BBC investigation: How 'cocaine for the poor' is destroying Russia

A growing number of young people - many of whom are still in school - are using, producing and distributing the synthetic drug mephedrone.

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Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

03.11.2025. 18:59h

Warning! This text contains details about drug use and production that may be disturbing to some.

Russia has found itself in the tight grip of a synthetic drug epidemic that many have compared to the fentanyl crisis in the United States.

A growing number of young people - many of whom are still in school - are using, producing, and distributing the synthetic drug mephedrone.

Known as "cocaine for the poor," mephedrone is cheap and easy to make.

Russian police are fighting a losing battle to prevent supplies of so-called precursors, essential raw materials, from being smuggled out of China and delivered to a constantly replenishing chain of makeshift laboratories across the country.

BBC Russian Service and BBC Eye gained unique access to the entire chain of production, distribution and use, revealing the scale of the harm this drug is causing to a generation of young Russians.

'Dreams come true'

Eighteen-year-old Maxim (his name has been changed) woke up on July 22, 2023, in a rented apartment in the center of a small town in southern Russia.

At ten in the morning, the sun was already shining brightly, and Maksim was late for work at a nearby café.

The apartment was a mess: the tables were covered with crumpled cloths, glass bottles, and plastic syringes; piles of garbage bags were stacked in the corner; the kitchen was cluttered with boxes of baking soda mixed with empty ampoules.

Maxim was used to sleeping in his clothes without a blanket.

Broad-shouldered and tall, with neatly trimmed hair and a large watch on his wrist, he looked older than he was.

Quickly jumping to his feet, he grabbed a lump of damp white powder, wrapped it in a cut piece of towel, stuffed it all into his gym bag, and left the apartment.

He peeked through the window on the staircase.

Down in the yard, overgrown with hazelnut trees, he could see two men in tracksuits.

Maxim hesitated - for weeks he had been haunted by the same paranoia: at night he was tormented by nightmares that people would break into his apartment.

During the day, when he went to work, he would circle the block to make sure no one was following him.

But on the morning of July 22nd, he was in a hurry and decided to ignore all those fears, stepping quickly out of the building.

He was immediately hit with punches; a bag was pulled over his head and he was pushed into a car.

As he later wrote in his diary, being caught was actually a relief for him: "I relaxed. It was a long-awaited rest."

Briefly left alone in the car, Maxim began to sing the words to a popular Soviet pop song:

"Dreams come true. And they don't... But good things are never forgotten."

'I can make money from this'

For the next few months, Maxim recorded details from his life in two school exercise books that he later shared with the BBC.

He called these diaries-memoirs his "confession" and on the cover of one of the notebooks (the cover shows a ginger cat hugging a teddy bear, tilting its head mischievously) he wrote a pseudonym: MANDRAGORA - a name he borrowed from the Harry Potter books.

"These were difficult times for our family," Maksim wrote.

"We lived in poverty for a long time."

The family moved from the Urals to a small town in southern Russia and began building a house there.

They had to sleep on jackets spread out on the concrete floor and kept warm by burning boards left over from the construction.

"A year later, my stepfather died and we were left alone - my mother, my four-year-old sister and me."

Tatyana, Maksim's mother, worked as a nurse, but money was scarce.

Maxim "felt like a loser" compared to his classmates who had "new clothes, phones and school lunches."

To earn money, he sold cigarettes by the piece, and then decided to look for something more lucrative.

Drug sales in Russia are depersonalized: orders are stored in stacks, and the coordinates of those locations are sent to customers.

Realizing that there were no legal job opportunities for a 15-year-old, Maksim moved his job search to the messaging app Telegram, where he immediately came across ads looking for couriers of illegal drugs.

Drug dealing in Russia happens online and has become completely depersonalized: buyers are given coordinates to a crate (usually a small amount of the drug) and go there to pick it up. Alone.

These crates are made by the man in charge of them, or kladmen in Russian - who receives a bulk shipment from a dealer, breaks it into smaller portions and sends the coordinates to the supervisor, who then forwards them to the specific buyer.

The man in charge of the crates usually pays per delivery (payments are sometimes made in cryptocurrency), but he risks much more than he earns.

In Russia, the bettors are often young people who end up with long prison sentences for just a handful of deliveries.

Maksim recalls his first experience as a bookmaker.

