to finding the pin, these are Doctor Buzz’s tales from the free party welfare tent.

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WHAT’S THE PIN?

Everything is left to the last possible moment and there is no “normal” time to get the pin for the party’s location – it could be 8pm, 11pm, 1am, whenever. We’ll normally get there an hour before punters turn up and it’s a finely tuned military operation from there – we’ll be setting up with the rigs [soundsystems]

If you’re too early and someone sees a load of vans arriving, they could make a call to the police. If you’re there too late, there isn’t time to set up. If the party gets moved to a new location, so do we! The latest I’ve ever started setting up the RaveAid Crew tent was 4am. It was a long party.

We can’t be too far away from the action. People need to see us. But too close to the rigs and we can’t hear a thing – volunteers will get tired quickly because they are close to the vibration. You also don’t want someone two metres away from a line of subwoofers if they’re in psychosis

We’re very clear that we aren’t part of the organisers’ efforts – so we don’t make any decisions about locations, logistics or noise. But if a party is going to happen anyway, we want to be there to try and reduce harm.

WHAT’S IN THE PUNTER’S BAGS?

We see less trips [psychedelics] than normal festivals. A lot of ket, I’d say, is the main thing. And you get some people doing large amounts of gurners [pills].

Last year, we had one kid who was right on the verge of serotonin syndrome [a potentially fatal serotonin overload typically caused by taking large doses of MDMA]. He was talking gibberish, disconnected. I was watching him disintegrate and thinking that he could start dying any minute. Fortunately, that’s quite rare and we got him into an ambulance.

I am not in a position of authority to tell anyone to do anything. It’s a free party and there is no authority! But, generally, people listen if we’re giving advice. If you’re approaching the conversation like you’re mandating them, or forcing something on them, it’s probably not going to go very well

So it’s about persuading someone why chilling out a bit, not taking any more drugs or letting us look after them is a good idea.

WHAT’S IN OUR BAG?

We bring a gazebo, a table, food, water, battery lights, snacks and harm reduction leaflets – plus lots of water from the tanks stacked in my garden.

If we’re inside we’ll usually have a welfare room. If it’s outside, we’ll have another tent, which I’d call quite a Bear Grylls version of the welfare tents you get at festivals. We’re a lean, streamlined operation by design. We have to pack up at 3pm with no sleep. I don’t want to be messing around with anything complicated.

FREE PARTY PEOPLE

There’s elements of free parties which are quite antisocial, right? Particularly if the location has been forced to move to a Plan B. Plan Bs are often much closer to where people are trying to sleep. I’m not a fan of keeping people awake.

But the thing about clubs and festivals is that there are people literally employed to catch you, ruin your night, kick you out, take your drugs off you, whatever that may be. I think a lot of people at free parties feel free.

Other people are really into the DIY element – the decor, staging. It’s put together by people who want the party to happen. It’s not corporate and there’s an anarchist element to it all. It’s unique. Normal festivals and clubs can’t match that atmosphere and crowd.

And the people that volunteer for RaveAid Crew, honestly, they reinstate your faith in humanity. Most of them have spent years going to free parties, are now a bit older and the idea of partying all night is a bit much – so they need a role. My one prerequisite for getting involved with us is whether someone actively goes to regular free parties.

PARTY’S OVER

When Police arrive – which they basically always do – they’ll sometimes try and speak to Rave Aid Crew. We have a tent, table and lights, so it makes sense. They’ll ask if we’re running the party but we’re just there to do welfare.

Sometimes the organisers will negotiate with the police and they’ll agree a shut-off time. That’s based mainly on the fact that if there’s a few hundred people on-site and the party’s going, it would cost police a huge amount of money to shut that down. [The Dorset police for EGGTEK clearly thought this was an investment worth making.]

But there have been cases recently, especially with the big events, where organisers refuse to do any negotiation or discussion at all. If you’d got a really big party going – which would take a lot of police to shut down – it can be a good strategy. Or sometimes we’ll get to lunchtime and loads of people leave, so the organisers will start talking.

MO POLICE MO PROBLEMS

The officers on the ground don’t understand what welfare is. They’ve just heard there’s an illegal rave about to happen and their priority is to stop everyone and anyone.

