A RECENT SPATE OF DEATHS AMONG BRITISH USERS OF THE PARTY DRUG ECSTASY CAN BE TRACED BACK TO THE CAMBODIAN RAINFOREST. HERE ILLEGAL LOGGING HAS LEFT THE TREE THAT IS THE SOURCE OF ITS KEY INGREDIENT ON THE ENDANGERED LIST, AND DRUG GANGS HAVE TAKEN TO E

New Year’s Day 2015. In an Ipswich fat a young woman pressed her palms to the chest of her comatose boyfriend and desperately pumped. On a cofee table strewn with beer cans were a few pills in a tiny plastic bag. They were red, triangular and stamped with Superman’s S symbol. The woman’s mobile phone lay dashed to the foor. The last dialled number was 999.

Paramedics pronounced Gediminas Kulokas, a Lithuanian labourer, dead at the scene. ‘Superman’ pills killed three more men in Britain that day. They had all been duped. They thought they were buying MDMA – the drug known as ecstasy. Instead they were sold the toxic imposter chemical PMMA. ‘There has been an increase in ecstasy pills containing signifcant quantities of PMMA,’ says Harry Shapiro, the director of communications for DrugScope, a charity providing independent information on drug issues. ‘It caused not only the [four deaths over New Year] but clusters of deaths throughout Europe over previous years.’

PMMA (and its sister drug PMA) plays havoc with the brain, according to the former government drug tsar David Nutt. ‘At high doses these drugs release serotonin [the neurotransmitter associated with ecstasy’s euphoria] but, unlike MDMA, they prevent the brain from breaking it down.’ Victims overdose on their own feel-good chemicals – expiring from stroke, aneurism or cardiac arrest.

The reason for the rise of PMMA can be traced back to Cambodia, to the Cardamom Mountains, to be precise. A remote and dense jungle, it is one of the last old-growth rainforests in Southeast Asia. Until recently it was home to the remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, whose landmines made it terra incognita for even the most intrepid botanists.

Deep in the Cardamom jungles, in the province of Koh Kong, the Honda moped I am travelling on makes a grinding, squealing noise as it is driven up a steep footpath. Its driver’s AK-47 jabs my knee painfully. He is Thet Sarean, a law enforcement ofcer for the NGO Wildlife Alliance. Walls of green speed past until we leave the footpath, carving a route through the undergrowth, fording streams and