Way back in 2015, VICE asked me to write an article looking into the future of the illegal drug world. What kind of drugs would people be taking, and how would the cat-and-mouse game between dealers and police have changed? Now, ten years later, they asked me to revisit those predictions and compare them to what actually happened—to see what I’d got right, what I’d got wrong, and what came totally out of the blue.
Before I start, here’s a quick reminder of what was going on in 2015. Globally, high strength ecstasy was back in a big way and cocaine smuggling into Europe was on the rise. Big pharma had created an army of U.S. opioid addicts, and despite the FBI’s best efforts, darknet drug markets just kept popping up.
In the UK, county lines drug dealing and drug deaths were booming; small groups of teenagers, mainly in Brighton and Bristol, were binging on cheap ketamine; and nitrous oxide was getting trendy at music festivals. Head shops sold spice, university students were caught setting up their own DIY darkweb drug rings, and the media told us cocaine rots your flesh.
Let’s get into it.
Prediction 1: THREE CERTAINTIES
“When we talk about the future of drugs, there are three certainties that cannot be ignored: Certainty #1. Until the planet explodes, melts, or drowns, humans will want to get intoxicated. Certainty #2. People who supply these intoxiants, particularly banned ones, will pocket a load of cash. Certainty #3. We will be blindsided by a new drug phenomenon, a bolt from the blue, that everyone will pretend they knew was coming.”
Was it right? Well, this wasn’t too hard, but yes. Since 2015 global drug use has continued to rise, the drug trade is more profitable than it’s ever been and there was a bolt from the blue that no-one saw coming: The explosion of fentanyl in North America, unleashed by the Mexican cartels, which caused 320,000 deaths in less than ten years. This potent synthetic opioid—and an array of other powerful synthetics, such as nitazenes and benzos like xylazine—are now a fixture of North America’s street drug scene, and on the rise in Europe too.
Prediction 2: DRUGS FOR SELF-IMPROVEMENT, NOT JUST SELF-DESTRUCTION
“2025 will be awash with smart, lifestyle drugs—drugs to help people learn, think, relax.”
Was it right? Mainly. This was actually a prediction made in 2005 by the UK’s Foresight thinktank, which I flagged in 2015 as being a good one. It would be wrong to describe the world as “awash” with them—although a mishmash of legal, semi-legal, and illegal lifestyle drugs have become more popular. The psychedelic renaissance sparked a rise in research into the medical uses of psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, and LSD, which led to an increase in people microdosing these substances to improve mood and productivity.
Meanwhile, widening legalization of weed in the U.S. has led to a global rise in CBD wellness products, most of which are useless. What’s more, the use of speed-like prescription drugs such as modafinil to work or study longer has become increasingly normalized, including among university lecturers working their way through essay-marking binges.
Prediction 3: THE OLD SCHOOL DRUGS WILL REASSERT THEIR DOMINANCE
“The future will not be about the endless procession of legal highs. A smattering of new psychoactive substances (NPS) will always be around, but they have had their day in the sun. The imminent clampdown on head shops will stifle supply to teenagers and the homeless—two of the keenest buyers of NPS products. Yes, mephedrone is here to stay… it will still have an appeal to those who are broke, unable to get hold of decent drugs… but now that the ecstasy and cocaine markets have righted themselves, with the purity of both drugs up considerably, the old school drugs are back.”
Was it right? 50/50. Back in 2015 there was an obsession with “legal highs” and “new psychoactive substances” (mainly synthetic cathinones such as mephedrone, synthetic cannabinoids such as spice, and other drugs designed to mimic traditional highs). There was a feeling that traditional drugs could go out of fashion. What actually happened was that in the last decade the OG drugs such as cocaine, MDMA, meth, ketamine, and weed have grown more popular and purer worldwide, while synthetic cathinones and cannabinoids are mainly confined to eastern Europe, Russia, and in the UK to prisons and in the specific case of ‘monkey dust,’ Stoke-on-Trent. The closure of UK head shops did reduce the use of spice and mephedrone among schoolkids, but it did not stifle them among the homeless.
As I mentioned under Prediction 1, I did not foresee the proliferation of synthetic opioids and synthetic benzos—some known like fentanyl and others more obscure like xylazine and nitazene—into North America’s street heroin market. What I also didn’t see coming round the corner was the rise of drug product mash-ups, such as DMT vapes, psilocybin chocolate, purple drank, pink cocaine, gas station heroin, and drug rip-offs such as fake Xanax, spice being sold as weed, and a host of fake medications often sold online.
Prediction 4: BRITS WOULD STILL BE PARTYING HARD
“In Blighty, our drug users will continue to play a leading global role in getting hammered.”