He was told he would receive the coordinates of a bulk drug shipment.

His job was to collect it, divide it into smaller portions, and then hide them all over the city.

"I was sitting with a friend in the back of class. He was doing both his and my class assignments, while I sat, sweating and shaking, waiting to get the address."

"During the fourth period I got the address, and by the end of the sixth period I was already on the bus to the city."

Mephedrone has become Russia's most popular drug

The coordinates led him to a snow-covered forest area.

"I dug in the snow until dark, texting my supervisor that I couldn't find the box. My phone was about to explode from my mother's call, but my supervisor wouldn't let me postpone the job until the next day, so I went home and snuck out again that night to make deliveries."

Maxim was paid 200–300 rubles (about three to four euros) for each steak.

“I was stupid to work for that money,” he commented years later.

But he wasn't just motivated by money, but also by the adrenaline rush of selling illegal substances.

"And what if I could make money from it? That was just awesome."

With the money he earned, he used to buy groceries at the grocery store, and once even treated himself to a quality coat with a fur collar.

"For the first month, that coat was in a bag under my bed," recalls Maxim - he couldn't explain to his mother where he got such an expensive thing, so he was afraid to wear it in her presence.

Maksim continued to do this job for a few more years.

When he turned 16, after finishing ninth grade, he started working part-time as an assistant chef when he saw that a drug dealer was hiring "chemists" - people who could synthesize Russia's most popular drug: mephedrone.

'Cocaine for the poor'

Mephedrone first appeared in the early 2000s, when it was popularized by an Israeli chemist working under the pseudonym Doctor Z.

Mephedrone enters the brain faster than other synthetic drugs, producing euphoria, a surge of energy, sex drive, and sociability - but it also wears off more quickly, leading to severe withdrawal syndromes (anxiety and depression) and, as a result, rapid addiction.

Russia banned mephedrone and its ingredients in 2010, but that hasn't stopped its popularity from growing, especially among teenagers.

According to psychologist and rehabilitation center staff member Irina Medved, as well as the director of another rehabilitation center interviewed by the BBC, children in Russia are now trying drugs for the first time at the age of 12, and by the age of 14 many are already using mephedrone regularly.

Denis, an active narcologist and employee of a charity that works with drug users, points out that addiction develops very quickly in teenagers, and without help they risk death - either unintentionally or by suicide.

At the same time, getting help is extremely difficult: addicted teenagers fall into a “gray zone.”

"We are losing an entire generation," he warns.

It is estimated that around a third of all illegal drug sales in Russia now go to mephedrone.

The Russian research project DarkMetriks monitors and studies activity on darknet markets.

Incredibly, Russians who buy drugs on these sites often leave reviews for them.

Researchers studied reviews left on four popular marketplaces and found that in just one month, one-third of all reviews (more than 300.000 posts) were for mephedrone.

Since most users only leave feedback after their second or third purchase, this means that the true number of mephedrone purchases each month on these four sites could be as high as 700.000.

Continuing to study these figures, the researchers also took a random day in 2024 and counted how much mephedrone was available for sale across Russia on the two largest darknet marketplaces.

They found 617 kilograms of mephedrone on offer stored in crates ready for pickup in cities across the country - around a third of the total amount of all illegal substances for sale on the darknet that particular day.

'Merciless drug'

Eighteen-year-old Olya came to a Moscow laboratory to be tested for HIV and hepatitis.

She carries a backpack with a sweater for the evening, some makeup and - always - a supply of clean syringes.

For the next 15 minutes, two nurses try unsuccessfully to find a vein in Olya's arms; they only manage to draw blood after several attempts - the veins in her arms have burst from intravenous drug use.

Olja was first introduced to mephedrone by her boyfriend when she was 15 years old.

At that time, she lived on the outskirts of Moscow with a large family and was still attending school.

"It opened up a whole new world for me."

Within a few weeks, Olya was snorting mephedrone several times a week - it turned out that her boyfriend was also a dealer.

She recalls the period of her life between the ages of 15 and 17 as follows: without mephedrone, she would go "at most a couple of days in a row."

Soon after that she left school and started tusovat's - socializing and having fun.

At first, Olya liked her new life: "Everyone is either looking for money or drugs. And I had a boyfriend who deals drugs. That's it, I told myself, I'll stick with him."

