MDMA purity drops to 15% in 2009, rises to 74% by 2023, study finds

A new study from Georgia State University, published in the journal Drug and alcohol addictionshows that there are problems with misrepresentation of MDMA in unregulated markets in the United States, although there have been improvements in recent years.

MDMA, often called “ecstasy.”

The research analyzed 4,719 suspected MDMA samples submitted to the drugs monitoring service DrugsData, with the aim of understanding how often the drug is misrepresented and identifying trends in its purity over time.

The findings reveal that 75% of the samples were expected to contain only MDMA, but only 48% did. “MDMA-only prevalence decreased between 1999 and 2009 (from 57.4% to 15.2%), recovered between 2009 and 2017 (from 15.2% to 56.0%), and is increasing more moderately between 2017 and 2023 (from 56.0% to 74.1%), says the study.

In total, 199 unique adulterants were detected in the 25-year supply of MDMA.

“We confirmed strong correlations in adulterant prevalence trends between drug screening and law enforcement seizure data,” state the study’s researchers. “Although users typically expected alleged MDMA samples to contain only MDMA, more than half of the submitted MDMA samples were misrepresented in some way. Despite the high levels of misrepresentation, the quality of the MDMA s ‘has stabilized at relatively high levels in recent years’.

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