I remember, once, we had just done CPR at a squat party. The person had just been strapped to a stretcher and it was really intense. As this happened, a 60-year-old lady had driven up from Bath to deliver a tank of water because we’d run out.

So I go to the police line [from which partygoers can’t re-enter the party] and said that we’d just escorted paramedics out with the CPR, that we dealt with it onsite, and could I go get the tank of water from the woman because it was too heavy. I remember saying, “If your kids were here, you’d want them to have this water.”

They waved me through. I picked up the tank, turned around and they didn’t let me back in while the person who was manning the stall – and had just given CPR – was inside having a terrible time. (I snuck back in, obviously.)

So, in short, on occasion the police have posed lots of problems. But sometimes they can be fairly reasonable and amicable.

FREE PARTY RESURGENCE

Rave Aid Crew started in 2019. I was going to free parties and thinking that there was nothing appropriate there for people often engaged in way more acute patterns of drug use than you’d get at normal festivals – yet those events would have proper welfare offerings.

I think a lot of people assume free parties are all just about people getting off their heads but plenty of people there aren’t taking drugs. What’s also interesting is that a lot of the younger rig owners are less into the hedonistic chaos and more about doing it for principled reasons.

This new generation are doing events and building up soundsystems. You’ll have a lot of club nights now where there’s no line-up and it’s just free party rigs. It’s all helping a free party resurgence. There has been some noise about it in the press but free parties are definitely back!

I wish I liked weed. Honestly. Burning one down a couple of times a week. Music popping anew. Cosmic food and orgasms. Fuzzy in the morning but, look, it’s a Friday and better than being hungover.

Every time I tell a cannabis nut about my disaffection for their preferred psychoactive, I get passionately (or perhaps pointedly) told that I’m not trying hard enough, or that I’m smoking strains with too much THC.

I’ll retort that I’ve tried every variation: CBD-stacked hash, oils, edibles, vapes, the lot. It all, in the end, spins my brain into overdrive and invokes a kind of dread I do not cherish. Yet it wasn’t always so. There was a distant epoch when weed was the poison of choice: back in the 90s (and a bit of the 00s, before I gave up).

As 4/20 approaches, I thought about writing a diatribe about cannabis and modern weed culture (elements of which I do find cringe). But then it seemed equally cringe to dunk on something mostly because I can’t use it anymore. So instead, this is a short tribute to being a stoner in the pre-Stardawg era.

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The funny thing about drugs, as with most experiences providing great pleasure or pain, you can usually remember your first time. But I can’t with weed.

The two earliest experiences I can recall are pretty typical. Pulling a deep whitey round my friend Ben’s house, along with a bunch of other winnowed 15-year-old boys rolling draughty joints. And going to the Whirligig, a kind of free party cum Glastonbury Stone Circle rave, when I was also, I think, 15. I tried to drink and smoke like the adults I was with, managing an hour before my night slammed to an early, emetic terminus in the bogs.

Nowadays, if you’re underage, it’s theoretically easier to buy weed (or any drug) than booze, thanks to a whole cosmos of online and IRL dealers. For us, it came through a single source.

During much of my smoking career in Maidstone and surrounding villages, we picked up from a lady called Mandy on the Shepway estate. She was the mum of a schoolmate. My friend Taz, not his real name, was the link, so would text her off his NOKIA 3210 and drive round to get three bone-hard eights of the brickiest hash for the princely sum of £20. Compared to modern pricing thresholds, this may seem like a steal but it’s not like that satin patella hash everyone’s chuffing up now.

If she wasn’t in or had fallen asleep on the sofa, we didn’t get the goods. There were no sourcing groups or options to Snap a local plug. There was another guy that sold, Gavin, someone from school who once tried to talk me into going into business with him, but that wasn’t a dial-a-dealer situation.

Quietly, weed became a pretty entrenched habit and I feel like, then, it was more of a device to kill time before something bigger happened. A low impact boredom glue and easy default mode before anyone without a degree in neuroscience knew what a default mode network was.

