The Dutch committee concluded that MDMA is “relatively safe”, with rates of addiction, long-term health damage and death extremely low. But DJ van Bellen has sworn off drugs, including ecstasy. “When you use drugs, for example ecstasy, a huge amount of serotonin is released,” he told Playboy. “That makes you feel free, happy and exuberant. But at a certain point that supply runs out and then you get a big dip. That’s called Suicide Tuesday , the hole you fall into a few days after a weekend of partying. Then you feel so terrible. I can’t imagine experiencing that again.”
It appears he may have mixed MDMA with other drugs, and alcohol, helping spur troubling thoughts which some study participants have also experienced, but the Dutch committee remains open to legalisation in principle. The illegal trade is muddying the water, though. “We are not against regulation, but you should try to enforce that through international organisations such as the United Nations or the European Union,” state commission chair Brigit Toebes told de Volkskrant.
“We are convinced that from a medical standpoint, MDMA can be given ‘soft drug’ status,” Toebes tells Mixmag. “In some countries and states, such a status would make it eligible for regulation.” But given the enormous amount of MDMA produced by criminal networks for export, the committee called for the drug’s “hard drug” status to remain, so that criminals can be more easily prosecuted. Still, the country, long a liberal mecca for drug consumption, has “effective” harm reduction policies regarding MDMA, including “numerous” drug testing locations, she adds.
“It’s very welcome to see a serious debate on MDMA regulation opening up in real world political forums,” says Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at Transform Drug Policy Foundation. “A pragmatic reform position is now advocated by mayors, academics, police, civil society, and crucially – Dutch political parties.”
Rolles’ book, How To Regulate Stimulants, inspired activists to set up a mock recreational MDMA shop in Utrecht, in the centre of the country, in 2022. The shop, visited by some 1,500 people from mid-July until late September that year, while it was open, sought to generate debate over three different approaches to the legal regulation of MDMA.
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In the utopian vision conjured within the shop’s escapist enclave, ecstasy could either be sold as part of “a low threshold nightclub retail model, a more regulated pharmacy-esque model, or a “smart shop” model somewhere between the two.” Former health minister Ernst Kuipers, whose D66 party has called for legal alternatives to drug prohibition to be taken seriously, visited the shop after he personally accepted a report entitled Therapeutic applications of psychedelics at a university event. In October this year, the shop reopened – with Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema, who said earlier this year that wholesale drug legalisation is inevitable – in attendance.
The pernicious criminal trade behind the millions of euphoric highs complicates matters for policymakers, as the commission highlighted. “The illegal profits from the [ecstasy] trade are associated with large-scale tax evasion and are said to fuel corruption in police, municipalities and other government agencies,” a report by Poppi Drugs Museum and academics at Utrecht university surmising the impact of the shop says. There are also concerns about “ordinary” citizens being recruited to produce and sell ecstasy, as well as environmental issues resulting from forcing the trade underground into makeshift labs, whose owners dump chemical waste in waterways and manure, leading to traces of ecstasy showing up in corn.
“In remote areas, for example, it is quite common to be asked to make a shed or warehouse available for the illegal production of MDMA,” the report adds. “Paradoxically, the fight against the supply side of the MDMA market seems to have the unintended consequence of increasing organised crime.” The concern is an overarching theme of the war on drugs and experts have said that regressive policies cause gangs to fragment and contribute to increased violence.
Still, police officers in the land of gabber towards the end of the last century were generally not concerned by the dealing of MDMA, nor its use, according to Pottjewijd. “The new wave of optimism made everything less extreme, less politicised,” he writes in XTC. “While the punk movement had been singing ‘no future,’ there was an actual future now, and more importantly: a self-made one.” A raver said of dancing on MDMA: “I feel more liberated and uninhibited. I feel less ashamed than I used to.”
Rotterdam-based DJ Jurgen Bouman says that some afterparties ban the use of cocaine. It does not always make for the best vibe: Half of attendees disconnecting with coke, and the rest ascending with MDMA. “It opens up people’s feelings,” he says of MDMA. “People can talk more about their problems. Normally, if you talk about the past you will scratch open wounds, but with MDMA it comes from a higher perspective.”
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So too, it seems, have some of The Netherland’s policies. The country pioneered the use of pill testing services to reduce the risk of people ingesting dangerous adulterants. A trailblazing project called “Just Say Know” (an inversion of the “Just Say No” US campaign) was formalised fully above board in 1992, with five testing centres in Amsterdam alone. Head shops and coffee shops serviced much of the demand for cannabis and certain psychedelics, including psilocybin mushrooms and truffles, and a natural form of LSD. And consternation remained focused on heroin and cocaine.
But in 1995, the high-profile death of 18-year-old Leah Betts in the UK, after she allegedly drank too much water after taking a pill, spawned the beginning of a controversial anti-drugs campaign. The changing of the mood music, at least in popular discourse, on the other side of the North Sea signalled a further shift to come in the Netherlands.
The same year, Dutch authorities seized such large amounts of the precursor chemicals used to create MDMA that pill makers began using more dangerous substances. “The effect was that the market quality of pills was going up and down,” Janhuib Blans, then head of harm reduction charity Jellinek’s prevention programs, told local media. “People were so unsure of what they were buying that they moved to the next [drug], cocaine. In terms of health and prevention, the move from ecstasy to cocaine is not a happy one.”