DragonFLY: The Drug that Keeps You High for Days

It’s a hallucinogen so potent it will keep you high for days on end. It’s powerful, it’s cheap, and in most places, it’s totally legal.

Known as Bromo-Dragonfly, it puts all other psychedelic drugs that came before it to shame. It’s twice as strong as LSD, has similar stimulant effects to meth, and is growing in popularity across the world’s party scene.

But where the heck did this ominous drug come from? How has it remained legal in so many places for so long? And how have its effects led to overdose, hospitalisation, and even death?

This is the most powerful narcotic you’ve likely never heard of. It might be labelled “not for human consumption”, but those who do take it are in for one hell of a ride.

Making Dragons Fly

So, what is this mystical “Bromo-Dragonfly”? And why does it have a name that sounds like a jiu jitsu gym that Instagram influencers go to? Well, it’s a synthetic, designer, hallucinogenic drug. Ok, great, but what does that really mean?

Well, synthetic means that it was artificially created in a lab, as opposed to natural narcotics that can be found around the world in the wild like various kinds of mushrooms and some cannabis plant species. A designer drug is one that is engineered to recreate or simulate the effects of traditional illicit drugs, either to up their strength, or to escape regulation from the law. It’s quite common for designer drugs to have inconsistent ingredients, alongside little information on dosages and the health impacts of taking them owing to the ceaseless tinkering with the molecular structure of it to stay one step ahead of the law. And as for hallucinogens, well it’s rather obvious, they make you hallucinate, which some people find to be a pretty fun time.

So obviously the chemical name of this synthetic, designer hallucinogen isn’t actually dragonfly, that’s just a nickname. Its full name is bromo…furo…benzo—this. And it’s known as dragonfly because its chemical structure looks as close to a dragonfly as you can get in a chemistry formula, with two wings, a head, and a long tail.

It’s actually designed to mimic the psychedelic effects of the 70s hallucinogenic drug known as 2C-B, which looks quite similar and comes in powder and pill form. However, dragonfly also seems to have similar stimulant and psychoactive effects to well-known drugs like LSD, amphetamine, methamphetamine, and MDMA.

Dragonfly also goes by a number of other nicknames as many drugs tend to do. It’s known as Fly, ABDF, 2CB-Fly, DOB-Dragonfly, BDF, Placid, Spamfly and B-fly. We’ll just call it dragonfly, or Bromo-Dragonfly, as that’s what most places seem to call it.

As far as recreational drugs go, Bromo-Dragonfly is pretty new, pretty powerful, and pretty scary. It was first synthesised back in 1998 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in the lab of professor David Nichols. Scientists there were doing research on the central nervous system, as well as serotonin receptor activity and structure.

Quick aside: serotonin is the happiness chemical your brain releases in response to certain stimuli. And during this time, they managed to create Bromo-Dragonfly, which means that this hallucinogenic drug was designed in a science lab with the concept of maximising the amount of serotonin you can possibly receive, “just for funsies”. Because there are absolutely zero medical uses for dragonfly whatsoever, even today.

And trust me when we say it is powerful.

ED50 is a metric used in science that represents the dose of a medication that it takes to produce the intended pharmacological effects. Basically, it’s a score of how much of this stuff it takes you to become high as a kite and start seeing things. Those same researchers found that dragonfly was around twice as potent as LSD. You know, acid?

The drug that makes you feel like you can move through other dimensions? Yeah, just double that. But not only that, dragonfly is also longer-lasting than almost any drug you can take, legal or illegal. A regular dose of Bromo-Dragonfly can keep you high for up to three days, which is simply far too long to ever be tripping out for.

But how has this hallucinogen spread throughout the world if it’s so dangerous? Why can’t countries do much about it? And where do people even get such a niche psychedelic anyway?

Doses, Prices, and A Legal Crisis

At some point, this hilariously strong chemical substance’s formula was leaked and spread across the world. It was formally identified in 2008 amongst a new emerging trend of drug abuse during the internet monitoring activities of the Psychonaut Web Mapping Project. However, we know that dragonfly started buzzing onto the recreational drug scene some time in the early 2000s, which makes sense given the year it was created.

I mean, a hallucinogenic that makes you high for three days sounds like an early 2000s festival-goer’s dream. And since then, it has remained a niche, evolving and elusive substance that has been linked to a lot of overdoses and even several fatalities. We weren’t kidding when we said this stuff was strong.

But its stock is growing. Mostly it has seen popularity in Northern European nations like Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, but nowadays it sees use throughout Europe and the USA amongst any particularly vibrant party and rave scene. The onset of its effects are rather slow and being a party drug, it also ends up getting mixed with lots of other substances both legal and illegal—we’re talking marijuana, cocaine, prescription medications, alcohol, LSD, ketamine, amphetamines, and even other “legal highs”.

