On October 14th, news crews gathered outside a red brick building in Westerpark, Amsterdam to mark the re-opening of the world’s first MDMA dispensary.
“The war on drugs has had a huge impact on this city,” deputy mayor Alexander Scholtes told the cameras.
“Look, drug use has always been an issue and it certainly has risks. But that is exactly why we should no longer leave drugs to criminals.”
Inside, the shop was divided in two. One side was garish and flamboyant, with vending machines looking like candy dispensers offering brightly-coloured pills stamped with logos such as Netflix, The Punisher and the face of Donald Trump. On the other side was a more bland, pharmaceutical setting, where a chemist in a lab coat attended to customers.
“First the visitor has to answer a set of questions before they get their personal XTC prescription,” explained Guido van Diepen, the man in the lab coat.
“Have you used before, and if yes, when was the last time? Because of possible built-up tolerance. Other questions are do you have a family history of mental illness, and would you mind notifying your healthcare provider? We ask them to step on the scale to measure their weight to advice on their dosage, then they get a sticker with their personal details, risk profile and advised dosage and go to the smart shop [the brightly-coloured area] where they will get asked for their ID, and will have to pass an alcohol breathalyser test. If they are over 18 and haven’t drank alcohol, they receive a coin.”
After inserting the coin into one of the vending machines, electro music starts bumping through the speakers and there’s a small laser show before you’re presented with a couple of pills along with a small leaflet of medical advice.
No, Holland has not legalised ecstasy… at least, not yet. Instead, the XTC-shop is an art installation imagining how such a place could realistically operate, if and when the day comes.
“The ecstasy itself is fake, it’s candy,” Guido admitted.
“A lot of visitors came in the XTC-shop out of interest. They saw it in the news or heard about it. We had a couple of parents who were interested in ecstasy itself, and would like to know more about the effect and risks, but also several people came in to talk about regulation. Usually the discussions go very respectfully and nuanced.”
This comes as the prohibition of MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, the active ingredient in ecstasy) is steadily being questioned, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere. An official government report released in May recommended revising MDMA’s position in the Dutch narcotics laws, a position echoed by Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema (although paradoxically, Halsema has attempted a harder line towards the city’s famous coffeeshops).
Spearheaded by MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) in the States, and MMA (MIND Medicine Australia) down under, in the past several years there’s been a growing movement to legalise Mandy for medical reasons. As anyone who’s spent the night swallowing more pills than Pacman at an abandoned warehouse knows, ecstasy lets you open up in ways you’d never even imagine if you were sober, so you can imagine how it might be useful for psychiatrists. Last year, MDMA and psilocybin-enhanced therapy for treating trauma was given the go-ahead in Australia, although the hefty $24,000-a-course price tag is more than most Aussies can afford.
To a limited degree, since 2014 MDMA, LSD, and shrooms-assisted therapy have been allowed in Switzerland as well.
I do think the debate about regulation – also for recreational users – is becoming more mainstream and more people are opening up to this idea. Let’s say it will take between 10 and 20 years before MDMA is regulated
But in America, MAPS founder Rick Doblin has always been open about medicine being the backdoor to full legalisation, the same way “medical” marijuana paved the way for cannabis to become an everyday consumer good across America. However, this summer the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took issues with the rigour of MAPS’ experimentation, and the programme has been shelved pending new studies. Doblin has resigned from his position on MAPS’ leadership board. Still, the promise and momentum of MAPS’ studies is difficult to ignore.
“The introduction of MDMA in therapeutic settings is likely to happen, but only under a research umbrella for now,” said Machteld ‘Mac’ Busz, director of the Dutch drug charity Mainline which is behind the XTC-shop.
“I do think the debate about regulation – also for recreational users – is becoming more mainstream and more people are opening up to this idea. Let’s say it will take between 10 and 20 years before MDMA is regulated.”
