What is the Pink Drug ‘Tusi’? Everything You Need to Know
What is the Drug ‘Tusi’? Everything You Need to Know About the Instagramfication of Party Drugs
By Simon Doherty
Author's note: “What is the pink drug tusi?” is a question I get asked several times a week, as a journalist who specialises in drug culture. So, I thought I’d write everything I know about the pink powder in one article. This, reader, is that article. Firstly, tusi is not a drug, per se, it’s actually a brand. And a good example of the increasing Instagramification of the sesh.
There’s a new drug on the block, kids. Well, it’s not exactly new. And it’s not exactly a drug. It’s a concoction of drugs sold as a product. A patchwork of existing substances cobbled together (with a peppering of pink food dye added for branding purposes). It’s collectively referred to as tusi (pronounced “two-see”). It’s an alphabet soup of synthetic drugs as unpredictable as the range of spellings used to describe it – including but not limited to “tusi”, “tuci”, “tucibi”, and “tucci”.
Police officers, teachers, and journalists tend to call it “pink cocaine”, which is funny because statistically speaking it’s very unlikely to actually contain any coke (we’ll get on to that). As always, without any form of testing (by posting a sample to Wales' public health laboratory WEDINOS, for example, or using EZ Test Kits to check if various popular substances are present), you simply don’t know what’s in it. Because with tusi it varies from batch to batch and manufacturer to manufacturer.
Not to be confused with 2C-B, a psychedelic drug which is an easy mistake since it sounds very similar, tusi started its life in Latin America. It originally surfaced in Colombia around 2010, it was pioneered by a new generation of young narcos selling it as a premium product on the underground clubbing scene and around the tourist-focused sex trade. Apparently it was called “tusi” because the original incarnation was much more likely to contain 2C-B. Over the next ten years, it crept across the globe through Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Chile, and Panama towards Spain, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the UK, Canada, and North America.
In 2024, Spanish authorities busted 21kg of tusi across Ibiza and Malaga, the biggest bust yet. And that was also the year it started making appearances in popular culture; P Diddy was accused in a lawsuit of asking his staff to buy and hold it for him, it was implicated in the tragic death of One Direction singer Liam Payne, and earlier this year NFL star Stefon Diggs faced criticism after a video appeared online depicting him “appearing to pass around an unknown pink substance” which many commentators suggested was tusi. Some people believe that tusi may have been partly responsible for a spate of deaths involving tourists falling off balconies in Ibiza.
Without any form of testing, the only thing for sure with tusi is that it’s got pink food dye in it. If you look at data from testing carried out by drug checking charity The Loop, WEDINOS, and Canadian community drug analysis service Get Your Drugs Tested, the most popular drugs in the tusi samples they tested were MDMA, ket, and caffeine. Coke was found in a minority (8.3%) of the samples, and 2C-B was not present at all. A range of other substances were found in a smaller number of the samples: levamisole, meth, phenacetin, and dimethyl sulfone.
TICTAC Communications, which operates out of St. George’s University of London, tests drugs for the health service and the criminal justice system. Trevor Shine, Director at the service, told EZ Test Kits that the number of tusi samples that they’ve seen so far this year has “increased significantly compared to 2024” and even more so since tusi first came onto their radar in 2022.
“Pretty much every sample contained MDMA and ketamine,” he told us. “And some of the samples also contained other things like caffeine (that’s in a fair amount), occasionally we see 2C-B, but not much (sometimes only traces which could be accidental cross-contamination).” He added: “And then there’s a few things we have detected [in tusi] but not on a regular basis – like benzocaine, paracetamol, or meth [found in one sample from this year]. One of its names is “pink cocaine” but we rarely see cocaine, it was only in a couple of samples.”