You don’t need me to tell you, that is rather ill advised for a drug that lasts for three days.

Bromo-Dragonfly comes in three main forms: powder, liquid, and blotter paper. The powdered form can be snorted, smoked, ingested, or even taken rectally. However, snorting the powdered crystals appears to cause the strongest intensity of the hallucinations as well as the worst side effects health wise, but we’ll get to that later.

The liquid form is usually injected directly into the bloodstream via a vein, but just like with the rectal use, this is both highly uncommon owing to the practicalities, whilst also being stupid dangerous because it is very easy to overdose when administering it in either way. The last and one of the most common ways to take dragonfly is orally, either in solution or on blotter paper.

The drug is dissolved in a liquid, which is then absorbed onto blotter paper, and once dried, it’s cut into individual squares, known as tabs, and taken by placing them under the tongue or swallowing them. You may have heard of “a tab of acid” in reference to LSD before—this is the same process. And it’s probably the safest way to take it also, as the doses are at least more accurate and the chances of overdose are lower. Some blotter papers are also sometimes made into art to make them more appealing.

And on top of all of that, it’s not only potent, convenient, and flexible, it’s also pretty cheap, at least as drugs go. A single gram of Bromo-Dragonfly can set you back over $400 dollars. “But you said it was cheap!” Well, that’s because the dose is commonly less than a single milligram.

A gram of this stuff would kill you, heck it might kill an elephant. A single dose on blotter paper can cost someone between $14 and $42 dollars, and given how much people tend to spend on booze at raves and festivals, that’s not a huge amount for several days’ worth of feeling like you’re living inside a kaleidoscope. But it can be even cheaper depending on the supply, demand, and the strength of the dose.

Generally speaking, there are two “batches” of dragonfly you can buy: the European batch, which is stronger, and the American batch, which is weaker. We couldn’t tell you why the strength is split geographically like this, other than by just assuming that Europeans have a higher tolerance for narcotics. And if you’ve ever been to Scotland, that is probably obvious to you.

In the Nordic nations and Romania, it actually became a major problem for the authorities in those countries because people started to die from it. They ended up outlawing dragonfly completely, but they are the only nations that have attempted to ban the hallucinogen outright.

And the reason for that is because it’s difficult to do so. Dragonfly in many parts of the world is considered a “legal high”, meaning that it isn’t distinctly prohibited by governments for people to have it, supply it, or take it. And even if it was, some boffin would simply change the formula by 0.1 percent and then you have a totally new substance to outlaw—it never ends. It’s kind of like changing George’s name in Of Mice and Men to Phil and then claiming that this makes it an entirely new work of fiction legally. Lest we forget that dragonfly itself is a descendant of 2C-B, a similar illegal chemical compound with a slightly different structure.

But even if you ban all of the 2C-B family of drugs, like the UK’s Psychoactive Substances Act in 2016 did by classifying them all as class A drugs for example, there are still ways around it. None of these drugs in the UK are legal to produce, supply or import for human consumption. And those last two words are important: “human consumption”. Because people will simply smack a “not for human consumption” sticker on their dragonfly, label it as plant food or something else, and then import it no problem.

Just because it says “not for human consumption”, doesn’t mean people are going to follow that advice. But at least the UK tried to do something. Most of Europe, alongside most states in the US, don’t outlaw it whatsoever. It is illegal in Oklahoma though.

And so, this “legal high” as it’s known in many parts of the world, continues to live in this legislative grey area in a lot of countries, where it’s not distinctly banned by name, but it doesn’t seem legal either. Such grey areas lead people to taking the substance under the guise that it is safe to do so. As we’re about to show you, that is absolutely false.

Highs and Lows

Ok, so you know where it is, what it costs, that it’s powerful, why people take it, and that it makes people see funny colours, but what is it about Bromo-Dragonfly that makes it so powerful, so sought after, and so horribly dangerous to its users?

So first, let’s talk a little about hallucinogens and what they actually do. When a person takes a hallucinogen in some form, it enters the bloodstream and ends up in the brain. Once there, it binds to your serotonin receptors—those are the bits in your brain that produce the happy chemical when you eat a bar of chocolate. Those receptors are then overwhelmed, causing one’s serotonin and dopamine receptors to fire repeatedly, and temporarily altering the brain’s understanding of everyday sensory input.

The scientific term for this is tripping balls.

And those hallucinations can manifest in all sorts of ways, but they’re mainly a false perception of someone’s core senses. If you were hallucinating, you might see, hear, smell, taste, or touch something that simply isn’t real. You might feel like someone is in a room with you when nobody is present, you may feel like you’re floating or flying, and you may feel as if you’ve entered an alternate reality completely.

