Those who spent the summertime festival hopping and generally rarking up will know all about this. All anyone could talk about was bath salts—bath salts this, bath salts that, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Every single person had a shit yarn about bath salts or knew someone with said shit yarn. No one gives a fuck about your bath salts story. You’re selling in a saturated market environment. Stop it.
I recently wrote a piece about KnowYourStuffNZ. They are a volunteer organisation that performs drug testing at festivals. They are a brilliant service that focuses on keeping people safe through increased awareness and knowledge of what people are taking. They are worth looking at if you haven’t heard of them. You can check them out at www.knowyourstuff.nz.
KnowYourStuffNZ established that over half of what they tested, believed to be MDMA, was Eutylone or other stimulants in the family of Cathinones. These were colloquially being called bath salts. They were also fucking up a lot of people’s holidays and leading to some very, very shit yarns.
However, I didn’t hear a lot about why this was such a ubiquitous phenomenon countrywide. Some have blamed COVID, but I think there is much more to the story than that.
In October of last year, the police made an enormous bust on a drug syndicate in Auckland. They executed 34 search warrants across two days. Police arrested twenty-six people and seized $600,000 in cash, $1.2mil worth of luxury vehicles and motorcycles, numerous guns, high-level manufacturing equipment, and a shit load of Pink Porsche’s. This investigation had been going on for seven months and, no doubt was a massive hit to the supply of MDMA in New Zealand.
Meanwhile, in France, the police seized a shitload of pink powder used to make Haribo’s gummy bears.
The statements of the remaining paragraphs are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. I would guess that whatever small amount of MDMA that was in the hands of the public at that time would have been the last actual gear they have had ever since. The last of the dwindling bulk supply was now in the hands of a few dealers and quickly running out. The Auckland raids effectively halted manufacture. Import was already complex due to COVID; many European exporters began going dark, making it even more difficult. All of a sudden, there was no more gear. What was left was what was left.
Then the festival season approached. Demand was extremely high, and supply near nil. This lack of real MD was where the Cathinones came in to fill the void. The majority of it looks like what your drug fucked mate would call “definitely good gear, bro, brown crystals are the best shit.” Unless you’ve got a good eye for different shades of tan and brown, the stuff looks just like the best shit you’ve ever had, and you should not be taking it. It is very dangerous and should be avoided as much as possible.
Long story short, now is not a time to be buying drugs from anyone. Have a break, have a KitKat. Take some time off the gear.
