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Last summer, I plunged into Berlin’s nightlife circuit for a few months in an attempt to decipher the city’s latest drug trends. Along the way, I was searching for a particular pleasure found in the clubbing capital’s combination of chaos and catharsis, but instead, I found myself on the phone one night, complaining to a friend back home about what a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time I was having: “Berghain is a soulless simulacra…the aesthetics are giving abjection…all my friends are low-key k-junkies… and everyone is doing this weird new drug called 3-MMC!”
“Wait, what’s 3-MMC?” she said. “You should write about that.”
And so…here we are.
I first heard of 3-MMC in one of the Telegram groups that drive Berlin’s blackmarket drug economy. Sidenote, these groups are…hilarious. Hosted by various delivery services, they feature elaborate menus of drugs branded by country-of-origin (Bolivian coke, Indian ketamine, Cali weed…), divided into subcategories like “Pharma” vs “Nature,” and ornamented with random flashing GIFs. According to protocol, you’re supposed to privately DM the account to place orders, but clueless customers constantly spam the chat asking for specific substances—inadvertently revealing, in an ad hoc fashion, what drugs are in vogue. This is how I noticed something called “3-MMC” is in high demand.
Berlin’s dancefloors are like putrid petri dishes where experimental drugs get tested for mass market adoption, and 3-MMC was everywhere this summer: DJs squatted under the booth to rail lines of the rocky white powder during their sets (lol classic move), KitKat club chemsex fiends debated if it would be good for their erections, and at an extremely fashion afterparty for Michelle Lamy and Arca one night, the Balenci-gays scuttled outside to pick up “some 3-MMC and cocaine, dahling.”
So wtf is 3-MMC, and why is it trending?
To understand the rise of 3-MMC, we must first unravel a long chain of events in the drug market that precipitated its popularity. More than just another synthetic substance that sounds like Grimes’ baby, 3-MMC encapsulates how the party drug landscape of the 2000s has been evolving in response to factors like: the development of online distribution networks, industrialization of designer drugs, War on Drugs Synthetic Analogues, and fears of fentanyl contamination. In other words, this “weird new drug” is a sign of our fucked-up times.