Has the New Cocaine Finally Arrived?

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Has the New Cocaine Finally Arrived?<br>Clubgoers are using 3-MMC to dance all night, then taking more to lock in at the office.

Playboy and Michelle Lhooq<br>Jul 22, 2026

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Photography by Ewen Spencer<br>This story appears in our Summer 2026 issue, on newsstands July 28. Want us to come to your place? Become a member to get digital access to the issue and early access to paywalled content.

Across American and European dance floors, clubgoers are falling in love with a designer drug called 3-MMC. Said to have a softer comedown than Ecstasy and less risk of fentanyl contamination, the synthetic stimulant is “coke without the irritation,” as one 33-year-old former regular on the European gay club circuit told me. “It’s a bit insidious because it’s so lucid.” It’s also cheaper and longer-lasting than cocaine, helpful for marathon-style parties that can stretch 12 to 24 hours, with libido-enhancing effects that make it popular with chemsex enthusiasts. For years, the European clubgoer would use 3-MMC to keep dancing all weekend, sometimes sharing it with the DJs, then keep taking it on weekdays to stay focused during client meetings as a product manager at a major tech company. “When you take it, you don’t feel ‘high,’ ” he explained. “You just feel better, with a little bit of pep in your step. It’s a functional tool, and it’s also very stealth. The outside world can’t really tell that you’re on drugs.”<br>In an era obsessed with both hedonism and productivity, a substance that enhances the party while also making you more effective at the office feels like the perfect drug. The new synthetics are often quasi-legal because they emerge faster than regulators can keep pace, though bans don’t necessarily decrease their use: 3-MMC has been a controlled substance in the EU since 2022 and in the United States since 2023. Synthetics also usually cost less than classic party drugs because they’re cheaper and easier to produce. As the Brookings Institution noted, “In addition to requiring only a small labor force and minimal territorial control, producing synthetic drugs is more discreet. … Finding drug labs hidden inside or alongside legal drug factories, such as in China and India, is much tougher than locating poppy fields.”

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Like many synthetics, 3-MMC can be traced to a single source: an Israeli-born, Vancouver, Canada–based chemist, often described as the “godfather of legal highs,” who goes by the name Dr. Zee. He claims to have concocted hundreds of new psycho­actives—often with the aid of an algorithm he built, drawing on his background as a mathematician—and tests them on himself before releasing them into the wild. Many remain curiosities consumed only by hardcore psychonauts, but Dr. Zee has had a string of hits with substances that mimic the stimulating, uplifting effects of cathinone, the active ingredient in khat, a flowering shrub that grows throughout East  Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Known as the “leaf of Allah,” khat has been used for centuries for its energizing properties. After years of trying to reach him, I finally got Dr. Zee on the phone.<br>Dr. Zee began experimenting with synthetic cathinones during a stint working for a drug company in Israel, where he noticed that members of the country’s Yemenite community often chewed khat leaves. Dr. Zee described cathinones to me as “pleasure on tap,” a stimulant class that could sharpen focus while loosening the social hinges. “I found it to be a better alternative to the cocaine circulating in Tel Aviv at the time, so I thought it should be available to everyone,” he said in the documentary King Khat. Known as hagigat, his drug became so popular that, according to the Jewish magazine Tablet, no early-2000s celebration in Tel Aviv was complete without it.<br>When the Israeli government banned hagigat in 2004, Dr. Zee tweaked the formula and came up with mephedrone, another synthetic cathinone that, despite an odor recalling cat urine (and earning it the nickname Meow Meow), became wildly popular on the U.K. club scene for its euphoric, stimulating qualities. At the time, in the late ’00s, a crackdown in Southeast Asia had choked off the global MDMA supply, so partygoers turned to mephedrone for its warm, MDMA-like high. It did have a moreish quality that could trigger compulsive redosing for some users, but it was also easy to get. Tobacco shops, gas stations, and convenience stores sold synthetic cathinones as “plant food” or “bath salts,” or under stripperish names like Ivory Wave, Vanilla Sky, and Bliss. Mephedrone could even be purchased online from labs in China. “It was insane,” a British raver friend told me. “You could order shitloads of it online and deliver it to your mum’s house.” Mephedrone’s ubiquity prompted sensationalist media reports that falsely linked bath salts to grisly crimes, including cannibalism, penis mutilation, and the killing...