OK, I have friends of friends who say they take 'MDMA' on a Saturday night out. Is it really pure MDMA, or is it just what we would have called Ecstasy in the past?
To be honest, the only way to truly know if one is taking pure MDMA is to run a fairly expensive test (along the lines of GCMS, NMR, or many of the other qualitative analysis).
Reagent tests ala what Dancesafe sells are great harm reduction, if the pill fails the test, the pill certainly has 0% MDMA. However, they will not be able to identify that you are taking pure MDMA. I imagine any MDMA+other substance mixture will flag positive. In addition there are probably a few non-MDMA substances that will false-positive that reagent test.
There's an organization out there (https://www.ecstasydata.org/) that does GCMS analysis of pills, the data on what they find (in terms of ratio of substances) is public. So if you want a bit of a sampling of what type of things get sold as "molly" / "ecstasy" you can look there.
Absolutely. I did not mean to imply that the results are lab grade quality.
To clarify, by "pure MDMA", I did not mean that the substance is 100℅ pure MDMA, but rather that it does not contain other active adulterants.
With reagent tests you can be reasonably sure that a given pill does or does not (most likely) contain only MDMA and (most likely) contain no other (common) adulterants.
If you want to be sure on the actual amount of MDMA and be absolutely certain it contains nothing else, then you absolutely need a lab test.
Agreed- I've known people to send off samples for GCMS and have a pretty good idea then of what they've got in their hands. It costs money, but if you're worried about safety it is possible.
(GCMS doesn't actually cost much to run, places just charge a lot for it.)
This is incredibly naive. You are much better off testing any substance you put into your body. Whether you test it yourself, or can confirm that a trusted party has tested it.
What if your reliable supplier was sold cyanide from an unreliable supplier? Better one of you is wise enough to test it.
True in the sense that pure MDMA cannot be pressed into a solid tablet alone. It needs to be mixed with fillers/binders to be pressed into a pill and stick together.
However, you can find Ecstasy pills that contain nothing but MDMA and inactive fillers/binders.