Find out about the fatal effects of PMMA at the end of the article.

The Superman logo tablet has a long history of use for ecstasy which is surprising considering that there have been a number of batches containing extremely dangerous adulterants. You would think that its reputation would stop anybody wanting to buy it ever again but it’s 2019 and there is another deadly Superman ecstasy pill on the market.

The 2019 pills are orange and have a slightly thinner “S”. This is not surprising because the way that pills look does not tell us anything inside them. This orange superman tablet was detected multiple times at the Boomtown 2019 music festival. It is very likely to be sold on the wider market. The only way to know the contents of a pill is to test them.

Photo Credit: The Loop / Sam De Neijs

How to test ecstasy tablets

Testing any recreational drug to get an idea of the contents is easy and can be done at home. All you need is a tiny scraping of a tablet or a crystal the size of a grain of sand.

Adding one drop of a reagent test liquid to this will give a colour change, and that colour change tells us what might be (or importantly, might not be) present.

PMMA reacts very differently to MDMA, so these pills would be very easy to tell apart from a pill with MDMA in it.

Type of home MDMA test Test result for PMA and PMMA Marquis Reagent No colour change Froehde Reagent Pale blue Mandelin Reagent Brown Liebermann Reagent Purple-brown Mecke Reagent Green

It is necessary to use more than one test on each sample to reduce the chance of confusion. For example, if you only used the liebermann reagent then paracetamol and PMMA have the same purple-brown colour change. If you use the mecke reagent as well then the difference is immediately obvious because mecke would not change colour for paracetamol.

What is PMMA?

PMMA is a terrible drug for a few reasons

High doses totally disable serotonin regulation causing the brain and body to fatally overheat

The effects take a long time to fully kick in, so people take extra before the first dose has taken effect

The desirable effects are similar to weak MDMA, a feeling of warmth and energy

The overheating effects become dangerous before the desirable effects become like a full dose of MDMA

You will notice that all of these factors are things that make people think they have a real MDMA-containing ecstasy pill based on the effects, so they take more, but become fatal after a short time.

The last time we wrote about superman pills was in 2016, when they also contained PMMA. Prior to that, a batch of superman pills containing PMMA killed four people in the UK in 2014 after the government refused to issue a warning, despite knowing the dangers of PMMA from batches in previous years.