This was particularly with Taz and another friend, Liam. We’d smoke around friends’ houses or, more often, in cars parked in lay-bys, church parks, sometimes, in the summer, just outside one of our houses, barely out of sight and hoping our parents didn’t come out to do the bins. I always thought I’d adroitly kept it secret, until my 18th birthday when my mum gleefully asked Taz if he’d been outside “having a puff-puff” lately.

I wasn’t the one behind the wheel but, also, for better or worse, Taz driving after smoking five of Mandy’s packed out biftas didn’t seem such an issue. Things changed, alongside a culture of lads toking weed in cars, when new drug-driving laws came into force in 2015.

When I wasn’t smoking and talking ephemeral guff with Taz and Liam, there was another group who I’d sometimes go out with.

They were marginally more streetwise and I didn’t quite fit in. I once jumped into the Peugeot 206 and all of them, driver included, had dropped a pill. This was a narcotic I’d yet to try.

Later, we were sitting in the unlit car park of St Michael’s Church in Chart Sutton, farms flanking each side, a Dreamscape tape whistling happy hardcore out the tinny radio. I was razed by weed, trying to stay awake while they all quietly gurned away, eyeballs boring into the back of their headrests. One of them, Greg, suggested their experience would be so much better without me there. I didn’t go out with them again.

This lot were also notable for their love of a homemade bong over joints. This comprised a 500ml Coke bottle, a hollowed out pen and a socket. They’d have these stashed in bushes around Maidstone, the bong water getting murkier by every visit and rain shower.

It was rudimentary but didn’t burn as much as a lung, surely the most medieval of smoking hardware. It consisted of a cut off 2l plastic bottle and a plastic bag attached to it. You’d burn hash into it via foil dotted with holes. Then inhale, in and out, until alighting on the nearest soft surface. Discounting the ruinous effect of all those microplastics curling around my alveoli, they were a good crack. Three lungs, six packs of Salt n Shake, 12 hours sleep on a friend’s sister’s bed was how I celebrated passing my GCSEs. Not got the data but beats a gram of MKAT, surely.

Before going to university in 2003, I actually quit. I knew I’d just become a fully functioning stoner left to my own devices.

This was a prescient move but sadly ineffective. From there, it was a daily stinky skunk habit until my mid-20s. So many days reduced to a mind-melting joint. So many missed social events, lectures, the ones I attended I was only half there. Weed came before groceries. Didn’t exercise meaningfully for years. I fell in with some professional stoners that made my own habits seem quaint.

I depended on it for sleep. Nights without were so riven by dreams of witches and apocalypse that I would vow never to hit the pillow without a joint again. This despite the fact that I found, each time I smoked, I’d spend an hour pulsing with liquid anxiety, thinking about all the things I hadn’t done, would never do with a mind like mine.

Eventually I got a promotion at the call centre I worked at. I needed to be able to speak with people in person rather than on the phone. So I quit weed, replaced it with swimming. Time to stop killing time.

When does a number become so vast that its loses all meaning? I’ll go.

Reportedly, there are around five trillion Google searches a year. The omnipotence of the search engine – invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University in 1996 and originally called ‘BackRub’ – can feel close to total.

So, after January and February’s ‘quitting’ challenges – in which I found living without ultra-processed foods for a month easier than apps for six hours – I chose to give up the act of Googling for five days.

This incorporated any Google application – Chrome, Youtube, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Gemini, etc –and I couldn’t just replace Google searching with Safari because, well, what’s the point? ChatGPT is basically a maxxed Google, so I chucked that on the pyre too. If anything, it was less about binning Google and more a ban on an endless pursuit of instant information, throwaway smarts and distraction.

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Full disclosure upfront: I really enjoyed this. A 2024 meta-analysis found that it can take anything between 59 and 365 days to embed a behaviour. So I’m loathe to shout about it too loudly. But, combined with the experience of deleting a bunch of apps in February, there have been tentative behavioural and perhaps even emotional changes.

A major caveat: I undertook this during a few days off from work, then a weekend. Which, were I writing this up academically, would be noted under the “study limitations” subhead as it wouldn’t represent a real-world scenario but one where I did lots of gardening and visited my parents.

I’d also worked flat out for a few months without a break and was totally sick of the internet. Would this count as a conflict of interest? If so, I should probably declare that too.