Was it right? Yes. Drug use in the UK, particularly cocaine, ketamine, MDMA, heroin, and nitrous oxide, is still high compared to most countries.
Prediction 5: THE COPS WOULDN’T BRING DOWN THE INTERNET DRUG MARKET…
“The online drug trade will be blazing a trail into the next decade and beyond, whether the world’s police like it or not.”
Was it right? Yes. The darknet’s “holy trinity” of Tor, PGP, and Bitcoin remains un-cracked, with Bitcoin actually going mainstream. But it is in tech-loving Russia where darknet drug dealing has gone into overdrive. There, a handful of shady organizations with masked, PR-savvy figureheads oversee a drug trade in which most people buy online, including over Telegram, and retrieve their stash from hidden ‘dead drops’ in streets and parks. These Russian darknet platforms, which show off robot-dog drug-couriers and carry out elaborate PR stunts on the streets of Moscow, rake in $1.5 billion a year and account for over 90 percent of global dark web trade. What’s more, this model has expanded into other countries, including Ukraine, Georgia, and South Korea.
Prediction 6: …BUT THE DRUG MARKET WOULD REMAIN MOSTLY IRL
“The internet drug trade still represents only a tiny proportion of the global trade in drugs. Barring the mass return of polio or a totalitarian style curfew regime, most people will still be out and about buying their drugs from family, friends, friends of friends, junkie acquaintances, and blokes saved in their phone as “Johnny Coke 1” in pubs, clubs, colleges, house parties, street corners, crack houses, Audis, and off other moms and dads on the school run.”
Was it right? Yes. Apart from in and around Russia, the vast majority of drugs in the rest of the world are bought hand-to-hand, rather than over the darknet. But tech’s role has expanded…
Prediction 7: WANNA GET HIGH? THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT
“In the future, if the notoriously early adopting gay drug scene is anything to go by [drug dealing] will probably be aided and abetted by mobile phone apps.”
Was it right? Yes. Drug dealing has colonized mobile phone apps. Street drug dealers selling emoji-filled menus of recreational drugs have been all over social media and messaging apps, using them as shopfronts, for charming marketing blitzes, and as tools of supply, with payments often taken via money mule accounts on Monzo and Revolut.
Prediction 8: WEED WOULD BE FREED
“Within ten years, more than half of Americans are likely to be living in a state where it is legal to buy marijuana.”
Was it right? This was weirdly accurate. In 2025, 54 percent of Americans live in a state where recreational cannabis is legal. It wasn’t so easy guessing which countries would follow the U.S. down the legal recreational weed route, though. While Canada and Mexico (which hasn’t activated the new law yet) have legalized weed, the article failed to tag Uruguay, Germany, Malta, Luxembourg, and Thailand, and wrongly tipped Colombia, Ecuador, Jamaica, Guatemala, Morocco, Cambodia, and India.
Prediction 9: THE UK WOULD STAY UPTIGHT
“It’s unlikely there will be any big changes to UK drug laws over the next decade. Most MPs are too scared of the right-wing press to risk their careers by sticking their heads above the parapet to back anything that could seem remotely radical.”
Was it right? Yes. In the UK, drug law reform has been stuck in aspic. While other countries have modernized their aging drug laws, British governments have refused to change anything.
Prediction 10: THERE WOULD BE NO GLOBAL CONSENSUS ON DRUG LAWS
“While Hollywood A-listers will be sucking on spirulina and sensi lassis on Melrose, poor fuckers in Iran and Saudi will be swinging from the rafters after being caught with a dub.”
Was it right? Yes. I thought we’d be heading into an increasingly polarized drug policy world, but maybe I should’ve been more pessimistic. Between 2016 and 2022, up to 30,000 Filipinos living under the government of Rodrigo Duterte were killed during “anti-drug operations.” Meanwhile, there has been a surge in beheadings and hangings of drug offenders in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. Yet even within single countries drug policy can be schizophrenic. While more U.S. states have legalized weed, a string of high profile incidents have shown police are still using drug laws as a stick with which to beat the Black community.
Prediction 11: DRUG LAWS WOULD EXACERBATE DRUG ADDICTION
“The more people become mired in poverty, social exclusion, and the trauma that surrounds it, the more likely their drug use is to become problematic, meanwhile, local authorities are cutting back on the very services that can help them.”
Was it right? Yes, austerity hit drug addiction hard. In the UK, drug-related deaths escalated from just over 3,000 in 2015 to nearly 5,000 in 2023, a rise which experts say was fueled by austerity. In North America and the UK, the local authorities with the largest spending cuts and poverty levels saw the highest rates of drug addiction and drug deaths. The expansion of country lines drug-dealing networks across rural and coastal towns in Britain has also been linked to areas made more vulnerable to addiction and gangs due to austerity.