And this mirrors the listed effects of dragonfly when you take it. There are many effects but common among them are hallucinations like visual or auditory distortions, a feeling of connection or belonging with other realities, a sense of peace and well-being, emotional stimulation, an altered perception of space and time, euphoria, increased associative thinking, prolonged sexual pleasure, and meeting with other entities. And as we stated before, these effects don’t just last for a couple of hours or a few minutes. They can last for two to three DAYS. 2C-B, the strong psychedelic dragonfly is based off, lasts about 10-15 hours by comparison.

Sounds great, right? Let’s all whack out the dragonfly and go meet space Jesus for a long weekend. But not so fast, because even if dragonfly sounds like the ride of a lifetime, it is catastrophically dangerous and we recommend enough that you should not take it. Mainly for a few reasons.

Reason number one: You have no idea what you’re taking. Because Bromo-Dragonfly is a synthetic drug, it looks like every other synthetic drug you’ve ever seen, usually some kind of ominous powder, pill, or liquid. Unless you are a chemist with a PhD and a full lab of equipment, you have no clue what’s in it. And because of its designer drug status, the formula can be tinkered with constantly, leading to adverse effects and further causing confusion about its ingredients. If you don’t know what something is, you probably shouldn’t put it in your body. Drugs like dragonfly and other synthetic hallucinogens are also sometimes mislabelled or marketed as something else, usually LSD. Someone wants to take a tab of acid at a festival to watch the pretty colours and instead they end up in the ICU.

Reason number two: It’s ridiculously potent. A typical dose reported by those who take it is between 200 and 800 micrograms—less than a pinch of salt. That makes it very hard to measure using something not very precise like your kitchen scales for example. So, people frequently take too much and overdose. And trust me, you don’t want to overdose on the drug that keeps you high for three days as standard. What’s worse is that the onset of dragonfly usually takes between six to eight hours to fully start to work. In that time, someone impatient may decide that they simply got a dud, and take more, or something else, which only makes that person’s problems 10 times worse when it finally does hit them. As a result, some users describe the effects of Bromo-Dragonfly as a bit like being strapped to a rocket, because you get extremely high and you can’t get off. It’s been described that the high simply “lasts too long and leaves you drained”, which seems a colossal understatement in our books.

Reason number three is it’s extraordinarily bad for your health. Like all psychoactive substances there is the possibility of addiction and the subsequent withdrawal, although scientists report that dependence on dragonfly is rare. Although despite it not being considered overly addictive, people can and do still get addicted to it. It’s designed to flood your brain with serotonin and dopamine after all.

But beyond just the possibility of addiction like with almost any drug, taking dragonfly can be severely dangerous for your body. We’re going to name every single medical complication that we’ve read has arisen in at least a handful of cases who have taken dragonfly, and it’s a long list so bear with us. They are: agitation; anxiety; blood vessel constriction in the extremities; confusion; delusions; diarrhoea; dilated pupils; extreme fever; flashbacks; headaches; heart problems; high blood pressure; insomnia; kidney failure; liver failure; memory problems; muscle tension; muscle breakdown; nausea; paranoia; restlessness; respiratory problems; seizures; sweating; twitching; and death.

This is without mentioning there are likely more undocumented effects as well because dragonfly has yet to be fully studied, and because of the changing formula.

But don’t just hear it from us—there are several stories in the media of people who took Bromo-Dragonfly on a whim and really ended up regretting it. One man from the UK stated his life-threatening experience:

“I threw up and then inhaled the contents of my stomach, and my lung collapsed. As the ambulance arrived, I had another fit and my heart stopped. They brought me back in the ambulance, and then my heart failed again as we reached the hospital.”

His dose cost him just £5. He stated that since his near-death experience he still struggled with severe flashbacks for some time afterwards as a result of the trauma to his body and mind.

But some weren’t so lucky as to just nearly die. The BBC reports that one 18-year-old user died after taking dragonfly. They were allegedly promised “a mellow hit, similar to acid but more enjoyable”. One case, which was reported in Denmark, saw an 18-year-old woman die after consuming liquid Bromo-Dragonfly.

Her autopsy revealed that she had a swelling of the lungs, swelling of the brain, enlargement of the spleen, irritation of the stomach and poor blood flow to the kidneys. Another patient in 2008 died in a Swedish hospital, having suffered convulsions, breathing problems, liver and kidney failure and on top of that, she lost several of her fingers and toes.

What we’re saying is, people do ultimately end up hospitalised by Bromo-Dragonfly for any number of reasons. Every person is different, with brain chemistry that reacts differently to certain substances, and an adverse reaction, either mentally or physically, could cause you serious harm that you might not recover from. You know how some people prefer never to smoke weed because it causes high levels of paranoia?