It’s a similar story for DrugsData, a lab that checks the contents of drugs on behalf of the educational organisation Erowid Center. They’ve been testing tusi since they received their first sample of it in 2023. People send them samples from all over the world, but their tusi samples largely came from North America, Switzerland, and Austria. Most contained MDMA, ket, and many contained caffeine. After that, to a lesser extent but in order of most popular, they saw ket precursors, 2C-B, MDA, meth, and lidocaine. They even had one sample of “yellow tusi” from Colombia – it contained Ketamine, MDMA, and LSD.
As the reputation and hype around the pink powder has swelled, the concoction has become increasingly unpredictable. More and more young tusi ‘chefs’ have started experimenting in DIY setups, turning their kitchens into weird pharmaceutical car boot sales. Taking tusi from a new source, therefore, is like spinning a roulette wheel. Will the tingling euphoria of MDMA start to make itself known? Will a scattered sense of ketty disassociation settle upon your psyche, making you confused like a caveman trying to solve a Rubik's Cube? Or will splendid psychedelic colours begin to bleed into your peripheral vision, dissolving reality like a stroboscopic Instagram filter? Without testing, it's unclear what the outcome could be. If a barman emptied the drip tray (a tray under beer taps that collects all liquid that’s spilled over the course of a day) into a pint glass at the end of their shift and necked it, that’s the alcohol equivalent of tusi.
This unpredictability makes it a shit drug trend to me. After all, two of the main ingredients often found in tusi – MDMA (an empathogenic stimulant) and ket (a dissociative anesthetic) – are at odds with each other. It’s much better to pick a vibe: Do you want to be stimulated and loved-up or disassociated and floaty like a ball of cotton wool that’s about to get blown away in the wind? Buy the respective drug, get it tested by posting it to WEDINOS or Energy Control or using a reagent testing kit from EZ Test Kits, and then research the harm reduction around the particular substance you know you have.
Harm reduction efforts around tusi are very difficult because you simply don’t know what substances are present unless you have tested for the various common ones. How can you advise someone on how to reduce the harms of a drug if you don’t know which drug they are taking? For this reason, it’s also impossible to answer when someone asks, as they often do, “How long does tusi stay in your system?” Equally, it would be hard to advise anyone legally on tusi. If someone was found to be in possession of tusi which contained MDMA (a Class-A drug) and ket (a Class-B drug), could they be charged with two separate offences? No idea.
I saw a similar thing to this at uni, but people didn’t call it tusi back then, it was universally known as The Shit Mix™. You’d only see it at like 8AM, at an afterparty, when you should probably (read definitely) all just go home. Everyone’s party prescriptions were almost depleted, so a plate would be ceremoniously placed upon the crowded coffee table (invariably stuffed with empty beer cans, overflowing ashtrays, and endless reams of small rizlas). Multiple people would empty the pitiful remains of their baggie onto the communal plate. It was offered as a last ditch attempt to prolong a sesh which was fading away like the final glowing ember on a winter fireplace. People knew it was shit, hence the name, but now this sort of thing is bizarrely being sold as a premium, aspirational product.
We now see tusi in fancy branded packaging, much like the so-called “Cali packs” – the phenomenon over the past five years which sees weed that is sold in bright, branded packaging and purporting to be imported from California being sold for vastly inflated prices well above the market rate. Some of this weed is genuinely imported, sure, there have been a number of high-profile busts at airports which attests to that, but it’s also often domestically grown using seeds of strains with associations with the Californian cannabis market. It’s then mis-sold as imported flower, at an exorbitant price.
High-quality weed has been readily available in the UK for a very long time. But now it’s re-packaged, re-branded, and re-sold to a higher bidder. Tusi follows this process but takes it a step further: it’s not just the packaging that’s branded, the actual powder is too (with the pink food dye). Unfortunately, in the case of tusi, branding and hype has come to the forefront, while quality assurance and harm reduction has taken a back seat. “It’s a marketed product rather than a drug,” Shine told me at the beginning of our chat. He’s right. This is the Instagramification of the sesh.
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