Ecstasy labs find help smuggling ingredients

FACTORY owners are more than willing to coach buyers of chemicals used to make the party drug MDMA on how to smuggle the chemicals from China to Australia.

It took less than 15 minutes for The Ripple Effect to find comments online that would send hundreds of kilos of PMK Glycidate, a base ingredient for MDMA, to Australia.

“Don’t worry, we sent 1000(kg) PMK to your country in the last month,” one agent from a factory in Hebei, northern China, said. “We can offer other product names to Customs. We can send you within one to two working days … and it is not illegal.”

But PMK Glycidate is illegal, except for a narrow field of scientists with permits. Another agent in Guangzhou offered to pack the chemicals and label them as lollies.

“If you change the name, the Customs will not check it. If you feel this is a sensitive product we can also change it to candy packaging,” they said.

“Then slow down the delivery, will not be Customs seizure.”

For these Chinese chemical giants, it is a game of risk versus reward and at $260 a kilo, the rewards on PMK Glycidate are extreme. As for the risk, that’s on the buyer, who must navigate border authorities, intelligence agencies and face the prospect of jail time to take delivery of the shipment.

But the Australian market for imported MDMA precursors is fairly limited compared to the MDMA manufacturing superpowers of The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

Most MDMA (ecstasy) in Australian clubs, pubs and music festivals arrives here pre-made from those European countries.

Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission Head of High Risk and Emerging Drugs Determination Shane Neilson said transnational crime groups fuelled the demand for MDMA precursors.

“As a business model, they need to obtain the chemicals in bulk, almost certainly from China,” Mr Neilson said.

“That’s the starting point. They go from there to Europe, either legally or illegally depending on the chemical.

“There then needs to be … a large manufacturing site with a specialised drug cook.”

The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction said drug cooks were so careful not to waste precursors that leftovers were rarely seized in police raids.

“The fact that no excess precursors are seized ... suggests that the exact volumes of precursors required are provided ‘on demand’ for each production batch,” it said.