Nevertheless, Googling (or using AI) is a fundamental part of my life, with the latter nixing any necessity to have intellectual curiosity ever again. And it does have positives. A recent trip to A+E for partner Robyn’s excruciating stomach pains, for instance, was made more comforting after ChatGP suggested it could be gallstones rather than a viper attempting to escape her stomach. It was right. But let’s think about gardening.

Recently, I fulfilled the cliche of turning 40 and getting into it, serenely opining about the meditative properties to anyone who’d listen. (“It’s the journey not the destination.”)

But I don’t really know anything about plants and, while I enjoy the easy serotonin wins of weeding or shifting and lifting, I’m astonishingly shit at vaguely skilled manual work. So, my early forays into gardening – by this, I mean a small patio out the back and pot plants – have been guided by the digital palm of Gemini or ChatGPT.

It only occurred to me after committing to this challenge that, for these days I had set aside, to get the garden ready for spring, I wouldn’t able to use either of these methods. That I would be forced to wing it or, worse, ask someone. I landed somewhere in the middle and, clearly, it was fine. I started to actually read those little cardboard inserts you get with plants. Most of them have thrived (or at least lived). Instead of Googling “how to lay woodchip” I called my dad. It’s membrane, far as I can tell, remains un-punctured by weeds.

More annoying – and look, this is not deep – was not being able to check whether the hardware shop nearby sold spades in advance of going there. They didn’t. I then chanced my arm with this tool rental place down the road: it turned out they had a second hand one for sale, for five pounds! This felt like a thumb bite at Google and Amazon – the latter of which I would have probably used otherwise.

As for the rest of it, honestly, after a few times reaching into my pocket to search a recipe or the average March temperature in Seville, I just stopped trying. I basically never watch Youtube so that wasn’t an issue. It was pretty easy, though it would clearly be impossible to traverse a normal working hour in this manner and, as ever, I invoke the “this wouldn’t happen with kids” directive.

The simplicity of it is perhaps best elucidated by the fact this story’s main pain point was temporary confusion regarding the purchase of a spade.

What definitely helped was not reloading Gmail or Outlook on my phone since the previous month. I’d also given Instagram – which I find is up there with mephedrone in its moreishness and the way it makes me unhappy –  a warily wide berth: only downloading it when there was something to post, sticking around for a couple of hours to drink in the disgustomine, then deleting the app again.

I was out of the habit of checking them constantly, always being “on”, claiming that I don’t read my emails in bed when obviously I do. Even during work hours now, even though I have Gmail and Instagram mostly open in a browser, they get randomly checked way less than before. It’s like they’ve been taken off rotation in my mind.
Maybe it’s the combination of these things, the lurching of mood, season or simply the passing of time, but I have noticed that my motivation to be really “online” – other than that which is vocationally necessary – generally has beaten a retreat.

But if I’m not really online (and I think my amount of being online is pretty low compared to many; probably to my career’s detriment) then what am I actually doing? At all?

I generally think these are good healthy questions to ask: at least in the daytime and not the dead of night when they can take on a different tenor. But they have influenced my decision about where to go next with my year of giving up. The answer is obvious, isn’t it?

After decades wrestling with the weird, dread-inducing paradox of agnosticism, I’m going to hunt the original omnipotent. The holy morphine. I’m going back to church.

For sake of clarity, this April I’m giving up agnosticism. If you have any tips on who –or what –might help: hit me. Or, like, pray?

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In the past month, The Loop opened two drop-in drug checking services in Camden and Hackney. They will run fortnightly and, for London – a city famed for policing drugs with a gusto matched by its appetite for taking them – these are unprecedented times.

It builds on the charity’s decade of work at festivals and clubs, and a monthly service operating in Bristol for the past two years. The Home Office-approved service allows users to drop off a controlled substance, from where it will be forensically examined by The Loop’s team of experts (and a very handy spectrometer).

This is then followed by a judgement-free consultation to discuss the substance’s contents and any queries the user may have. Everything is free-of-charge and anonymous.