But soon the first problems began - Olya's boyfriend was arrested, while her addiction to mephedrone deepened:

"I wasn't taking it to get high anymore, I was just taking it to wake up. And to get out of bed. To stay alive."

To get money and mephedrone, Olya went to parties organized in Moscow chat groups where men invited girls to "snort together."

She would post messages on Telegram asking her friends to come with her:

"Girls, a guy invited me to a party, who wants to come with me? Will he order us a taxi from my apartment?"

Everything turned darker when a friend gave her the contact information of a 60-year-old Moscow businessman.

Before their first meeting, the man asked her a seemingly innocuous question in the chat: "How's school going? What grade are you in? What do your parents do for a living?"

Olya's friend insisted that he just wanted to talk, but it quickly became apparent that what the man really wanted from 15-year-old Olya was sex.

"He would either give me mephedrone or money, which I was then spending on mephedrone anyway."

Olya met him several times: "I would have gotten high and gone to see him. For me, sober, that was impossible."

He soon suggested that Olya take some of her friends with her.

For every new girl, Olja says, she would receive a percentage.

"He wanted a schoolgirl after all. I would send a message to that man if I could get him a girlfriend."

"'Show me her pictures. How old is she, where does she go to school?' It was like a questionnaire. If he liked her, he'd say, 'Okay, come by.'

"We would go to his place, have sex, take the money and leave. Later I even started asking for a percentage from the girls themselves - I wanted more drugs, and the prices kept going up."

"I would lie on the bed, hold their hand and try to calm them down, while only one thought would run through my head: 'I'll just do my job, I'll take the money or the mephedrone. And then I'm not interested in you anymore.'"

"Mephedrone wipes out everything: your sense of worth, your self-esteem, your love for yourself, for your family, for your friends."

"If you took a cigarette and put it out on your skin - it would leave a hole in your flesh. Well, that's what mephedrone does to you - it burns everything. It's a ruthless drug," says Olja.

In March 2023, Olya's mother decided to send her 17-year-old daughter to rehab.

"I looked like a skeleton, my nose was burned from the drugs, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep - I didn't care about anything except the next dose," she recalls.

Olya spent seven months in a closed rehabilitation center, counting down the days until her release.

Four months after she came out, in March 2024, Olya contacted the BBC.

She told us that she had found a job.

She said she only gave in once, but that after that experience she decided she was done with mephedrone for good.

Unfortunately, that won't last.

'Any schoolboy can cook it'

All the rehabilitation centre staff and drug treatment professionals interviewed by the BBC agree on one thing: mephedrone is popular because it is available and cheap - easy to buy or, if you know where to look, even find in a hidden stash intended for someone else.

Mephedrone is also popular among manufacturers because it is cheap and easy to make.

It costs between 30.000 and 150.000 rubles (300 - 1.500 euros) to make a kilogram of mephedrone, according to dealers the BBC spoke to.

The street value of one kilogram of mephedrone is around two million rubles (20.000 euros), according to research group DarkMetriks.

"To make other synthetic drugs you still need great precision and expensive equipment," says Nikolai (his name has been changed) - a chemist who writes guides for people learning how to 'cook' synthetic drugs.

"Mephedrone became popular with manufacturers because you could make it in the kitchen. Now any schoolchild can cook it."

His position is also supported by Renat Kuramshin - a former investigator for the Ministry of Internal Affairs who investigated large drug shipments to Russia:

"We're stopping the big hashish supply. We stopped the big heroin supply. Something had to replace it. And mephedrone arrived."

"It's a drug that's easy to synthesize and can be produced anywhere, from central Russia to the Arctic Circle and beyond. You can open laboratories anywhere and cook in peace."

The BBC has gained access to a large number of guides to synthesizing mephedrone.

They describe the production process in detail.

"These instructions are aimed at someone who has taken chemistry classes in school and received a grade of three or higher," says the introduction to one such 157-page guide.

The manual advises purchasing the necessary supplies at household chemical stores or home distillery stores (but in both cases it's best not to attract attention).

It explains how to find private homes or apartments for laboratories, and provides step-by-step instructions on how to mask odors and dispose of liquid toxic waste (which, the authors complain, inexperienced cooks pour down the drain).

He also offers general advice (the main one being - don't waste what you make and always have a reliable cover for being in an empty parking lot at 1am: "I have to pee" is also legendary).

