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Across American and European dance floors, clubgoers are falling in love with a designer drug called 3-MMC. Said to have a softer comedown than Ecstasy and less risk of fentanyl contamination, the synthetic stimulant is “coke without the irritation,” as one 33-year-old former regular on the European gay club circuit told me. “It’s a bit insidious because it’s so lucid.” It’s also cheaper and longer-lasting than cocaine, helpful for marathon-style parties that can stretch 12 to 24 hours, with libido-enhancing effects that make it popular with chemsex enthusiasts. For years, the European clubgoer would use 3-MMC to keep dancing all weekend, sometimes sharing it with the DJs, then keep taking it on weekdays to stay focused during client meetings as a product manager at a major tech company. “When you take it, you don’t feel ‘high,’ ” he explained. “You just feel better, with a little bit of pep in your step. It’s a functional tool, and it’s also very stealth. The outside world can’t really tell that you’re on drugs.”
In an era obsessed with both hedonism and productivity, a substance that enhances the party while also making you more effective at the office feels like the perfect drug. The new synthetics are often quasi-legal because they emerge faster than regulators can keep pace, though bans don’t necessarily decrease their use: 3-MMC has been a controlled substance in the EU since 2022 and in the United States since 2023. Synthetics also usually cost less than classic party drugs because they’re cheaper and easier to produce. As the Brookings Institution noted, “In addition to requiring only a small labor force and minimal territorial control, producing synthetic drugs is more discreet. … Finding drug labs hidden inside or alongside legal drug factories, such as in China and India, is much tougher than locating poppy fields.”
Like many synthetics, 3-MMC can be traced to a single source: an Israeli-born, Vancouver, Canada–based chemist, often described as the “godfather of legal highs,” who goes by the name Dr. Zee. He claims to have concocted hundreds of new psychoactives—often with the aid of an algorithm he built, drawing on his background as a mathematician—and tests them on himself before releasing them into the wild. Many remain curiosities consumed only by hardcore psychonauts, but Dr. Zee has had a string of hits with substances that mimic the stimulating, uplifting effects of cathinone, the active ingredient in khat, a flowering shrub that grows throughout East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Known as the “leaf of Allah,” khat has been used for centuries for its energizing properties. After years of trying to reach him, I finally got Dr. Zee on the phone.
Dr. Zee began experimenting with synthetic cathinones during a stint working for a drug company in Israel, where he noticed that members of the country’s Yemenite community often chewed khat leaves. Dr. Zee described cathinones to me as “pleasure on tap,” a stimulant class that could sharpen focus while loosening the social hinges. “I found it to be a better alternative to the cocaine circulating in Tel Aviv at the time, so I thought it should be available to everyone,” he said in the documentary King Khat. Known as hagigat, his drug became so popular that, according to the Jewish magazine Tablet, no early-2000s celebration in Tel Aviv was complete without it.
When the Israeli government banned hagigat in 2004, Dr. Zee tweaked the formula and came up with mephedrone, another synthetic cathinone that, despite an odor recalling cat urine (and earning it the nickname Meow Meow), became wildly popular on the U.K. club scene for its euphoric, stimulating qualities. At the time, in the late ’00s, a crackdown in Southeast Asia had choked off the global MDMA supply, so partygoers turned to mephedrone for its warm, MDMA-like high. It did have a moreish quality that could trigger compulsive redosing for some users, but it was also easy to get. Tobacco shops, gas stations, and convenience stores sold synthetic cathinones as “plant food” or “bath salts,” or under stripperish names like Ivory Wave, Vanilla Sky, and Bliss. Mephedrone could even be purchased online from labs in China. “It was insane,” a British raver friend told me. “You could order shitloads of it online and deliver it to your mum’s house.” Mephedrone’s ubiquity prompted sensationalist media reports that falsely linked bath salts to grisly crimes, including cannibalism, penis mutilation, and the killing of a pygmy goat. After police crackdowns, the U.K. and the EU banned it in 2010, and the U.S. followed in 2011, paving the way for 3-MMC.
A close cousin to mephedrone, 3-MMC has a speedier drive and less of a fuzzy loved-up feeling. Dr. Zee told me he took 3-MMC almost every day for 10 years. In a patent application, he wrote that the drug seemed to encourage “deeper self-disclosure [and the] ability to produce a sense of calming empowerment” that allows users to creatively reframe undesirable thought patterns while fostering a “deeply felt sense of accomplishment.” The relaxed, chatty lucidity that 3-MMC brings users translates well not only to the club and office but also to therapeutic contexts. In “On 3-MMC: A Cathinone I Have Come to Know and Love,” an article published in the American journal Anthropology of Consciousness, Carmen Ostrander, a therapist also based in Vancouver, Canada, observes that the drug can act as a sort of truth serum: “Stories come tumbling out, not because you can’t stop talking about yourself, but from an earnest yearning to share authentically and be received, while simultaneously promoting deeper listening and presence.”
Like MDMA, 3-MMC’s non-recreational potential has caught the attention of the pharmaceutical industry. Definium Therapeutics is working on 3-MMC as a tool for psychotherapy and a treatment for PTSD. Another company, Period Pill, is researching a 3-MMC-based drug to treat menstrual cramps, PMS, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. In a phase 1 study recently published in Psychopharmacology, Period Pill found that low to moderate doses of the drug offered pain relief and mood enhancements. Today’s party drug is tomorrow’s pharmaceutical panacea.
Despite the enthusiasm of therapists and Big Pharma, 3-MMC has one potentially fatal flaw: Like hagigat and mephedrone, it can be addictive. The club kids with ruined sinus cavities and nose scabs can attest to this. Yet 3-MMC’s rise seems unstoppable. Perhaps it will turn out to be like MDMA, which saw its recreational market explode after being banned. So far, 3-MMC’s supply chains, which trace back to industrial labs in China and India, have held steady. With its irresistible mix of pleasure and productivity, 3-MMC might just be the drug for our time.