Border seizures of toxic designer drug on rise
Eutylone, a synthetic cathinone, has contributed to a number of hospitalisations around the country.
Seizures at the border of a ‘‘dangerous’’ drug frequently sold as MDMA have rocketed in the past two years.
Between 2015 and 2018 Customs reported no seizures of eutylone, a type of synthetic cathinone that often mimics the effects and looks similar to MDMA.
However, from March 2019 until December last year, 13.6 kilograms of the drug has been seized at the border, from 16 different shipments, arriving from China, Hong Kong, Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
The 2020-21 festival season was dubbed the ‘‘summer of cathinones’’ by drug-testing agency Know Your Stuff NZ, with director Wendy Allison saying its testing results aligned with Customs data.
The stimulant takes longer to kick in, meaning a user can take more before they’re aware of the effects, and end up overdosing.
It has contributed to a number of hospitalisations around the country, with users reporting a range of symptoms including shaking, vomiting, paranoia, panic attacks, hallucinations, seizures and anxiety.
With little international research available on the drug, Allison said almost everything they know about it had been told to them by users.
‘‘We’ve had people describing physical symptoms up to 10 days later, like nausea and insomnia and occasionally seizures,’’ she said.
National Drug Intelligence Bureau manager Detective Inspector Blair Macdonald said synthetic cathinones typically followed the pattern of a two-year life cycle in New Zealand’s domestic market.
Before eutylone, it was N-Ethylpentylone, also known as ‘‘brown sugar’’, which was linked to 151 overdose deaths between 2015 and 2018 in the United States.
Over the past five years, about 40 types of synthetic cathinones had been identified within New Zealand, about a quarter of the 160 identified internationally by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Macdonald said there had always been a market in New Zealand for designer drugs that mimicked the effects of other drugs, but the development of technology in the past five years, new dark web websites and young people being more tech-savvy meant they were more accessible.
For organised crime groups, importing and selling synthetic cathinones could be more appealing than normal MDMA as it was cheaper and provided less risk, he said.
‘‘You could argue there’s good reason for that when you think about the price per kilogram being cheaper than MDMA, as well as the criminal penalties for importing for sale and supply for cathinones, which are a class C substance compared to MDMA, which is class B,’’ he said.
Macdonald said provisional drug testing data from last summer showed about 37 per cent of what was being presented to them as MDMA was synthetic cathinones, which contained zero MDMA.
‘‘That’s a significant departure when we compare it with the results from last year, where 90 per cent or higher contained MDMA.’’
Allison said the agency, which has operated since 2015, found its first sample of eutylone at a New Year’s event in 2018-19. By December last year, the agency was seeing it in significant amounts.
Allison believes the cathinones being found now are more toxic to the average user and cause more harm than previous ones discovered.
‘‘Because those early cathinones were made illegal, chemists started tweaking those molecules and coming up with substance after substance with just slight changes. It’s slowly creeping away from anything that resembles the drugs that they’re seeking the effects of and into what is basically unknown territory.’’
She said the testing numbers from last summer were ‘‘alarming’’ and at some events more than 50 per cent of samples tested were eutylone.
Customs spokesman Mark O’Toole said eutylone was most commonly intercepted in international mail.
Technology introduced at the border in July 2019 had allowed for the rapid identification of eutylone and other cathinone substances.
Customs group manager Dana McDonald said a number of the recent seizures had been linked to a joint operation with police, Operation Skipjack.
During a raid at a Wellington property in November, police seized 400 litres of gamma-Butyrolactone (GBL) and 20kg of eutylone.
Two men are facing charges relating to drug importation and supply.