Despite all these precautions, mephedrine labs in Russia are being shut down every two to three days - in 2024 alone, more than 138 such labs were shut down (about half of the drug labs shut down by the police).

To start cooking, Maksim, the assistant chef, ordered basic equipment for synthesizing mephedrone from one of the darknet markets.

These kits are called constructors because of their simplicity of manufacture - the set contains several containers with ordinal numbers and you just follow the instructions: "mix number one and two, then pour into number three."

"It's like building a dragon out of Legos. You don't have any extra bricks in your Lego box, do you?"

"The kit also has no extra parts. And following the instructions, you will assemble mephedrone from reagents," explains Maksim.

He told the BBC that the kit was sent to his regular supermarket pickup location.

The young man decided to cook drugs in an abandoned public bathroom - he checked for electricity, arranged the containers and began to follow the instructions.

But he did something wrong and the vessel exploded during the reaction, spilling the reagent out.

"The bathroom became deadly to be in. My body was burning, my eyes refused to open, and I could no longer breathe through my nose."

Running outside, Maxim lost control of his bowels and felt nauseous.

"I thought I was going to die," he recalls in diaries he gave to the BBC.

On the bus ride home, Maksim noticed that passengers were making fun of him because of his smell.

The next experiment was also unsuccessful, and it was only on the fourth or fifth attempt that Maxim managed to synthesize mephedrone.

"And those hundred grams sold very quickly," he recalls.

"Synthesizing drugs - it's not scary at all. It's just that you don't understand what you're actually doing. It says here: mix number one and number three. And you mix number one and number three."

"I had that youthful maximalism. I didn't realize what it could lead to. I even opened channels and boasted about my own successes online."

The BBC asked Maksim if he felt responsible for the fact that many of his peers became addicted to the mephedrone he was making.

"So what? I got hooked on mephedrone too," Maksim replied quickly.

"I don't blame some dealer who sold it to me when I was 15. That's up to everyone. Everyone decides for themselves whether to take it or not. Whether to put a cross over their own life or not."

At 17, Maksim was leading a double life - living in a rented apartment and working as a (real) chef in a cafe.

He would go to work in the morning and return home at noon and start cooking mephedrone: he moved the laboratory from an abandoned public bathroom to a rented apartment, where he installed a ventilation system and plugged the gaps in the doors to hide the strong smell of the chemical reaction.

In one room, he would set up a large container in which the reaction would take place; the process would take about 12 hours, so that by morning Maksim would be free to go back to his legal job.

At work, people would start to notice a strange smell on him and ask him what it was - Maksim would tell them it was from the chemical work being done in his apartment building.

He explained the smell to his mother by saying that he had left his clothes next to the vegetables at work.

Tatjana (his mother) visited his apartment several times and did not notice anything suspicious.

But his double life began to take its toll on him.

"Once a week I dreamt I was being arrested. I would wake up in a cold sweat, throw everything in the toilet and flush, and break all the glassware."

Asked why he continued to synthesize drugs, Maxim, after a short pause, quickly replied:

"It's like taking drugs. You sell it once. You realize you can make money from it. You realize it brings you adrenaline, new emotions...

"When you do it for a long time, addiction sets in and it's hard to stop yourself and say, 'No, that's it, I'm not selling drugs anymore.' That doesn't happen. It's like something inside you is forcing you to keep doing it."

In his diary, Maxim was more direct: "Drug abuse is my addiction, without it I go through withdrawal symptoms."

How drug raw materials reach Russia

One sunny Saturday in a city outside of Russia, 17-year-old Dan (his name has been changed) sits on the balcony of his rented apartment, vaping and constantly checking his phone.

He wears a perfectly pressed white shirt and sips a non-alcoholic beer.

Dan works for a darknet company that coordinates the supply of raw materials, chemicals, and equipment for drug production.

On the day the BBC met him, he was remotely controlling the production of mephedrone - advising the "chemists" who were supposed to carry out the work.

While we were talking to him, he was regularly receiving calls from people from Russia checking the details of how to "cook" mephedrone.

He showed us some of those conversations.

Before we met with Dan, BBC journalists spent months talking to him and confirming that he was indeed involved in the supply of raw materials and the production of drugs.

During one of the calls that day, the “chemists” complained about their equipment leaking.

