Dutch Police were as stunned as this garden gnome after it was discovered to be made entirely of MDMA.
The four pound gnome was discovered by Dongemond Police during a large drug bust.
The gnome appeared to be covering his mouth with both hands, as if caught in the middle of something compromising.
The force wrote in a social media post: ‘Drugs appear in many shapes and sizes, but every now and then we come across special things.
‘In itself a strange place to keep your garden gnome. That’s why why we decided to test [it] for narcotics. The gnome himself was visibly startled.’
In some folklore, gnomes are said to be mischievous – and it seems this gnome may be more cheeky than those made of say, porcelain.
MDMA is illegal in the Netherlands, even as the country is among the world’s leading producers of the party drug, also called ecstasy.
This summer, a dangerous drug was linked to 180 deaths across the UK after being sold as ‘ecstasy’.
Nitzenes are 100 times stronger than heroin, and a form of the drug was sold online as a pill that looked like ecstasy.
The drug has also been linked to 47 deaths in Scotland according to the National Crime Agency – a country that already has the highest death toll from drugs in Europe.
First detected in white powder sampled from a Wakefield taxi in April 2021, nitazenes have since been detected in cannabis, crack cocaine, heroin and even vapes.
One of the issues with nitazenes is that they’re very poorly monitored, she said, and a lethal dose of the drug is so small you can’t see it with a naked eye – meaning many are unaware their drugs have been laced.
Opioid use and overdoses have been on the rise for more than a decade across the UK – in 2022, 46% of the 2,261 drug poisoning deaths involved an opiate.
And as heroin supplies dwindle across the world due to the lack of poppy harvest in opium-producing countries like Afghanistan, drug dealers are cutting their supply to make it more potent while risking lives.
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