Regular readers of Ears To The House might remember a post we published back in September last year covering the findings of UK drug harm reduction charity The Loop. They’d been inspecting MDMA pills to see what was actually inside them – and they reported back that over half of what they looked at contained no MDMA at all.

A number of reasons were cited for this. The dance music press at the time blamed Brexit – although we suspect global factors such as disturbances to distribution networks thanks to Covid restrictions and clubs being closed in much of the world were more of an issue. Even this study accepts it’s unclear how much of a role Brexit played.

There has, however, been a question of what will happen next. Now, drug dealers are generally not known for their willingness to do interviews about their trade with dance music websites – but there are other ways of working it out. And for The Loop, it starts this weekend.

They’re heading over to Greater Manchester to Parklife, which begins on Saturday. All 24 of them, in fact…

So excited to be back at @Parklifefest this weekend with @WeAreTheLoopUK Last year we had a multidisciplinary team reducing drug related harm on site, same again this year (but hopefully with less rain) pic.twitter.com/4lApEM0edk

— Sarah Radley (@SarahRadley_) June 7, 2022

Ears To The House is just as interested to see whether the situation has now changed after the lifting of pandemic restrictions – we’ll be coming back to this one…