I’ve used The Loop before — ten years ago, covering the launch of their first drug checking service at Secret Garden Party. It felt surreal to have some actual MDMA checked – smuggled past security in the name of journalism – yet plainly logical.

The launches received a wide press splash but WAYO had a long chat with The Loop’s CEO Katy Porter between the Hackney and Camden launches to get beyond the headlines.

WAYO: Hey Katy. I imagine you get asked this constantly…but how do people using the service know they won’t just get stopped and searched outside by the police?

Katy Porter: It does get asked a lot! No-one should be stopped if they’re just attending the service. There could be other rationale — perhaps there is an arrest warrant for them — but if there wasn’t, I’d be asking any service users to let us know the exact details, the police badge numbers, and we would take that up. This service is about public health. The police are supporting us in that purpose and recognise the value of people accessing the service.

WAYO: Some people might not put much stock in trusting the police — especially communities typically targeted by stop-and-search.

Katy: We have worked over the last couple of years with Avon and Somerset police. We haven’t had an issue to date.

It’s probably a fair point about different members of our communities feeling that they might be treated differently. And that’s about us working harder in terms of reaching out to people who may feel targeted by stop-and-search. So there could be an approach, for instance, where a volunteer meets someone nearby and walks with them into the service.

WAYO: Could a Loop team member take the substance in for someone and then meet them after?

Katy: No. This wouldn’t be working to the legal compliance of our service. They have to come through the door and the intake has to be at that location. That is where the Home Office licence covers us to be in possession of controlled drugs. But finding ways to support people to come through the door is really important.

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WAYO: Your festival drug checking services were open to anyone. But the Bristol service seemed aimed more at people dependent on drugs rather than occasional or recreational users. What was the thinking there?

Katy: As an organisation, we have always stated and continue to state that there should be universal access to drug checking services. This is because we consider any form of drug-taking to come with some degree of risk. The case remains, however, that drug checking services, public-facing — from a UK drug policy and legislative point of view — are to be targeted towards dependent users.

But what has been further reviewed, based on our review and evaluation of our Bristol service, is the thinking about what dependency actually means: what does dependency look like? How do we assess and define dependency?

WAYO: Dependency isn’t binary. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone is taking heroin all day.

Katy: Exactly, and people can go through different stages, and people may at times consider their drug-taking to be more problematic. And this might change and fluctuate.

WAYO: You’re now using a DSM-5 framework to assess that dependency when someone uses the service. Can you explain what this is?

Katy: The DSM-5 is a longstanding recognised assessment and clinical tool, primarily used by the American Psychiatric Association to diagnose mental health disorders.

Within our context, we are using the 11 criteria as a framework to get an indication of an individual’s substance dependency. These criteria – which we talk about as ‘how is it for you’ – range from increasing tolerance, to difficulty in ceasing or limiting use, or possibly more negative effects on work or relationships.

Fulfilling two to three criteria indicates a mild dependency; four to five is moderate; six or more is severe. We want to work with people at all those stages, trying to avoid harms or escalating risk — whether that’s overdose or other related issues.

WAYO: So the idea is to intervene earlier?

Katy: The criteria is not just about the drug itself but also other impacts of drug taking: social, emotional, work life. Why would we wait until people are in worse, or more severe, situations before assisting them to access information and support when they feel they want and need it?

WAYO: Thinking about Camden. The nightclub fabric is nearby. Could you hypothetically advertise there or in other places where people traditionally take drugs, whether recreationally or dependently?

Katy: We’ve been talking to fabric, and as one example of many community partners. It feeds into that question of: “Where do we find the people that use drugs?” So there’s homeless services and hostels, universities. At football. There might be someone using cocaine most weeks following their team who is also having an issue with their intake.

We need to think: “Who would really benefit from using the service?”

WAYO: Most of the people reading this will probably be fairly pro the liberalisation of drug policy. But what would you say to people who argue services like this encourage drug use?

Katy: In our experience, just saying “this substance is harmful and you shouldn’t take it” hasn’t worked. People take drugs in multiple environments — whether that’s festivals, clubs, football stadiums, anywhere. Drugs are in our society and it’s so important to have open conversations, based on accurate information. And that’s when people consider and potentially change their behaviours to reduce risk. Most people don’t want to cause themselves harm.

