‘The bright colour makes it stand out in a baggie, people post it on socials as if it’s some exotic new drug.’ Photo: Jamie Tomlinson.
The selling point of “pink cocaine” is not, as you might expect, cocaine. More often than not, the trending party drug of 2025 contains no cocaine whatsoever. Nor does it contain 2CB, the synthetic psychedelic that gives the drug its more common street name: tusi (as in “2-C”). These days, the powder is more likely to be a mixture of MDMA, ketamine and caffeine.
No, the reason pink cocaine is “one of the most significant developments in the drug market in recent years” (according to a recent Spanish government report) is rather more basic. It’s because it’s pink. A bright, lurid, Barbie Dreamhouse pink that really pops on Instagram. It also comes in pastel yellow, pale violet and sparkly blue, too, but either way, the colour is the thing. Illegal drugs follow hype cycles just as reliably as consumer products. Pink cocaine is the narcotic equivalent of a pastel green matcha latte or a bright orange Aperol Spritz. Did I mention that it smells of strawberries?
Sold in distinct zip-up baggies and snorted in small “bumps” off keys, credit cards and designer spoons — including miniature pink AK-47s — tusi is now more popular than cocaine in Colombia where it originated, and is well established in Spain, where police seizures of the drug regularly appear in the press. It’s coming to Britain too. Last December, border police uncovered a huge stash hidden in a lorry in packets branded with the image of Pink Panther. “Pink cocaine in the UK was a niche drug last year but this year it’s more than that,” says Trevor Shine, the director of TICTAC, a drug identification service which tests drugs found by law enforcement. “It’s growing fast. At this rate in a few years it will catch up with drugs such as cocaine, MDMA and ketamine.”
Joe*, a DJ familiar with Ibiza’s party scene, told me the tusi high is similar to ketamine, but with an extra twist. “Like ketamine tusi has that floaty, dissociated rush, but it’s more intense and playful. It’s heavier than just a bump of K. There’s this edge that makes it fun, almost euphoric, rather than just spacey. The mix of intensity and surprise is probably what makes it stand out.”
Joe first snorted tuci thinking it was just a new type of pink-coloured cocaine, but says since then it has become a well-hyped drug. “The bright colour makes it stand out in a baggie, people post it on socials as if it’s some exotic new drug. There’s a certain novelty to saying you’ve done pink coke.”
The exotic colour — plus the fact that it’s sold for prices similar to cocaine, and often much more — have given it a sheen of undeserved exclusivity. It has also increased its social media clout through another form of modern viral marketing: celebrity association, albeit in a uniquely grim form. Reports following the death of the One Direction singer Liam Payne in Buenos Aires wrongly asserted that he had the drug in his system at the time of his death. Pink cocaine was also namechecked in the Sean “Puffy” Combs sex trafficking trial in the US, with one former employee alleging that “all employees, from the butler to the chef to the housekeepers”, were required to keep a supply of drugs on their person at all times, including cocaine, marijuana gummies and “Tuci”. Truly, it is a drug for our times.
Tusi first started appearing in Colombia in the early 2010s, made and sold by a new generation of young narcos in Bogota and Medellin who — like many young drug users — saw cocaine as old hat. The bright colour helped it to stand out among the array of white powders being sold on the party scene, much like the blue crystal meth concocted by Walter White in Breaking Bad. Initially, the name tusi really did refer to its 2CB content but over time, the narcos swapped out 2CB for less mind-bending, more readily available drugs such as the dissociative ketamine, the more sensual MDMA, and caffeine, boosting its popularity, particularly within the reggaeton music scene, among tourists and young party people.
Now, tusi is made by a mixture of amateur DIY cooks and well-trained chemists, often employed by crime groups. Every respectable young narco in Colombia sells their own brand of tusi with a distinctive image and colour. One product sold in Medellin, “Homero”, is marketed with images of Homer Simpson. Tests of samples from one of Colombia’s largest dance music festivals last year found tusi was a bit of a mish-mash of highs. It mainly contained ketamine, MDMA or MDA (a similar drug to MDMA), and caffeine, although methamphetamine and benzodiazepines were also common. The tests also found only half of tusi samples were actually coloured pink, with purple being the most popular alternative colour.
Tusi has now spread through South America and into Europe, the US and Australia. According to unpublished data from TICTAC, UK police seized twice the number of samples of pink cocaine during the first six months of 2025 than during the whole of 2024. The first organised criminal convicted of selling pink cocaine in the UK was also jailed last December. His main market was Essex, a consumer culture that seems almost ready-made for pink cocaine.
