How ecstasy-related deaths in Britain can be traced to illegal logging in Cambodia

Twenty years after the shocking death of Leah Betts, a trail has emerged linking the killer party drug ecstasy back to the Cambodian rainforest

Some 120,000 "superman" ecstasy tablets were seized in Dublin in December 2014 Photo: Newsteam

By Nathan A Thompson

The Telegraph | 21 Nov 2015

New Year’s Day 2015. In an Ipswich flat a young woman pressed her palms to the chest of her comatose boyfriend and desperately pumped. On a coffee 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 floor. 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 significant 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.’ 

'These drugs release serotonin but prevent the brain from breaking it down. Victims overdose on their own feel-good chemicals' 

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 officer for the NGO Wildlife Alliance. 

A Wildlife Alliance ranger examines the burnt remains of a rare mreas prov tree, destroyed by illegal loggers in pursuit of the safrole oil it contains  Photo: Hannah Reyes

Walls of green speed past until we leave the footpath, carving a route through the undergrowth, fording streams and tearing up rocky slopes at terrifying angles. The bike comes to a stop. There they are: thick, solemn and toweringly tall, the mreas prov trees that are a rare source of MDMA. 

Mreas prov (pronounced ‘mar-ee pro’) have no English name; experts guess they are Cinnamomum parthenoxylon. They contain an oil rich in a chemical called safrole. In its pure form, safrole is a key ingredient, or ‘precursor’, of ecstasy. According to Tom Blickman, a drugs researcher at the Transnational Institute, there are four principal precursors in the manufacture of ecstasy. ‘Safrole is the key starting material in so far as the other three can be synthesised from it,’ he says. 

The oil from the mreas prov contains 70-80 per cent safrole. It can be extracted from the trunk and branches, but fresh roots provide the biggest yield. ‘Illegal loggers boil up the roots and distil the vapours to make safrole oil,’ Sarean says. ‘Any part of the tree not used for oil is sold on the black market to luxury wood dealers.’ 

There are no figures on the number of mreas prov trees in Cambodia. ‘Our experts are not aware of any surveys on Cinnamomum parthenoxylon in the Cardamom Mountains,’ says Olivia Nater of the International Union for Conserv­ation of Nature. But according to Sarean, who has patrolled these forests for 20 years, they are increasingly rare and inaccessible: ‘When illegal loggers come, they have to walk for two days into the forest to find them.’ 

In Pursat, a dusty town not far from the forest, a shop owner points to a large carving of Hotei (a Chinese god of good fortune wrongly referred to as the Laughing Buddha). ‘This is carved from mreas prov,’ he says through a translator. ‘You want to buy it? Only $250.’ He flashes a gold-toothed grin. ‘Smell it.’ The wood has a sweet aniseed fragrance. 

He disappears into a back room and emerges with a plastic bottle filled with a light yellow liquid – safrole oil. ‘This is very good, it has many health benefits, and it can heal…’ He mimes rubbing it on to a scab. ‘Or it’s good for massage – only $30 a litre.’ He holds it up to the light: enough safrole oil to make 10,000 hits of MDMA.

 

He says the oil comes from a contact in Veal Veng, a desperate town that is a hub for illegal forest products, from endangered animals to rare wood. When I ask if he is aware that possession of safrole oil carries a jail sentence, he smiles in the way that Cambodians do when they could lose face. ‘He can sell it because he has government connections,’ my fixer explains later. 

Safrole oil flows through channels carved by corruption. ‘Officials take bribes in exchange for allowing contraband products to pass on to the black market,’ says an anonymous source who has worked in law enforcement in the Cardamom Mountains. No one knows if the current supply of safrole oil is fresh or from stockpiles from the heyday of production in the 2000s. But researching the industry is made doubly difficult by the leak this year of a list of 49 officials who were accepting bribes in exchange for allowing a consignment of wood including mreas prov to travel to the capital, Phnom Penh. 

‘One can extract chemicals from wood chips wherever you might decide to truck them,’ says Andrew McDonald, a consultant botanist for conservation programmes in Cambodia. ‘Also consider that the value of luxury woods is a pittance compared with the calculable value of safrole oil.’ 

Om Yentieng, the chairman of Cambodia’s Anti-Corruption Unit, which is investigating the list, throws up his hands in exasperation when probed about the incident. ‘Everyone on the list hit the grass and dispersed like snakes,’ he says. ‘We have put the few we can identify on the grey list because we don’t have enough evidence to put them on the blacklist.’ 