WAYO: You mentioned football a couple of times. Is that a group you’re particularly interested in reaching?

Katy: The nighttime economy is often stereotyped as the problem. Or festivals. And they can get vilified. And while I’m not seeking to say football stadiums are problematic places, they are an example of other spaces where there is drug use that isn’t just clubs or festivals — where there are people who would benefit from harm reduction information and knowledge of drug impacts.

WAYO: Could someone get their cocaine or ketamine checked for strength with the same level of detail you can with MDMA and pills?

Katy: We can get indicators of strength with cocaine and ketamine. It’s not quite as pinpoint a quantification as MDMA pill strength, but we’re able to get an idea of low, moderate or high strength.

WAYO: What have you been seeing recently?

Katy: The majority of powders are indicated as higher strength. And we hear it often said that drugs aren’t as strong as they used to be. But that just isn’t the case.

People are increasingly getting into difficulties with the drug that they are intending to take, indicating a need to understand dosage and mode of use to reduce risks.

WAYO: I feel that when The Loop started its drug checking service at festivals, attention tended to be focused on adulterants and mis-sold drugs? Certainly in the press.

Katy: Yes, that’s probably fair and perhaps indicative of the drugs market at that time. But our recent data has shown increasing MDMA pill strength [average of 192mg at year end 2025, and variability from 73–335mg in MDMA pills. A typical adult dose is considered to be ~100mg].

The importance of dosage equally applies to MDMA crystal, and why we will talk to people about ‘crush, dab, wait’ as a harm reduction technique to moderate use and reduce harms.

WAYO: Is there not a chance that people in the drugs trade would use this service, then use the results to sell their products?

Katy: We get asked this by both the Home Office and police, and have needed to consider this in our practice. For this reason, we don’t write down the results or text them out. So it’s not possible to use it as a quality assurance service.

WAYO: I think plenty of dealers — or perhaps people buying stuff for friends before a festival — would want to know that a product they’ve bought wasn’t going to hurt anyone.

Katy: We do recognise that it’s often less binary between user and dealer than people think. In all our services we are seeking to have direct contact with as many people as possible who are using drugs.

WAYO: Will people have to prove they are from a particular borough to use the service? Or provide medical history?

Katy: The service is anonymous and confidential. Service users won’t be asked to provide ID, proof of postcode or anything like that. In fact, we might find that someone prefers to use the service in another borough because it feels more anonymised for them.

WAYO: I think lots of people would feel pretty unsure about this process. Can you describe exactly what happens when a person walks through the door?

Katy: Certainly. After an initial chat with our friendly and knowledgeable team, service users can choose to enter a separate room. This contains a secure drop box where the substance is surrendered.

We’ll ask a few brief questions afterwards, mainly about the substance being submitted — whether they’ve taken it before, and how they acquired it. This helps us build a picture of what’s circulating, but also understand the risks and potential harms.

We’ll also ask a small number of questions linked to the DSM-5 framework, to identify any indicators of dependency at any level.

If dependency is indicated, that gives us the green light to provide a direct result on the surrendered substance. It’s then passed to our mobile lab, where chemists carry out a full analysis.

Even when dependency isn’t indicated, should testing flag a significant public health risk — something that might warrant wider alerts or messaging via our social channels — we would share the result, then likely amplify that messaging .

WAYO: What limits are in place on the amount of substances you can have checked — and can you explain a bit more about the consultation?

Katy: People can surrender up to three substances at once, recognising that people may be using more than one substance.

The consultation with The Loop’s healthcare team offers a confidential space to talk through specific drugs, general health, and harm reduction steps. Further support or interventions — such as naloxone provision, or needle and syringe programmes — are always available where people need, and want, them.

Alongside the drug checking itself, which helps us understand the wider drugs market, we’re also keen for people to drop in, ask questions, and find out more. Don’t be shy! It’s a safe, friendly, zero-judgement space, whatever your situation.

WAYO: You’ll now have a service in London every two weeks. What happens if you get wind of something particularly dangerous circulating?