MDMA – A Dutch love affair
It’s a particularly pressing topic in the Netherlands, the world’s foremost ecstasy exporter. The drug first arrived here in the late ‘80s, possibly introduced by the followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the food-poisoning fanatics from Netflix’s Wild Wild Country. At first, the pills were mainly imported from the United States, but it didn’t take long before Dutch crooks began cashing in themselves. Drugs drew far less heat than bank robberies and burglaries, and they already had experience making amphetamines, which were legal in Holland until 1972. Raw materials could be imported through Rotterdam and Schiphol airports, and the existing chemical industry.
It didn’t initially cause too much concern, until in 1988 the police got word that a major shipment of PMK, a chemical whose only real use is manufacturing ecstasy, was on its way to a gang of known speed cooks. MDMA was hastily added to the Opium Act in October that year. By January, the cops made their first ecstasy bust: a makeshift lab run by an American at a tourist campsite. The Yank heard MDMA makes you terribly horny and thought if you could rub it into your nether regions, you would have godly sex – he was trying to create ecstasy-infused condoms. The defendant walked free on the grounds that he didn’t know MDMA was already illegal.
Back at the XTC-shop, a photo gallery of drug labs is displayed along the wall. Whether you’re at Burning Man or Ibiza, clandestine chemists in the rural south of the Netherlands, along the Belgian border, are the chief craftsmen behind these tiny capsules of artificial happiness. In the early 2020s, “purple molly” began appearing across America and Canada, name-dropped in rap songs. Redditors described it as a pure, easy come-up although with a “speedy” edge. So what was it? Nothing special – your baggie either contains MDMA or it doesn’t; most samples analysed did.
“The scheme was this,” relayed a source in the Amsterdam underworld. “We dissolved it in bottles of red wine; one kilo [of MDMA] took up roughly three bottles. Then we sent it over the post to America. And it was extracted in the most elementary fashion: you pour it out onto a flat sort of tray, and after two or three days it completely dries out and it’s still pretty clean [pure], but has a pinkish tint. We called it pink flamingos. And that’s how I survived the pandemic. But now you can’t do it anymore. If you want to post any package to the States you’ve got to fill out this form that logs your IP address. Holland is a red-flagged country. Well, that’s the nature of the game: they find something, and you’ve got to think of another way.”
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MDMA on its own isn’t particularly dangerous, although with the black market, you never know what you’re getting. It’s not in dealers’ interests to poison their customers, but sometimes their chemists must make do with the ingredients at hand. Remember all those old crusties lecturing you how ecstasy was sooooooo much better back in the day? Yeah, whatever gramps. But they may have been right, at least in the late 2000s.
One of the crucial components was safrole oil, sourced from trees deep in the jungles of Cambodia. In 2008 Cambodia’s finest managed to bust over a thousand drums of safrole oil, enough to inflict a worldwide ecstasy drought. A rare win in the war on drugs? Debateable. The chemists switched to making PMA instead, causing hundreds of deaths. You see, PMA takes longer to kick in than MDMA and, thinking nothing’s happening, you down another pill in case the first one’s a dud. Then it all kicks in at once, potentially gifting you serotonin syndrome, lethally high blood pressure, and hypothermia. Luckily, dodgy Chinese chemical firms stepped in to provide alternatives and the pills came back purer than ever before.
Since most ecstasy in Holland is sourced straight from the lab, and the government provides free drug testing, quality control isn’t a huge problem any more. Instead, the greatest fear in the Netherlands is organised crime, particularly after the recent gangland assassinations of a famous journalist and crown witness’ lawyer, leading some commentators to brand the land of windmills a “narco-state”. Most of that can be blamed on coke-dealing, trigger-happy Moroccan mobsters, while the ecstasy business remains relatively peaceful. But since the industry is completely unregulated, that comes with its own problems. Biker gangs intimidate farmers to let them use their barns as a cook site. Barrels of toxic leftovers from the process are dumped in the countryside, polluting the water and soil. And in January 2024, three Rotterdam residents died when a drug lab in their building exploded.
By now, at least a tenth of the Dutch population have tried MDMA, and the debate there over ecstasy is probably more progressed in the Netherlands than anywhere else. The D66 party, to whom Scholtes belongs, and the Greens both boast reform on their agenda. But for now, Amsterdam’s XTC-shop is a tantalising glimpse into the future.