'Tycoons who treat the Cardamom Mountains like a fiefdom are known to use brutal force to protect their illegal activities'

Yentieng was not available to comment further, but it seems no arrests have been made. The leaked list caused government agencies to become gripped with paranoia. They denied access to their operations. ‘They said they have been ordered not to talk to any foreigners,’ my fixer says. ‘I think they are scared of journalists discovering their secrets.’ Safrole oil is, my anonymous source says, ‘a very sensitive issue right now.’ He explains, ‘Some of the forest rangers are corrupt, and the police too; if you go there now, in this atmosphere, you could be in danger.’ 

He didn’t need to mention Chut Wutty, the Cambodian activist shot dead by military police in 2012 while guiding two journalists through the jungle. The tycoons who treat the Cardamom Mountains like a fiefdom make billions of dollars from illegal activities. of which producing safrole oil is just one. They are known to use brutal force to protect their activities. That is why no one is willing to go on record or testify against corrupt officials. 

‘If you want to log protected trees like mreas prov, you must pay a monthly fee to the ranking officials,’ explains another anonymous source, who has worked long-term in the Cardamom Mountains. ‘Of each $100, an official in forestry administration takes $20 and sends the rest up the chain; his superior takes $20, then his superior and so on. The last part of the bribe ends up in the hands of officials in the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries in Phnom Penh.’ 

For Sebastian Strangio, the author of Hun Sen’s Cambodia, published last year, it’s a matter of keep calm and carry on the corruption. ‘Corruption in Cambodia resembles a pyramid in which money is passed upwards and protection is passed downwards,’ he explains. Phay Sipon, spokesman for Cambodia’s Council of Ministers, denies this. ‘Our government doesn’t support any illegal operations,’ he says. ‘We welcome any information that helps bring corrupt officials to justice.’ 

When questioned about the lack of access allowed to journalists in the Cardamoms he replies, ‘That is not our policy; we always co-operate with journalists.’ Chhay Chhiv, the governor of Pursat also ‘didn’t know’ why access was refused. While mreas prov wood remains prized by illegal loggers, using it to make safrole has declined over the past decades due to the dwindling supply and a successful crackdown on what used to be a huge illegal industry. Safrole in its pure chemical form was listed by the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances in 1988. 

However, the oil of the mreas prov was not covered by the convention due to its legitimate use in the fragrance and insecticide industries. ‘While safrole is listed, safrole-rich oils are not,’ Barbara Remberg, the senior technical advisor at the International Narcotics Control Board, says. Drug dealers easily sidestepped the ban. ‘However, in 2006 governments were encouraged to control safrole oil in the same manner as safrole,’ she continues. ‘The Cambodian government prohibited the production, import and export of safrole oil and began cracking down on illegal loggers and their jungle laboratories.’ 

A ranger in a warehouse full of chainsaws confiscated in the rainforests of the Cardamom Mountains  Photo: Hannah Reyes

I met ‘Hing’, who used to work for illegal loggers hacking down mreas prov trees in the forest. He agreed to speak about it on condition a nickname was used. ‘I was 13 years old when the gang came recruiting people from my village,’ he says, staring out of the door of his wooden dwelling, watching tides of dust blow through rubber plantations. ‘It was hard work – the trunk was 4ft wide; it took three of us all day to fell one tree.’ He puts his lips together and makes a smashing sound. ‘When the tree fell, it was so big it splintered a number of smaller trees too.’ Hing was taking a big risk to earn a mere $5 a day. 

The mreas prov tree was listed as endangered by the Cambodian government in 2004. If caught, Hing would have been imprisoned. ‘The roots were the most important thing,’ Hing continues. ‘We had to dig them out and drag them to the nearest road.’ He describes shoving huge tangles of roots on to waiting trucks. ‘I knew the roots were used to make a special medicine,’ he says. ‘Our boss always made sure the roots were taken away immediately. I never asked where they went.’ 

Hing remembers when military police destroyed their camp. ‘We heard them coming and ran into the forest,’ he says. ‘When we returned to the camp they had burnt all our things, confiscated chainsaws, axes and motorbikes.’ The crackdown peaked in 2009, when a coalition of NGOs, international law enforcement and government agencies cremated 5.7 tonnes of safrole oil. According to Fauna and Flora International, which was part of the operation, the oil could have produced 44 million tablets of ecstasy with a street value of US$1.2 billion.

