Could the Netherlands become the first country to legalise MDMA?

On a dancefloor in Amsterdam in 1984, Dutch DJ Joost van Bellen was told: “You have to try this.” He took a dab of MDMA and, with his curiosity piqued, he soon swallowed an entire pill. Naturally, he had an incredible journey. (Everyone remembers the first time they felt that euphoric rush.) “Everything was like an entirely new experience. We would touch each other; sensations and warmth,” he is quoted as saying in XTC – a Biography, co-written by Wietse Pottjewijd.

The ecstasy scene then took off and the drug was integral to the rise of dance music in the Netherlands in the late-’80s, when the Second Summer of Love was taking the UK by storm with similar movements bubbling across Europe. MDMA, the key ingredient of ecstasy, was inextricably intertwined with the tidal wave of house music which surfed across the Atlantic from the inner cities of the US to Amsterdam, London and Ibiza. Club culture radiated outwards “in an unstoppable supernova of love”, writes DJ and author Bill Brewster.

Curiously, the original purveyors in The Netherlands of the so-called chemical of connection, including the man who gave a first ecstasy high to van Bellen — who brought his first house record the next year and was later a resident DJ at the legendary club, RoXY, that brought the genre to Amsterdam — were followers of the cult leader and tantric guru Osho. Known as sannyasins, they are understood to have brought ecstasy to Europe from the US, where its effects had only recently become known among New Agers. They did a roaring trade.

But as MDMA’s prevalence increased and the house raves got bigger, the yogi sannyasins were supplanted as the prime source of pills by more organised criminals who already controlled the amphetamine market (after first emerging as a force in an illegal post-war cross border butter trade between the Netherlands and Belgium). Those crooks began creating their own Es, known as XTC in The Netherlands. “They didn’t care so much about the quality,” says Pottjewijd. “And so a lot of other things were mixed into those pills and accidents happened.” The business also became increasingly violent as gangs began fighting over the bloating bounty.

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The Second Summer of Love period was also met with a police and media backlash, and MDMA was made illegal, but the Dutch policy of gedoogbeleid (tolerance of drug use) meant that the drug war there has generally been far less intense than in the US, or the UK. People who use drugs have rarely been arrested and are never prosecuted. Fast forward 25 years and with drug-related violence on the rise, amid serious fluctuations in the contents of ecstasy pills, there are growing calls to legally regulate the supply and reinvest the profits into harm reduction services.

A Dutch-government appointed state committee in June presented a report to the medical care minister titled, Beyond Ecstasy, which advocated for the nation’s 400,000 PTSD patients to have access to MDMA-assisted therapy as soon as possible and called on the government to fund high quality research. “There appears to be sufficient scientific evidence for the effectiveness and safety of this form of therapy,” the report said, two months before US regulators would decline to approve MDMA for PTSD, asking for more data and raising issues around the studies. “The government must act expeditiously to enable the therapeutic use of MDMA,” the Dutch report added. Until MDMA-assisted therapy is legalised in the country, the commission recommended the establishment of a large-scale naturalistic study for which the government has already allocated €1.6m.

“This is a significant step, and I hope it will encourage other European countries to explore similar ways to gradually open up access to psychedelics therapies for those who need them most,” says Tadeusz Hawrot, founder and executive director of the non-profit Psychedelic Access and Research European Alliance (PAREA).

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.”

Meanwhile, the prevalence of MDMA use continued to grow. In 1997, survey data suggests about 2% of people in the country had at least once taken a pill. By 2021, this was almost 10%. It is therefore possible that almost two million people in the Netherlands, a country of nearly 18 million, have dropped a pill at least once. Of these, about 150,000 are estimated to have done so in the last month.

The demand, coupled with being close to the source – there are at least a dozen major illegal MDMA production facilities in the Netherlands (far more than neighbouring countries) and almost a billion ecstasy pills are produced annually, according to estimates – means prices are relatively cheap, and the quality is typically the best in Europe. High strength Dutch pills are feted across the continent and a gram of MDMA today costs about €30 in The Netherlands, where a pill will set you back €5.

The scene in The Netherlands is far more user-friendly than in other comparable countries, but there is growing pressure on the authorities to reform and reign in the increasing power of organised crime groups. Not least because of the killing of journalist Peter R de Vries, who was shot in the head four years ago after working as an advisor to a former gang member turned informant who was testifying against the suspected boss of one of the Netherland’s biggest cocaine distributors.

The murder stoked claims that the Netherlands was becoming a narco state. It was just the latest act of savagery in a long line of violence which has shocked the nation to its core. In recent years, a severed head has been left in front of a shisha lounge, while a torture chamber was found in a shipping container.

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“Things have changed in the Netherlands over the last two decades in terms of the production of drugs,” says Daan van der Gouwe, a drug researcher from the Trimbos Institute, which runs drug testing. “Methamphetamine production has really become quite huge; Mexicans flying in teaching the Dutch cooks how to produce it. It's really serious stuff. This, and heroin and crack cocaine, are causing substantial problems. If you’re talking about regulation, why not start with those?”

The issues unique to the illegal MDMA market may not come close to rivalling those of other drugs, but guns have been found by police in MDMA labs and ecstasy tablets have arrived at random homes disguised as sweets after packages went to incorrect addresses. The growing violence seems inextricably interlinked with the growing size of the drug market, of which MDMA is a significant part. The Netherlands has the world’s biggest seaport outside of Asia, in Rotterdam, and there have been record numbers of drug labs and shipments raided by police.

“Whether because of the issues they have with organised crime groups involved in the trade, or their historically pragmatic and progressive approach to drugs policy – the Netherlands is leading the way globally,” adds Rolles, of MDMA policy. “It may not happen in the immediate short term but I think regulated access is a realistic medium term prospect.”

The commission’s report on MDMA is being seen as an endorsement for wider reforms. Cannabis reform also started within a medicalized setting. Just a decade ago, smoking a joint was prohibited in almost every country in the world, but now it is possible in more than a dozen key countries, and counting.

“We wanted to transform the regulation debate from a polarised yes or no discussion to one where we ask, if we would do this, then how,” says Machteld Busz, director of Mainline foundation, a harm reduction organisation which helped set up the pop-up MDMA shop. “And that was really successful.” The incoming new right-wing-led government may have other ideas, but MDMA has already transformed Holland once. Could it do it again?

Mattha Busby is a freelance journalist, follow him on Instagram

Tomi Tomchenko is MIxmag's Junior Designer, follow him on Instagram