WTF IS 3-MMC, BERLIN’S WEIRD NEW CLUB DRUG?

The post-2000s party drug landscape is shifting

Hey sluts! I just got back to LA, and was on the phone recently complaining to my friend Emily about what a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time I had partying in Berlin this summer: “Berghain is a soulless simulacra… the aesthetics are giving abjection… all my friends are low-key k-junkies… and everyone is doing this weird new drug called 3MMC!” 

“Wait, what’s 3-MMC?” she said. “You should write about that.” 

And so… here we are. 

I first heard of 3-MMC in one of the Telegram groups that drive Berlin’s blackmarket drug economy. Sidenote, these groups are… hilarious. Hosted by various delivery services, they feature elaborate menus of drugs branded by country-of-origin (Bolivian coke, Indian ketamine, Cali weed…), divided into subcategories like “Pharma” vs “Nature,” and ornamented with random flashing GIFs. According to protocol, you’re supposed to privately DM the account to place orders, but clueless customers constantly spam the chat asking for specific substances—inadvertently revealing, in an ad hoc fashion, what drugs are in vogue. This is how I noticed something called “3-MMC” is in high demand. 

Berlin’s dancefloors are like putrid petri dishes where experimental drugs get tested for mass market adoption, and 3-MMC was everywhere this summer: DJs squatted under the booth to rail lines of the rocky white powder during their sets (lol classic move), KitKat club chemsex fiends debated if it would be good for their erections, and at an extremely fashion afterparty for Michelle Lamy and Arca one night, the Balenci-gays scuttled outside to pick up “some 3-MMC and cocaine, dahling.” 

So wtf is 3-MMC, and why is it trending? 

To understand the rise of 3-MMC, we must first unravel a long chain of events in the drug market that precipitated its popularity. More than just another synthetic substance that sounds like Grimes’ baby, 3-MMC encapsulates how the party drug landscape of the 2000s has been evolving in response to factors like: the development of online distribution networks, industrialization of designer drugs, War on Drugs Synthetic Analogues, and fears of fentanyl contamination. In other words, this “weird new drug” is a sign of our fucked-up times. 

THE GREAT MDMA DROUGHT 

Let’s wind back to the Great MDMA Drought of 2009/2010, a bleak time when pills were getting pressed with weird knockoff shit and real ecstasy was basically wiped from the market. This drought was caused by several large sting operations in Southeast Asia’s jungles starting in 2008, when Cambodian and Australian authorities teamed up with environmental activist groups to conduct raids on remote facilities in Cambodia that were producing sassafras oil—the precursor to MDMA that derives from a rare tree in the region. Police seized and burned 5.7 tons of sassafras oil—enough to make 245 million ecstasy tablets, or half the world’s supply—effectively choking off the global pinger trade. 

In response, underground chemists started using a cheap and less closely-monitored precursor derived from anise oil to make new amphetamine analogues called PMA and PMMA—designer drugs that were often passed off as ecstasy pills, even though they barely feel like the real thing. PMA and PMMA are also more toxic at lower doses, and resulted in a string of fatalities that earned them the ominous nickname Dr. Death. Sick of the bunk shit, ravers started searching for alternatives.