Well imagine someone having a similar negative reaction to something as dangerous as dragonfly. For all of its interesting and potent effects, the risk of becoming just another statistic in the hospital, or worse, the morgue, is simply too great.

But for now, there hasn’t been any forward movement on whether dragonfly is going to be banned. As mentioned, it is restricted in the Nordic nations owing to its popularity and abuse there causing authorities to need to step in, but in other countries it is still effectively legal if you slap plant food and “not for human consumption” labels on it. It remains in this legal grey area, which causes some people to believe that just because it’s not directly outlawed, that it therefore cannot be harmful.

And that assumption costs lives. People are still able to freely find it and its ingredients on the internet. And until more research is done into dragonfly to understand its effects in more detail, it will definitively stay that way, going under the radar of authorities.

Regardless of your opinions on drug prohibition, dragonfly needs to be researched and understood by the scientific community, not some bored chemist in his garage with too much spare time, to truly know how dangerous it is. That remaining unknown will continue to cost people their lives.

Some have made very small efforts to try and get the danger of dragonfly recognised. In 2007, it was listed in the EU early warning system as a new psychoactive substance, but nothing really developed from it. Several organisations have taken some preventative measures, like posters, and this includes an absolutely badass-looking pamphlet on dragonfly which, let’s be honest, isn’t going to make it appear any less cool to raving teenagers. But it’s something.

Ultimately, there is a long way to go. Bromo-Dragonfly is, at the end of the day, a niche hallucinogen designer drug amongst many. If it ever entered the mainstream, it might gather some attention. But let’s be real—by the time that happens, those who make designer drugs will have already changed the formula, or moved onto the next crazy compound for people to fry their receptors with.

Just say no.

Key Takeaways

• Bromo-Dragonfly is a potent synthetic hallucinogen, twice as strong as LSD.
• The drug is cheap, widely available, and often labeled as ‘not for human consumption’.
• Effects of Bromo-Dragonfly can last up to three days, leading to severe health risks.
• Users may experience a range of dangerous side effects, including organ failure and death.
• The drug’s legal status varies, with some countries banning it while others remain in a grey area.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Bromo-Dragonfly?

Bromo-Dragonfly is a synthetic, designer hallucinogenic drug that is known for its potency and long-lasting effects. It is twice as strong as LSD and has stimulant effects similar to methamphetamine.

How long do the effects of Bromo-Dragonfly last?

A regular dose of Bromo-Dragonfly can keep you high for up to three days.

What are the common forms in which Bromo-Dragonfly is available?

Bromo-Dragonfly comes in three main forms: powder, liquid, and blotter paper.

How is Bromo-Dragonfly typically consumed?

The powdered form can be snorted, smoked, ingested, or taken rectally. The liquid form is usually injected, and the blotter paper form is taken orally by placing it under the tongue or swallowing it.

What are the potential health risks associated with Bromo-Dragonfly?

Taking Bromo-Dragonfly can lead to a variety of health complications, including agitation, anxiety, blood vessel constriction, confusion, delusions, diarrhoea, dilated pupils, extreme fever, flashbacks, headaches, heart problems, high blood pressure, insomnia, kidney failure, liver failure, memory problems, muscle tension, muscle breakdown, nausea, paranoia, restlessness, respiratory problems, seizures, sweating, twitching, and even death.

Why is Bromo-Dragonfly considered a legal high in many places?

Bromo-Dragonfly is considered a legal high in many places because it is not distinctly prohibited by governments. Even if it were, the formula can be slightly altered to create a new substance that is not yet outlawed.

What are some of the nicknames for Bromo-Dragonfly?

Bromo-Dragonfly is also known as Fly, ABDF, 2CB-Fly, DOB-Dragonfly, BDF, Placid, Spamfly, and B-fly.

What are the common effects of Bromo-Dragonfly?

Common effects include hallucinations like visual or auditory distortions, a feeling of connection with other realities, a sense of peace and well-being, emotional stimulation, an altered perception of space and time, euphoria, increased associative thinking, prolonged sexual pleasure, and meeting with other entities.

What is the typical dose of Bromo-Dragonfly?

A typical dose reported by those who take it is between 200 and 800 micrograms, which is less than a pinch of salt.

What are the legal statuses of Bromo-Dragonfly in different regions?

Bromo-Dragonfly is restricted in the Nordic nations and Romania due to its popularity and abuse. In other countries, it is effectively legal if labeled as ‘not for human consumption’. It is illegal in Oklahoma and classified as a class A drug in the UK.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: DragonFLY: The Drug that Keeps You High for Days
• Hero image source by Abhijitsathe / openverse, by.

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