Potentially, but death is still pretty rare with impure MDMA and the effects can be felt. It's also a social drug, so I would imagine most buyers purchasing ~tens of pills and sharing them with friends. One would probably leave a bad review if a friend died.

Testing kits and services are also available so you could review the quality without even taking the drug.

Be forewarned: A lot of these kits only test for the presence of, not quality/purity of, MDMA and other forms of E. That being said, someone would definitely pipe up and say "this killed my friend" if something were to go wrong.

A test I learned in jail from petty computer trespassing charges when I was a kid is to light a small amount of powder on fire sitting on foil, if the residue is cherry red it's mainly mdma and not piperazines. Once again prison is criminal university.

If regeant testing a pill break it in half and test the inside too since often the outside is coated in mdma and the inside is shitty pipes

Drugs are social, most people who buy from SR will have at least one friend who know where they got them and would go out of their way to warn others.

MDMA almost never kills people, it's far safer than alcohol or most other drugs. The chance of serious selection bias is unlikely.

More likely there is bias because sellers can edit listings without losing the existing rating.

The Marquis reagent is commonly used to test MDMA. It will readily distinguish MDMA from cathinones (aka 'bath salts') which is a common adulterant or substitute. Operations like Dance Safe have popularized this, and the demographic using the deep web seems to be particularly aware of this test and its value.

Marquis, Mandolin, Mecke and Simon are all sold on DanceSafe and are used to determine only whether a substance contains MDMA (or other similarly desired chemicals) and whether or not it contains PMA and PMMA (undesirable and toxic chemicals). It does not ascertain the quality of such substances nor does it establish concentrations beyond trace amounts. Thank you for your input.

You can test it without ingesting it. With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few people were smart enough to sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.

> With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few people were smart enough to sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.

I guess that it depends on how easy it is to test it. If it requires a chemistry degree and a lab I am guessing they won't test even if they are otherwise smart.

Testing is actually pretty easy, you can get a fairly comprehensive test kit from dancesafe.org[0] for $65.00.

[0]: http://www.dancesafe.org/product/coomplete-adulterant-screen...

Holy flippin' mark-up! $65 for four bottles that contains maybe $1-2 worth of chemicals?

Anyways, as someone stated above, these kits test for the presence of MDMA, not necessarily all adulterants. There is the issue of cross-reactivity as well.

It's better than nothing, but I'm not sure I would trust a drug that hadn't been run through an HPLC.

There are professional labs offering free testing in The Netherlands, Spain and other European countries.

Still illegal in France, IIRC. We really have an outdated policy regarding drugs...

France has a severe NIH syndrome.

There are simple reagent test kits that are reasonably accurate and affordable.

Not to mention how simple/easy it is to test any of these common drugs.

Think about it quantitatively. MDMA has always been tops in the rankings (not just this one, but DARCs and others), implying it's been sold to at least tens of thousands of customers. If the worst MDMA would rank 1 and normal MDMA 5 and half the MDMA sold is bad (to maximize the possible impact on the rating), then you'd have to have thousands of people croaking after taking the bad MDMA in order to produce an average of 4.9 (to pull down the average by .1 using ratings of 1). In contrast, I've seen media reports of maybe 2 deaths clearly linked to drugs bought off the black-markets (psychedelics which were RCs and led to fatal accidents).

Test kits are cheap, ~$25 on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/NIK-Drug-Test-Kit-Methamphetamine/dp/B...

The Silk Road (and presumably the darknet markets that followed it) let any user contest the charge and get their money automatically, which they almost certainly would do if they got MDMA that tested badly.

Further, if this happens too many times, the marketplace will just seize the account. Vendor accounts are expensive, so it doesn't make economic sense to sell bad shit.

These test the presence of substances; they don't test the absence of toxins.

There exist readily available test kits to check the purity. No consumption necessary. And of course it's just as important to look at the number of ratings. But you're probably being tongue in cheek.