Katy: If there was a spike in overdoses or perhaps a series of incidents within the local area, we could come together with local partners. One response might be to set up an additional drug checking service. That’s invaluable for locals, but also for our wider understanding and intelligence of drug trends and risks.

WAYO: Do you think the different criteria for the London services reflects changing attitudes within drug enforcement?

Katy: We’re in another phase where new and emerging substances are of concern. We have synthetic opioids, which include nitazenes, and now we’re potentially dealing with orphines.

WAYO: Recent research from King’s College London found that nitazene deaths were likely underreported by a third, with record drug deaths overall. So can you be part of a response to that?

Katy: It changes rapidly and isn’t always straightforward in communicating accurate and timely information. I think there is a recognition that the drug market is more complex than we’ve potentially seen in the past. That applies, perhaps, within police and around public health as well. Having intelligence on drugs from police seizures or coroners shouldn’t be seen as sufficient.

We need to be equipped and able to share and convey information: to people at all stages of drug-taking and possible dependency. We’ve got to get upstream of this.

I think, and hope, there’s greater understanding of that.

WAYO: Us too. Good luck, Katy!

The Loop’s next London based drug checking service is Saturday 4th April in Camden. Find the full 2026 calendars: Hackney and Camden.

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This is the third edition of THE BUMP, where we round up the previous month’s news and distorted views from the drugs mediasphere.

The Lancet vs leafie in the weed wars

Medical journal The Lancet invoked the wrath of weed activists and capitalists everywhere by publishing a damning meta-analysis of 54 trials into medical cannabis’ efficacy in treating mental health conditions and substance use disorders (SUDs).

Whilst they found some evidence it could help with symptoms of Tourette’s, insomnia, non-medical weed dependence and some autism traits, the researchers said that, “Given the scarcity of evidence, the routine use of cannabinoids for the treatment of mental disorders and substance use disorders is currently rarely justified.”

Weed is really not my jam. I spent too many teenage years doing homemade bongs in church graveyards and Ford Escorts when I should have been letting my vile little brain develop. Nevertheless, I know people who use medical and black market cannabis to manage symptoms of anxiety, insomnia, pain, or because it makes pyramid conspiracy documentaries seem vaguely plausible.

Liam O’Dowd, editor of leafie, wrote a takedown of The Lancet’s research — the main gist of which is that cannabis is a difficult substance to thoroughly study through randomised controlled trials (RCTs).

These are the so-called “gold standard” of drug trials, which measure a product against a placebo under controlled conditions.

The Lancet article prioritised these studies over real-world evidence (RWE) studies, which are less trial-led and instead comprised of “data collected from patients in actual clinical practice rather than controlled trial conditions”. Liam points to a number of RWE studies that dispute The Lancet’s findings (though, to be fair, this one he mentions twas done by the medical cannabis clinic Alternaleaf).

“RCTs were designed for conventional pharmaceuticals with patent protection, industry funding, and regulatory pathways that incentivise expensive trials,” Liam says. “Medical cannabis doesn’t fit that model. It’s a regulated drug in many countries, creating barriers to research. It can’t be patented in its plant form, removing the commercial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to fund trials. The stigma around cannabis makes institutional funding difficult to secure.”

“The problem isn’t whether cannabis works,” Liam continues. “It’s a treatment that thousands of patients report as beneficial. It remains trapped in a limbo, too hard or expensive to prove with randomised controlled trials, yet dismissed because real-world evidence isn’t good enough.”

👉 Full Lancet paper

👉 And read Liam’s retort

Stone the middle class

Staying with this story: The Guardian’s reporting contained a quote from Sir Robin Murray, a professor of psychiatric research at King’s College London who wasn’t involved in the study. It took a sharper turn and said: “In my view, the UK cannabis clinics operate as drug dealers for the middle class.”

Sorry to point out the obvious, but if we look at official figures, around 2.2 million adults in England and Wales reported using cannabis in the last year. (These numbers are almost certainly undercounted: students in halls, for instance, are not included in this Crime Survey data, nor are people over the age of 59.)

A white paper by Prohibition Partners estimated that around 80,000 UK medical cannabis patients would be registered by 2025.

