Lack of safrole

Four deaths in the United Kingdom last week may be the latest in a rash of fatalities linked to a hike in an adulterated version of party drug ecstasy, a trend experts say goes all the way back to the jungles of Cambodia. Rogue batches of synthetic MDMA-like substances have increasingly cropped up amid worldwide shortages of the common chemical precursor, safrole oil. The shortage is attributed to mass seizures of safrole in Cambodia from 2007 to 2009, when anti-drug officials attempted to eradicate clandestine production camps from protected forests. “Cambodia is one of the main sources for economical extraction of safrole for the production of MDMA. The big seizure [in 2008] did cause an MDMA drought in Western Europe, which suggests that other sources of safrole were not available in sufficient quantity,” said Harry Shapiro, director of communications at UK-based drug research centre Drugscope. Safrole oil, also known as sassafras oil, is distilled in Cambodia by boiling the roots and bark of a fragrant and rare tree known in Khmer as mreah prov mhnom. Manufacturing the oil involves felling several of the protected trees, which are found primarily in the Cardamom Mountain’s Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary in the western part of the country. Though small-scale production of safrole oil for traditional remedies has been going on for centuries in Cambodia, experts say large-scale and highly profitable safrole production began around 2000, when international demand for MDMA peaked, and shortly after neighbouring Vietnam issued a ban on making the substance in 1999. Production was ratcheted up further in 2004, soon after stricter controls were placed on the industry in China. In Cambodia, felling the trees and producing safrole became illegal in 2007, two years after Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered a crackdown on oil distilleries.