The internet connection was unstable and eventually the call was disconnected.

Dan could only guess - maybe the police had raided them, maybe the fumes were interfering with the connection, or maybe their phone's battery had simply run out.

Dan says very little about himself: he's not yet 18, but he's already been in the drug business for several years.

One of the main challenges, he says, is sending precursors for mephedrone to Russia.

There are two that cost between 18 and 40 thousand rubles (180-400 euros) per kilogram.

The main difficulty is not the price, but the import process: since 2022, both substances have been included in the list of drug precursors, and their circulation is now very limited.

Renat Kuramshin, a former investigator for the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, says that illegal drug producers in Russia now have two options for obtaining precursors.

These are legal production of chemicals in Russia (but this option has drawbacks - the police closely monitor precursors used in legal industry, so any "leakage" of precursors for illegal use will immediately arouse suspicion), or imports from China.

The Chinese route mimics the way precursors for the synthetic opioid fentanyl are smuggled into the US - with packages hidden in legal Chinese bulk imports - often in collusion with both Chinese and Mexican organized crime groups.

Fentanyl use in the US in 2022 led to 73.654 deaths - eight people per hour.

Drug traffickers in Russia are using an identical scheme, the BBC has discovered.

"In China, chemical production is developed," explains former narcotics detective Renat, drawing maps on a school exercise book.

"They produce not only common chemicals, but also precursors for narcotics. But at the border checkpoints between China and Russia they are well known and controlled. It is dangerous to transport them directly."

"In China, the shipment is prepared and hidden among legal goods that at first glance will not arouse the suspicion of the police. They go where there is less inspection, so they send it all to Kazakhstan."

Since Kazakhstan and Russia are part of the Eurasian Customs Union, Renat continues, "there is practically no border there," and then "the shipment is delivered."

Some of it is stored in Moscow, which serves as a logistics center for supply, and the rest is sent directly to other regions.

Dan, the importer, confirms that he buys precursors from China disguised as other legal chemicals - for example, pesticides: "Completely legal logistics are used. A truck transporting precursors from China could be carrying anything from sneakers to vibrators," he says.

The BBC also gained access to a closed chat room of wholesale drug dealers where the synthesis and supply of precursors was discussed.

The BBC followed the conversation for more than six months: users congratulated each other on national holidays, complained about unreliable suppliers and staff shortages, and occasionally discussed precursor shipments.

According to this correspondence, the “standard route” for delivering precursors is from China via Kazakhstan.

To confirm the route and method of delivery, posing as the buyer, the BBC contacted several Chinese factories selling fentanyl precursors.

In particular - the Amarvel Bio factory, some representatives of which were arrested in Fiji in 2023 and extradited to the United States on charges of money laundering and trafficking in fentanyl precursors.

Shortly thereafter, the same factory began expanding its operations to Russia, actively advertising and targeting buyers of mephedrone precursors.

A BBC journalist contacted the factory posing as a buyer, and factory representatives assured him that the delivery would be made safely and sent him a tracking number for the shipment, which, according to them, had already been sent to a client in Russia.

The cargo also passed through Kazakhstan.

Other factories also sent tracking numbers to the BBC correspondent, and these shipments were also sent through Kazakhstan.

Representatives of the Amarvel Bio factory sent the BBC a photo of the warehouse where, according to them, the cargo can be picked up.

The photo showed a yellow portable building, in front of which were boxes wrapped in yellow tape.

In October 2023, the BBC managed to geolocate this photo - the portable structure was located on the territory of the 'Yuzhnyaya Vorota' (South Gate) shopping mall in Moscow.

And in January 2024, 'South Gate' was mentioned in correspondence among drug dealers in a closed group - according to participants, arrests became more frequent there when couriers came to pick up precursors.

"South Gate" is called a "center of 'gray' customs clearance" in publications about the delivery of goods from China.

In the constant influx of goods from China and Kazakhstan, a barrel of precursors can easily be hidden.

Renat Kuramshin confirms that such shopping malls can be widely used among drug manufacturers and suppliers:

"Each such shopping mall is a small city, where anything can be hidden - from a luxury car to a ton of heroin or mephedrone," he says, standing about a hundred meters from a yellow portable structure whose photo was sent to a BBC correspondent by an employee of the Amarvel Bio factory.

Behind Renato, boxes wrapped in yellow tape are being actively unloaded.

