Tusi on TikTok:
the black market of
the pink drug

We analysed 504 accounts selling tusi, the ingredients to make it (also drugs such as ketamine and MDMA), or its recipes. Together they have 289,774 followers. This is what we found:

• 395 videos explicitly showing tusi or the formula to make it, with more than 23.7 million views .
• Most of the profiles operate in three countries: Peru (45%) , Colombia (32.7%) and Spain (6.3%) .

Tusi is a drug based on ketamine and MDMA that can cause intense dissociation, tachycardia and renal problems

• There is no official data on tusi use in Spain, but the 2025 ESTUDES survey lists ketamine, its main component, among the “new psychoactive substances” that students aged 14 to 18 have taken at least once.

Sellers use WhatsApp Business, Telegram and TikTok direct messages to contact clients and act like a delivery service

• If you buy a pack there is a discount, and some throw in the recipe for free. We spoke to 13 of them .
• They send recipes as PDFs , videos showing how to make tusi and even the illegal ingredients to do it. Their TikTok accounts show how they prepare it and which countries they ship to.
• They also offer one-to-one video calls to walk you through it step by step.

From Italian brainrot to The Pink Panther by way of Haaland memes

• Pop culture, cartoons, fluorescent pink and playful formats are used to attract customers in TikTok’s own language .
• It also makes it easier to slip past the platform’s moderation systems and lower the sense of risk, along with simple variants of the word tusi, such as tussi , and emojis like the 🍓.
• This is the code of the tusi black market on TikTok, under the hashtag #tussisabes .

This investigation was also possible thanks to TikTok’s own algorithm:

• Although it would not let us search directly for ‘tusi’ in the search suggestions, the ‘For You’ feed and the AI summaries kept showing us accounts, keywords and even specific places selling recipes, ingredients and the drug itself.
• The ‘For You’ feed also offered us a lot more than tusi: from the market for other drugs to videos recruiting escorts to fund our supposed new addiction.

• We have reported over 100 accounts to TikTok that repeatedly show, sell, or cook drugs in their videos; the platform has taken no action, despite its own rules prohibiting the “demonstration of or incitement to drug use” and the “provision of instructions.”
• Although TikTok did remove the 15 specific videos we reported for containing illegal content under EU law, it allowed the accounts to continue operating as if nothing had happened.
• Under European Union law, TikTok is required to take effective measures to mitigate specific systemic risks , including—specifically—the “dissemination of illegal content through its services” and any other risk that has an “actual or foreseeable negative effect on the protection of public health and serious negative consequences for the physical and mental well-being of individuals.”