A tablet logo, color, or market label cannot establish how much MDMA a unit contains—or whether MDMA is present at all. A 2026 study from New South Wales provides unusually detailed quantitative data from 3,378 street-level police seizures, including MDMA tablets, capsules, crystals, and powders.
The Combined Surveillance and Monitoring of Seized Samples program, known as CoSMoSS, is a partnership among NSW Health, NSW Police, and a forensic laboratory. Between January 2021 and March 2025, police selected suspected MDMA, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine samples from music festivals and designated community regions for expedited analysis.
Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry was the principal identification method, supported where appropriate by presumptive color tests, FTIR, or Raman spectroscopy. Purity was quantified where practicable. For MDMA tablets and capsules, the investigators calculated an average amount per unit from total weight and measured free-base purity.
MDMA was the main detected drug in 1,067 samples. Among samples with quantitative results:
Twenty-six of 121 tablets with usable dose information—21.5%—contained 140 mg or more as MDMA free base. Six of 522 capsules, or 1.1%, reached that level. The authors observed more high-dose tablet seizures in recent years.
The study reports MDMA as free base. Street materials may instead contain a salt, commonly MDMA hydrochloride. A percentage expressed as free base is not numerically interchangeable with a percentage expressed as salt. A defensible comparison must identify the reporting convention, molecular-weight conversion, unit weight, uncertainty, and sampling procedure.
The Results section reports that 930 of 3,378 samples contained at least one additional substance. Novel or emerging substances appeared in 133 samples, or 3.9%, including N,N-dimethylpentylone, novel benzodiazepines, arylcyclohexylamines, acetylfentanyl, and a nitazene. Some opioid adulteration was found in cocaine and methamphetamine samples. The paper also emphasizes that appearance alone cannot reliably identify content, dose, or purity.
There is an internal numerical issue worth noting: the abstract states that 16.5% of samples contained at least one adulterant, while the Results section reports 27.5%. Those figures may reflect different inclusion rules, but the difference is not explained in the extracted main text. Anyone citing a single overall adulteration percentage should resolve the authors’ definitions or consult the underlying dataset first.
No. The project deliberately prioritized drugs suspected by police to be target substances. Festival and community samples came from selected operations and regions rather than a random market sample. That design makes the data useful for early warning but limits prevalence claims. The program also did not record what the consumer expected the substance to contain, so a co-detected compound cannot automatically be called a deceptive substitution.
The laboratory did not test exhaustively for every possible diluent or adulterant. Sugars and creatine, for example, may not be detected through the same screening workflow. Damaged units could not always support a per-tablet dose calculation.
The NSW data show wide variability in MDMA purity and unit dose, with tablets generally carrying a higher median amount than capsules despite lower percentage purity. Seized-drug surveillance can provide strong objective information about tested items and useful early warnings. It should not be converted into a universal assumption about an untested tablet, a different seizure, or the entire market.
Smith J.L. et al. “A Quantitative Analysis of Street-Level Drugs Seized in New South Wales, Australia: Purity, Dose and Adulterants.” Drug and Alcohol Review (2026). DOI: 10.1111/dar.70270. PubMed PMID 42810992.