'Yuzhnyaya Vorota' is owned by influential Moscow entrepreneur Godo Nisanov, who also owns the 'Sadovod' shopping center and the 'Moskva' exhibition complex.

According to reports in the Russian online media outlet 'Baza', the 'Moskva' shopping complex is also being used as a final point for the delivery of precursors from China.

The management of 'Južnije Vorota' did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.

Dan, a supplier, told the BBC that 'South Gate' is a favorite destination for drug traffickers because it is easy to hide barrels of precursors in the nearby forest for manufacturers and couriers to pick them up later.

To show us how the system works, Dan sends instructions to a courier in Moscow - telling him that several barrels of precursors have been left for collection under a large fig tree near the highway, 60 kilometers from the Moscow Ring Road.

'Now I'm the one making the money'

While we are talking to Dan, he receives a call from the 'chemists' from Russia with whom he has been in contact.

He's clearly relieved that this particular branch of his business model is safe for now, but he admits that everyone gets caught eventually.

"It will probably last three or four years," he says.

Almost all of them start out just wanting to make money and then leave, but the environment pulls them in deeply - "you want more and your life changes."

Cooking can bring in up to 200.000 rubles [2000 euros] per job.

- Do you feel responsible for selling drugs?

- Well, I don't run around playgrounds with syringes anymore.

- So what? It ruins people's lives.

- I'm not interested. People sell cigarettes, alcohol and stuff like that.

- Yes, alcohol is also a quite destructive substance.

- Yes, my father drank himself to death.

- So, you've experienced firsthand how destructive addiction can be. And now, in a way, you're acting like a sponsor of other people's addictions. Don't you see the contradiction in that?

- No, not at all.

- Why not?

- Well, back then, alcohol companies were making money, and now it's me.

From mephedrone to opiates

In Moscow, after only being clean for a few months, Olya succumbed again.

She started by injecting mephedrone intravenously - to achieve a stronger effect.

But then, one night at a party with friends, realizing that mephedrone wasn't working for her the way it used to, she decided to try heroin.

The next morning, friends found Olya "on the mattress, blue with a bloody mouth."

A seventeen-year-old boy who was sleeping on a nearby mattress died.

After that incident, Olja and her friend were called to the police station for questioning.

"We weren't even in school for long," the 18-year-old explained in response to police questions.

Death doesn't seem scary.

After the party, Olya thought it over carefully - she could have easily died that night: "But they brought me back to life. So let's push on."

In the summer of 2024, Olya switched to methadone, a heroin substitute, which she took intravenously.

She posted videos about her own life.

In one of them, she stumbles through an underground passage in the Moscow metro in high heels, clearly having a makeover.

She wears a white faux fur coat, and her bright pink eyeshadow contrasts with her deathly pale face.

"Let's get high again, huh?" she asks her friend who's filming her. "Shall we?"

The BBC caught her walking through the park one evening.

Still sleepy from the previous night's party, she describes how she and her friends wander the city in search of drug crates - "you just have to look in the places where the people in charge of the crates usually hide things."

"I don't even like Moscow. There are so many drugs here. So many challenges," she says.

Olya talks about plans to leave the city to stay with her grandmother in Vladimir and try to get off drugs there.

But that's not happening.

After a walk in the park, Olja returns to her friend's apartment - in one room there are piles of bloody mattresses, while in the corner there is a sink with dried vomit or blood.

In a gloomy kitchen, with walls yellowed by cigarette smoke, Olya and her friend Vlad are making instant noodles and trying to remember where they left the money they had set aside for their next fix.

By evening they still haven't found him, so they decide to go for a walk to a nearby park and see if they can find the hidden boxes there.

"Honestly, I started thinking that I just wanted to throw myself out the window, just to forget about all this, that none of this existed anymore," says Olya.

"I want to live - but even death doesn't seem scary. I'm grasping at every straw."

'It's impossible to stop'

In the summer of 2023, Maxim was arrested - it turned out that the two guys in tracksuits who were watching his building were police operatives.

During a search of his rented apartment, they found drug synthesis equipment, 700 grams of mephedrone, precursor residue, and several bank cards.

Maksim and his partner were sent to pre-trial detention.

“When I was arrested, I felt a great sense of relief,” recalls Maksim.

