I’m meeting my accomplices at the Grand Kempinksi Hotel in Shanghai at 7pm. I haven’t stopped moving for 29 hours, and I’m working on an internal battery fuelled by adrenaline. I thought I’d sleep on the plane, but I couldn’t.

It’s taken me six months to set this deal up, and tomorrow is the day it goes down. The plan is to sign a contract to buy enough raw materials from a Chinese factory in the city of Hangzhou, a few hours south of Shanghai, to make £25 million-worth of MDMA. We can’t afford a single slip up, so I’m meeting the driver, the translator and the money guy to agree on a plan to cover every eventuality. We hope.

I shower in the pokey, coffin-like pod at my cheap hotel and head downstairs. Need to sharpen up. Two coffees. I grab a cab and weave uptown through shoals of electric bikes and air so polluted you can see, taste and smell it.

The Kempinski hulks on the corner like a thick-necked bouncer draped in diamonds and polished steel. I sit in a quiet corner, alert, and order tea. All around me the look is sugar-daddy fabulous: ugly old blokes with their one-night girlfriends tik-takking across the marble in stilettos. The women are draped in Versace; the men look bored by the glamour.

We enter, pay for our suite and get the perfect service that money brings. We stare out of the windows at the LED-clad skyscrapers sprinkling pixellated confetti as a seven-storey goldfish dives in slow-motion towards the Huangpu River. We change into black shirts. There are three of us in the team: me, 'Tim', and our translator, a quick-witted Chinese woman who knows about the deal.

I’ve told ‘Janet’, a sales rep from a chemical factory a few hours south, that we are perfumiers from Poland, and that I need a chemical her plant supplies ‘for use in a new fragrance’. It’s a lie, and we both know it.

What Janet doesn’t know is that I’m about to complete a sting operation that will document the mechanics, economics, and chemistry behind a drug production and distribution industry that stretches from a lab in a Shanghai suburb to a network of MDMA chemists and criminals in Holland, Belgium and Russia, to deep inside the serotonin receptors in the brains of tens of millions of clubbers. No pressure, then.