The Five Big Drug Trends Defining Summer 2024

Taking drugs in the winter: sitting round in your friend’s cold, dark living room ranting about how much your gas bill was, then shivering as you walk home in the rain to a shower full of mould.

Taking drugs in the summer: glorious weekend-long odysseys across the length and breadth of a city teeming with euphoria, wearing the same shorts and T-shirt three days straight, making new friends, falling in love, generally channeling a Mercutio-meets-Laura Palmer kind of vibe, before waking up Monday feeling nothing but serenity because for some reason the sunshine cures any comedown you can throw at it.

One of those things sounds better than the other. We’ve rounded up this summer’s dominant global drug trends—from the inexorable rise of ketamine, to a new nightmarish synthetic opioid. Stay safe.

For the last few years, ketamine has been riding the crest of a wave. According to wastewater analysis, the popularity of the drug rose in 12 of 15 cities in Eastern and Western Europe from 2022 to 2023. This tallies with the findings of the 2024 World Drugs Report, which reported global seizures of ketamine hitting a record high; East and South-East Asia saw an increase of 70 percent in just one year (more seizures are a reliable indicator of greater production and use).

“There’s no evidence to link the two together, but while the price has dropped significantly in Europe, we’ve also seen an explosion of ketamine production in Myanmar and Cambodia,” says Josh Torrance, a drugs researcher from Bristol University. He says a kilo of ket has reduced from around £8,000 to around £2,500 in the last two years—creating a pocket-friendly price point for the planet’s abyss-seekers. “The price of everything else has risen but drugs have gotten cheaper,” he adds.

While everyone’s favourite dissociative anaesthetic seems like the perfect drug for an insular generation growing up in the cash-strapped wake of COVID-19, Torrance worries about the ramifications of this: “There comes a point where a drug becomes so cheap that so many more people will pick it up. I’m really worried about young people—about going into the next decade and it affecting their wellbeing through addiction.”

In the 2020s, a new synthetic cathinone known as 3-MMC emerged in venues and communities operating at the fringes of global nightlife. The drug was quickly pegged as a seasoned raver’s best friend: a structural analog of mephedrone (4-MMC) that was designed to mimic its MDMA-mixed-with-cocaine qualities, providing the user with a hit of euphoria that had real staying power. Prior to this, it was best known in the UK as an adulterant in post-lockdown MDMA (synthetic cathinones like 3-MMC were present in over 20 percent of samples tested by The Loop at festivals).

The World Drug Report writes that 3-MMC and its brother and sister compounds have traditionally been favoured most in Central Asia, as well as Transcaucasia and Eastern Europe: “The past decade has seen a gradual shift in these regions… towards the use of synthetic stimulants, notably cathinones.” This was aided by the growth of the Russian-language darkweb drugs market, Hydra—defunct since 2022—where cathinones were hugely popular.

Moved to Europe’s schedule of controlled substances in 2022, 3-MMC has nevertheless retained its place on the menus of more expansive dealers and also found a home in chemsex scenes the world over—though it seems to circulate among an older contingent, as a small-scale French study from 2023 found the average user to be 40 years old.

Cocaine and MDMA have been cornerstones of rave and party culture since your dad was at school. The former is enjoying a prolonged boom across much of the planet with the quantities consumed—according to wastewater samples—increasing by 80 percent in cities in Western, Central, and South-Eastern Europe since 2011. (Concurrently, the American market seems to be contracting, with a 50 percent reduction in treatment demand between 2011 and 2021.)

“While the price of cocaine at retail level has remained stable over the past decade, cocaine purity has been on an upward trend, and in 2022 reached a level 45 percent higher than the index year of 2012,” writes the European Union Drug Agency’s European Drug Report 2024. This has enabled it to evolve, away from the preserve of rockstars and bankers, into the value-for-money people’s powder most of us see in action at pubs, bars, venues, and house parties each weekend.

Meanwhile, recent testing by the UK-based drug-checking service The Loop has found that the average pill strength there is now 181mg (a “common” adult dose is considered to be between 75mg and 125mg), after a brief reduction in purity during the pandemic. The proportion of super strength pills—one in ten were tested at 250mg or above—is a concern, with The Loop warning of the risks being “heightened for young people, many of whom will have come of age and only started going out and taking ecstasy pills during this post-pandemic period of lower strength pills.”

THC vapes first arrived on the American market around 2019 before working their way to Europe. They come either as e-liquid vape cartridges or disposables.

“They are massive in a way they haven’t really been before,” says Torrance, who adds that the biggest concerns with the liquids is ‘spice': an umbrella term for the galaxy of highly potent synthetic cannabinoids that bear little resemblance to the weed experience they are supposedly replicating.

In an article for The Face, journalist Simon Doherty analysed the 120 samples of THC vapes sent to the Wales-based drug testing service Wedinos in 2022. Only 35 of the samples actually contained THC, with 16 containing no active ingredient. “The rest contained an alphabet soup of random chemicals,” Doherty writes. In the most extreme and scary cases, these random chemicals have shown up on tests as nitazenes—the synthetic opioid said to be 500 times the strength of fentanyl.

When it comes to the disposables, Torrance says that much of the potential for harm stems from the fertilisers and pesticides used to grow the weed in the distillate—which may not be bound by regulation—getting into the juice. “Vapes are popular for being out and about—you can just puff it in a toilet cubicle and no-one knows,” says Torrance. “My advice would be to stay away from those pens because they’re not safe.”

In America, over 74,000 people died of a synthetic opioid-related overdose in 2022 alone.

While a far more pressing concern for heroin users, we’ve recently seen nitazenes—a super-strength opioid that can be even more dangerous than fentanyl—emerge into the fringes of the recreational party drugs landscape. A batch of ecstasy pills circulating at Sydney’s HTID festival were found to contain them, while they have been reportedly found in English ketamine.

These drugs carry more deadly potential into the illegal market for prescription drugs, as users try to wind down after a sesh or self-medicate mental health conditions. Wedinos, as recently as June 10th, found traces of metonzitazene (a type of nitazenes) in a sample of diazepam.

How can you steer clear? Much depends on whether you get your diazepam from a street dealer or online—perhaps via Telegram or the darkweb. “At the moment it would be more dangerous to buy offline than online because there’s an online feedback loop that means shit drugs won’t sell,” Torrance says. “I wouldn’t recommend buying valium [diazepam] face-to-face right now.”

@dhillierwrites