Gnome news now, and in the southern Netherlands police discovered one made entirely out of MDMA.
During a drugs bust, Dongemond Police searched a location suspected of harboring a whole bunch of drugs.
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Their suspicions were correct, and among all the drugs was one seemingly out-of-place object: a garden gnome police referred to as being “visibly startled,” since it’s been posed with its hands covering its mouth. Maybe it has a naughty secret that it almost let slip out? Who knows, that’s just my interpretation of the MDMA gnome.
Either way, it weight about four pounds and was made out of compressed MDMA, AKA Molly. The cops posted pictures of it on Facebook and everything.`
At first, police didn’t know the gnome was made of MDMA. Which is fair enough; you probably wouldn’t expect garden gnomes to be crafted out of Schedule 1 drugs. But they had it tested for narcotics, presumably based on a hunch and a fair few context clues.
The MDMA gnome isn’t the only bizarre find to surface in a drugs bust. Over the years, police have uncovered all manner of strange items linked to the drug trade, from cocaine concealed in avocados at Spanish airports to heroin stashed inside hollowed-out pineapples.
In one particularly odd case, Australian authorities found methamphetamine hidden in shipments of sex dolls. These outlandish smuggling methods highlight the lengths to which traffickers will go to avoid detection—and the occasional creativity that makes these busts go viral.
The discovery of the party gnome also comes at a time of rising MDMA use in Europe. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the production and availability of MDMA have surged in recent years, with record-breaking purity levels and declining prices fueling its popularity.
The Netherlands, in particular, remains a hotspot for MDMA production, with authorities regularly dismantling clandestine labs across the country.
