We know that we’ve put a fair amount of focus on the UK clubbing scene with our international news as of late, but with the continued closure of many big UK clubs threatening the scene, in particular the now resolved woes of Fabric we couldn’t help but turn our attention there. More news out of the UK today claims that so-called ‘real’ ecstasy pills are slowly but surely disappearing from British nightclubs.

The curious news comes from a BBC report, which alleges that the authenticity of ecstasy distributed in UK clubs has dropped sharply over the last couple of years to the point where ‘real’ pills have “almost vanished”.

“It’s a huge drop…the pill market has changed and we see very few ecstasy tablets now,” Dean Aimes of the Forensic Science Service said in the piece which claimed that many pills seized by UK authorities were now testing negative for MDMA. “Just 27 batches seized in the first three months of 2010 contained the chemical down from 152 in 2009 and 1046 in 2006.”

So what’s changed? Those interviewed in the BBC report offer a couple of reasons, saying that mephedrone is gaining ground as a drug of choice for British users and also suggesting that laboratories across Europe are having difficulty producing the necessary chemicals.

“It’s relatively simple,” Roumen Sedefov, a spokesman for the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction said. “We have observed a lack of precursors as the basic reason. For years manufacturers were using chemicals from China and now that is more tightly controlled.”
The thusly dubbed ‘ecstasy drought’ in the UK has already hit club-going users, who are reportedly turning more frequently to cocaine because “ecstasy just isn’t available anymore”.

“We’ve just seen this sudden drop. The experience has completely changed in two years,” an unnamed punter explained. “We’ve started wondering what is in the pills because they must have changed something.”