Still, it is Spain, with its hedonistic club scene and Colombian gang links, that has become Europe’s tusi heartland. It’s also where most British drug users are likely to first encounter the drug. “Tusi’s just started to pick up over the last year in the UK, but it’s big all over Ibiza,” Danny, a British drug dealer who operates in Spain, tells me. The pink powder is openly sold, alongside cocaine, MDMA, ketamine and weed, on Ibiza’s main strip in San Antonio, as well as on social media apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram — usually indicated by a pink coloured emoji such as a heart or a purse.
In Ibiza, ambulance services now report they are at risk of collapse due to drug-related callouts from clubbers. In July a woman travelling from Barcelona was arrested at Ibiza’s main airport after being caught with a suitcase stuffed with 1,000 grams of tusi. During a crackdown last year, Spanish police arrested a gang of Italian-led criminals based on Ibiza linked to a €25 million stash of party drugs, including 21 kilograms of tusi, stored in 21,000 gram-sized bags.
But tusi is not just limited to Ibiza. Claudio Vidal, national director at Energy Control, a Spanish drug-harm reduction NGO, said that the drug is now “integrated into the drug repertoires” of young people going to nightclubs, raves and music festivals across many parts of the country, including big cities such as Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. Vidal said around one in five young adult drug users asked by Energy Control said they had used the drug over the last year. Domestic production appears to have increased in Spain, with drug gangs often importing ketamine from India and MDMA from the Netherlands. In December, Irish mobster John Gilligan was arrested after police seized an alleged tusi lab and 600 kilograms of drugs at his home near Alicante.
In contrast with Colombian tusi, Spanish tusi seems relatively consistent in its makeup. Tests of 470 samples purchased in Spain between 2020 and 2024 found ketamine and MDMA present in over 90% of samples. Increasingly, ketamine and MDMA have been the only drugs found in tusi, with over half of samples in 2024 including just the two drugs. The third most common drug was caffeine, found in just under half of the samples. On average, most samples had around twice the amount of ketamine than MDMA, and around twice the amount of MDMA than caffeine. Other drugs were only very occasionally present. Cocaine, for example, was found in just 2% of the samples, and unlike in Colombia, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines were extremely rare. Almost all the samples were pink, although very rarely some were coloured blue or yellow. These results chime with the content of samples of UK-bought tusi handed into the Welsh-based drug tasting service Wedinos in the last year.
Tusi is expensive and buyers appear to be prepared to pay a lot of money for the fact it’s pre-mixed and pink. In Spain, tusi usually costs around the same as a gram of cocaine (€40-€100, depending on where you are). But this is roughly double the €30 a gram for ketamine and MDMA, tusi’s main components. Partly because of this, the rising popularity of tusi has left seasoned drug experts baffled.
“Most people who regularly use party drugs would not buy this product,” says Al Bryant, head of content at UK charity Cranstoun. “A drug mixed like this is a blag, an excuse to put the price up, and could increase risks.”
Even though tusi is a more consistent product than its reputation presumes (it does not, as many “explainers” say, contain fentanyl), the mix of ketamine and MDMA does present a risk for users, says Shoba Ram, an independent drug-harm reduction consultant. “Ingesting both drugs together will impact your body in different ways. Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic and sedative, while MDMA is a stimulant with euphoric and mild hallucinogenic effects. Risks increase when you don’t know the mix of drugs taken, the purity, with effects often being exacerbated with consumption of alcohol. Users have also reported an altered perception of time, which can lead to dosing more regularly than intended. It is also a bag of unknown combinations of unknown quantities of different drugs that could be a huge risk to one’s health and wellbeing.”
Vidal says in Spain the main negative consequences associated with tusi have been related to ketamine. “Some people, after repeated doses, enter a sedated state, or begin to experience the psychedelic effects of ketamine when they don’t want to or are not prepared for it. In this context, anxiety or panic attacks are the most common reason for emergency room visits related to tusi use.” According to Barcelona’s main hospital, the number of drug related emergency cases linked to tusi quadrupled between 2023 and 2024, although the drug still accounts for a small proportion of drug casualties. Vidal says that the long-term effects of ketamine are dependence and bladder damage. Not that this seems to be stopping its inexorable rise. It’s bright, it’s Instagram-friendly, it’s pre-mixed and it’s created by combining cheap man-made chemicals imported from around the world.
“Everyone just wants everything immediately,” one former psychonaut told me. “Maybe the phone-scrolling generation might have a dopaminergic association with immediate highs without care for content or quality. I guess drugs roll with the times.”
*Names have been changed
Max Daly’s substack is Narcomania