 

As the smoke of safrole fires blackened Cambodia’s sky, UK clubbers were noticing that their ecstasy pills were getting weaker. MDMA in its pure form was disappearing. ‘Big seizures like the one in 2009 made [MDMA] hard to come by,’ says Shapiro. ‘It was part of a general drought that began in 2008; purity levels were so low chemists had to find other ingredients.’ 

Faced with a shortage of safrole, illicit chemists began replacing it with anethole oil, which is derived from anise or fennel and is used in the insecticide and beverage industries. ‘A clandestine lab set up to convert safrole into ecstasy could easily switch to using anethole as the input, and use the exact same synthetic sequence,’ says Larry French, professor of chemistry at St Lawrence University, New York State. ‘The result of this process is PMMA.’ 

The Cambodian crackdown smashed the last jungle lab in 2011 as PMMA-related deaths in Europe continued to rise. Indeed, in 2012, the Journal of Clinical Toxicology detailed 24 fatalities associated with PMMA/PMA in Israel over one year. Could the precursor-control policy, intended to curb MDMA use, actually have resulted in even more dangerous chemicals being ingested? 

‘The simultaneous crackdown on distillation operations in Cambodia and the drop in MDMA supplies on the streets of Europe does not prove causation,’ McDonald says. Yet the link is compelling: there are no significant producers of safrole oil outside Southeast Asia, according to Blickman. What appears likely is that PMMA was used as a stopgap while the drug gangs recruited better chemists, who could magic the drug from simpler ingredients. 

‘There are a variety of routes to create MDMA,’ Prof French says. ‘Most of the easier methods will involve precursors that are scheduled, but the more ambitious can just go further back and synthesise the precursor itself.’ Gangs that couldn’t recruit good enough chemists kept on churning out PMMA, which may explain its continued presence in the blood of overdose victims across Europe. 

‘We are now seeing a new kind of “super pill." Ecstasy tablets with a higher concentration of MDMA than ever' 

At the same time mephedrone – a so-called ‘designer drug’ – became ruinously popular. Sacks of this now Class B drug were bought online with impunity. But, like PMMA, it wasn’t the same. It lacked the open-hearted empathy that characterises the ecstasy experience. As for PMMA, users reported a much weaker effect. ‘MDMA is a one-of-a-kind thing which simply defies all the rules,’ wrote Alexander Shulgin, a pharmacologist and drug researcher. 

‘[Whereas PMMA] is a pushy stimulant with little if any sensory sparkle.’ Before its ban in 2010, mephedrone had already been linked to 37 deaths. International control efforts had merely helped dangerous substitutes to enter the market. ‘The attempt to thwart MDMA production by controlling precursor production was a failure or worse,’ Prof Nutt says. ‘It led to the rise of PMMA production.’ 

It is 20 years since Leah Betts’ death made headlines after she took ecstasy at her 18th birthday party, but it is still a popular drug. ‘You can buy weak pills for £5 each or proper badboy stuff for £10,’ says Zee, a clubber from London. Every weekend Zee and his friends take ecstasy and dance all night. ‘The £5 pills used to be strong but that all changed around 2009,’ he continues. ‘There was a drought and you couldn’t get MDMA anywhere, but then these more expensive pills came out and they’re even stronger.’ It’s likely that the ‘weak’ pills contain PMMA or some other concoction; the ‘bad-boy’ pills point to a renewed stream of MDMA. 

Leah Betts on a life support machine in 1995  Photo: MSA

‘We are now seeing a new kind of “super pill”,’ Shapiro confirms. ‘Ecstasy tablets with a higher concentration of MDMA than ever.’ And this new stream seems to be flowing faster. According to this year’s Crime Survey for England and Wales, the number of people taking ecstasy is up 84 per cent in the past year. Like the mythical Hydra, drug enforcement cut off the head of one international supply only to see two more sprout from its bloody stump. 

Today Hing scrapes a living farming a smudge of land in a village near Veal Veng. Safrole production in the Cardamom Mountains has been stemmed but not stopped. It remains the key to creating ecstasy and demand will waver, as alternative routes are found but never die completely. Not until the last mreas prov tree falls. 

For Gediminas Kulokas and the other victims of the Superman pills life was cut brutally short. And users like Zee continue to take the risk when they swallow the pills in clubland. ‘Making pill-testing kits available is the answer,’ Prof Nutt says. ‘It would stop PMMA sales very quickly.’