By analyzing thousands of pill reports, we now know that most ecstasy pills – or at least those that people bother to test and tell other drug users about – do contain MDMA or an MDMA-like substance. But how much MDMA is in any given pill, and whether it’s mixed with speed (as it very often will be), is down to chance and possibly where you live. Canadian pills almost always seem to contain some speed, whereas those from the Netherlands, where pill testing is much more common than any of the other four countries we looked at, are much more likely to contain just MDMA.

We’ve also seen that Molly, the apparently pure form of MDMA mentioned by Madonna and Miley, is typically anything but pure. It’s no more likely to be pure MDMA than an ecstasy pill selected at random.