Prediction 12: CUTS TO POLICING WILL EMBOLDEN DRUG KINGPINS
“Austerity will have an increasing effect on the war [police] are being asked to wage on drugs, as they won’t be able to afford it. Over the next decade, cannabis grows will go undetected, street drug dealers will be less likely to be arrested. To the horror of people like Peter Hitchens, the cutbacks could lead to the de facto creeping in of ‘de-penalization’ of some drug offenses, which is a truncheon’s width away from decriminalization. Carrying out the surveillance needed to catch the guys pulling the strings will become too pricey for many police forces, so while the gophers may get pulled, the bigger players will increasingly be left in peace to work out how to do that pesky laundering.”
Was it right? Sort of. For the first part of the decade there was a serious dip in police activity against the drug trade—including big falls in the number of cannabis farms being found, in people being arrested for drug dealing, and in the amount of drugs being seized at the border. In 2020, UK police got lucky after international police forces hacked into encrypted phone networks being used by gangsters to arrange everything from drug smuggling to assassinations. An unprecedented stream of intelligence was gained and an endless queue of cocaine smuggling gangsters, especially from Merseyside, were put behind bars. However, despite this historic body blow—and the pandemic putting a slowdown on global narcotics supply—the world’s organized drug trade has flourished.
Prediction 13: IN THE FUTURE, ANYONE COULD BE A DRUG DEALER
“Mr Bigs are gradually being replaced… by a trading zone that anyone can engage with… a complete democratization of drug crime. The old underworlds based on the industrial working class and the old working-class neighborhoods are gone, and the new market is open to everyone. The most unlikely people in terms of class, gender, and background can now get involved. This is the future of organized drug crime.”
Was it right? This was what the legendary crime expert Dick Hobbs told me back then. Turns out he was on the nose, because in the last decade an even bigger array of narco-entrepreneurs have been able to plug into the highly lucrative cash cow that is the international drug trade. Now, it’s almost a free-for-all, with people of all ages and nationalities grabbing a piece of the action, alongside the established crime networks. Take for example the quiet unassuming suburban couple from Hanwell in West London who used their car wash, Breaking Bad-style, to help launder the proceeds from their $900m cocaine empire. But what we didn’t foresee was exactly how much crime gangs have doubled down on the drug trade, and how much more powerful organized crime has become in the last ten years as a result. A plethora of crime networks have become more collaborative with each other and more successful at infiltrating legitimate society.
Prediction 14: CHINA WILL PLAY A HUGE PART IN THE GLOBAL DRUGS TRADE
“Although China is ruthless in terms of security and clamping down on dealers, it is also corrupt, so it will be hard to stop the rise of the Chinese drug gangs.”
Was it right? This came from another crime expert, Frederico Varese, and he was right about the corruption bit. Experts now say the Triads are more likely to be working for the Chinese government than against it.
Prediction 15: POLITICIANS WILL BE LESS SHY ABOUT THEIR DRUG USE
“Newspaper readership is dwindling, so the power the right-wing media has over policy will lessen. The spell will be broken, so you are more likely to have politicians standing up for more rational debate. I would love it if we got to the point of an MP standing up and saying: ‘I do smoke weed—in fact I smoke it every night.’ I’d vote for that guy. The dope-smoking MP would be great, but maybe 20 years’ time is too soon.”
Was it right? Not really. This was former Daily Star reporter Rich Peppiatt, who turned on the tabloids in his film One Rogue Reporter (and who recently directed Kneecap’s film). Unfortunately his optimism has not been realized, and right-wing discourse has actually been trumped by a cacophony of extremism and fake news, so rational debate is out the window.
Prediction 16: THE FUTURE WON’T BE AS FUTURISTIC AS YOU THINK
“I’m willing to make the call that ‘chemputers’—which will supposedly print 3D drugs—and electronic highs—which allegedly get people frazzled via their iTunes—are both bollocks, and that even by 2025, will be used regularly by fewer people than have been to the moon. And if this line comes back to haunt me, I’ll be hiding somewhere in the dark market.”
Was it right? It is, so far. Getting high off your keyboard is not happening yet, at all. But 3D-printing technology is advancing so quickly (they can already print some medicines) that in another ten years I might have to eat my words.
So, what about my predictions for 2035?
We will be living in an increasingly techy drug world, one driven on by cutting-edge marketing and PR stunts—and where any dose or combination of psychedelic highs can be taken in ways that make injecting, snorting, and smoking look retro. As the authorities turn their attention to more pressing crimes, impending global disasters, and working out what is real and what is not, the heat will come off the drug trade, which is allowed to flourish, leading to spiralling, but easily treatable, addiction waves.
Follow Max Daly on X @narcomania
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