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Pills seized by police during Operation Ark - Source: ONE News
Auckland's illicit drug market had been flooded with ecstasy before police smashed a major syndicate last week, a drug expert says.
And Massey University's Dr Chris Wilkins says many of the drug's ingredients have not been tested on humans and there is no way to know whether they're safe.
Police arrested 22 people and seized millions of dollars worth of assets after raiding 45 Auckland properties last week.
The raids ended a year-long investigation into a group they believe controlled up to 90 per cent of Auckland's ecstasy trade.
The group is allegedly responsible for the toxic pills that prompted seizures and hallucinations and left users aggressive and agitated. About a dozen users were admitted to Middlemore Hospital recently after taking the drug.
Police were alarmed to discover many of the pills were made from a mix of compounds that could be fatal if consumed. The drugs were made alongside rat poison at one of the properties.
Wilkins, from the university's centre for social and health research and evaluation, said today their research showed a spike in the availability of the drug in Auckland at the end of last year.
"We did find signs that the Auckland ecstasy market appeared to have grown quite a bit," he said.
The price dropped from about $51 to $41, "so there was a big increase in the number of respondents who were buying ecstasy weekly or more often [and] a big jump in Auckland", he said.
Police said last week the pills were being sold for around $40. The syndicate was allegedly producing tens of thousands of the pills every week, importing the raw ingredients from overseas.
However, few of the pills contained MDMA - ecstasy's active ingredient - but were made using substitutes, or cathinones, due to extensive restrictions on MDMA precursors and the difficulty in making it.
"So that opens up opportunities for people in Southeast Asia to make it whereas previously MDMA was mostly made in the Netherlands," Wilkins said.
"The danger for users is that they don't know what they're getting and most of these cathinones are untested for humans and some people have quite serious reactions to them. But also sometimes the actual cathinones aren't particularly good for human consumption anyway."
Last week the officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Inspector Bruce Good, outlined similar concerns.
"Those who've been manufacturing such pills have regularly modified the molecular structure of various compounds and, by so doing, created dangerous substances that have been sold as ecstasy," he said.
"My advice to anyone considering buying or consuming what they think is ecstasy is don't do it."
All of the alleged syndicate are before the courts facing charges including manufacturing and supplying ecstasy, supplying methamphetamine and money laundering.
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