So, very crudely, somewhere around ~95% of cannabis users are still using the illegal market. I don’t have hard data for this, but I’d wager the boujie edibles sellers on Instagram and Telegram reach far more middle-class users than regulated clinics do. Anecdotally, the people I know that use medical weed are those that need it most: regardless of class.

Murray’s comment felt almost AI-engineered to land with a press increasingly fixated on the drug-taking sins of the chattering classes. The trope of the coke-taking woke is outdated now —Polanski’s crowd are on ket or MCAT — but this type of framing persists. An investigation into drug-dealing gangs published by The Times this week opened with: “Gangs dealing recreational drugs to middle-class users on social media are operating with impunity as the law fails to keep up.”

👉 Read The Guardian’s story

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Psychedelics v SSRIs

Any historically controlled substances batting up against the old bastions of Big Pharma are liable to find these problems — especially with the hype that surrounds nascent medicines still early in their development.

Research released last week found that psychedelics may be no more effective than SSRIs in combating depression. Mattha Busby wrote it up for New Scientist and the research — like The Lancet’s — was a meta-analysis of 24 trials.

“The team found that the traditional antidepressants seemed to outperform PAT [psychedelic assisted therapy] by just 0.3 points on a 52-point depression-rating scale, which is neither statistically nor clinically significant,” Busby writes.

The research analysed both trials focusing on psychedelic-assisted therapy and open-label trials for traditional antidepressants. At the crux is the placebo problem. When someone receives a psychedelic dose, it’s very difficult to blind (i.e. they know they’ve taken a trip).

The article quoted a who’s who of modern psychedelic research cognoscenti, with little consensus being reached on the veracity of the study. “The jury is still out scientifically,” says Dr Rayyan Zafar from Imperial College London, adding that more research is needed that pits psychedelics directly against antidepressants rather than placebo.

👉 Get the full New Scientist story (it’s behind a paywall but there’s ways to get around that - just ask if you don’t know)

Middlesbrough = coke capital of Europe

Wastewater analysis by the European Drug Agency suggested that Middlesbrough’s water has the highest volume of cocaine metabolites in Europe.

Of the places analysed globally, only Whitehorse, the 30,000-person capital of Canada’s Yukon more famed for being a gold rush town than the world’s cocaine capital, was higher.

But why Middlesbrough: a port town of around 150,000 people that’s suffered more than most from deindustrialisation?

Pure speculation, but maybe it’s a socio-geographic blend.

We know that gangs are increasingly targeting smaller or less scrutinised ports to move drugs into Europe. Antwerp (traditionally a major ingress point but now heavily policed) has consistently ranked high in these wastewater charts. Rotterdam too. So maybe routes are shifting, and the Port of Middlesbrough is being used.

Also, the North East has some of the highest levels of drug deaths and social deprivation in the country. So it perhaps stands to reason that there’s more cocaine — possibly in the form of crack, which can’t be distinguished from powder in wastewater data — flowing through these waterways.

👉 EUDA wastewater analysis (if that’s your sort of thing)

Bananas and beak

Related: Border Force made a splash about £75m of cocaine seized in a shipment of bananas at Southampton. It reminded me of excellent VICE piece on why traffickers so often use bananas to transport coke. Like anything he writes it’s definitely worth a read. But if you’re looking for a tl;dr:

1: Bananas and cocaine come from a similar region and are both enjoyed immensely by Europeans.

2: Bananas are perishable and thus move faster through ports

3: The refrigeration equipment used in transporting them makes handy hiding nooks and crannies.

👉 Border Force story

👉 Why cocaine traffickers love bananas

Ella Glover joins WHAT ARE YOU ON

Some in-house news: is now working with WHAT ARE YOU ON.

Ella is a top journo, whether she’s writing features for The Observer or local reporting for The Lead. She’s co-editor of Ordinary Zine and previously wrote a drugs column for Dazed, so is well placed to dig into the powdery corners of this creaking but psychoactive-thirsty land.

She’s also the reason our Instagram carousels finally look good.

Ella has already written some excellent pieces for WAYO — including a recent interview with Giorgia Gaia, an anthropologist mapping ketamine-induced paranormal experiences, which is well worth seven minutes of any earth-bound commute.

👉Enter the Ketaverse