"My head was overloaded. I had to go to work, prepare food at the restaurant, pay the rent..."

While in detention, Maksim began keeping a diary, which he later handed over to a BBC correspondent.

"A gray winter sky loomed over the city. The air was enriched with the sharp scent of freedom, and outside a light rain had begun to fall. Street lamps flickered in the distance," wrote Maxim, lying on the bed in his cell.

Relations with his cellmates were tense - the young man was forced to do the dirtiest jobs in the cell and they hated him for making drugs.

On days when the pressure from his cellmates increased, his diary entries became more emotional:

"My consciousness is reduced to four by ten meters. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. It reminds me of a student dormitory: TV, phone, fan, kettle. All good living conditions - but it's impossible to live there."

His mother Tatyana (her name has been changed) tried to get an answer while her son was in custody - why did he spend several years dealing drugs?

"He saw how hard his mother worked and how little she earned. And how much you could earn just by leaving a stack under a bench somewhere."

"Once he got a taste of easy money, it became difficult for him to stop," she says.

One day, while buying T-shirts for him, Tatyana smelled a familiar scent - the same scent that Maxim wore on him while he was making excuses.

In front of her stood a young man choosing a flashy tracksuit, and Tatyana realized: he was a chef who synthesized drugs.

She wanted to talk to him, tell him about her son, and tell him, "Stop it."

But when she saw his "satisfied face," she realized - "no pleas from a stranger's mother" would dissuade him from doing so.

"My son is gone - and 200 others have come in his place. This will never stop," she says.

'Lost generation'

In detention, Maksim thought about possible ways to "escape from prison" - he was facing a long prison sentence, which meant he would not be released until he was almost 30 years old.

"Who needs a man who has been to prison, has no education, and has spent half his life behind bars," he wrote.

To avoid serving the full sentence, Maksim decided to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense and go to fight in Ukraine.

When his accomplice Nikita found out that Maxim was planning to sign the contract, he sent him a message from the next cell:

"Brother, if you're already going to a special military operation [Russia's official name for its war in Ukraine], maybe you can take all the blame on yourself so I can get a lighter sentence."

"You're already going on a special military operation anyway, and it doesn't matter how long your sentence is there."

Maksim, who entered into an out-of-court settlement, was released from detention in January 2024 and placed under house arrest.

Before they put a splint on him, he was free to move around the city.

Standing in the forest where he once found his first stash, wearing a balaclava and a hood with the logo of a darknet shop, he recorded himself on video:

"I would have ended up in prison sooner or later. We knew what we were getting into. But 12 years - that's a lot."

His mother told the BBC that Maksim signed a military contract in July.

In August, his fellow students informed her that Maxim may have been killed in a combat mission.

In the fall of 2024, Maxim's official status was "missing in action."

Nikita, Maxim's partner in crime, according to Nikita's father, also planned to sign the contract and go to war.

During a meeting with BBC correspondents, Maxim's mother read his diaries for the first time and began to understand the depth of despair her son felt.

"A lost generation. We didn't know what to do. There were only deceptions everywhere... I lost everything because of drugs, insomnia and endless work."

"I let my family down, I let my mother down. I let my sister down, I let everyone down. I said it couldn't get any worse. But it was...

"The guilt I feel towards my family is endless. I will never be able to make up for it. Will I get a chance? I am in deep trouble."

During that time in Moscow, in the fall of 2024, Olya was taking heroin again.

She bought drugs using the money she was awarded as moral compensation - the man who had sex with Olya in exchange for money or drugs was arrested and prosecuted.

Olya was also suspected of bringing female friends to the man and taking a percentage from them, but she was not charged since she was under 18 at the time of the crime.

In November 2024, she was detained and placed under house arrest.

In May 2025, she was sentenced to six years in a penal colony for attempting to sell drugs.

Olya's mother refused to speak to the BBC.

In December 2024, Dan got back in touch with the BBC.

He said that the chemists he had called during our earlier meeting were now in prison, but that he now ran a much larger laboratory capable of producing mephedrone on an industrial scale.

He even sent a video that talks about production cycles of several kilograms of drugs.

More money for suppliers and dealers.

More ruined lives and more misery for families across Russia.

The BBC asked the Russian Interior Ministry for comment on the scale of the distribution of illegal mephedrone and the supply of precursors.

We didn't get an answer.

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