The quaalude comeback: a once ‘extinct’ drug from the 70s makes a resurgence

Mattha Busby Sun, September 6, 2026 at 6:41 PM UTC

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Quaaludes featured prominently in Martin Scorcese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street.Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy

Quaaludes all but vanished after the US banned the euphoria-inducing sleeping pills in 1984. The sweeping measure was the one unequivocal success of the “war on drugs”, since “ludes” were produced entirely by the pharmaceutical industry – which complied with the order to cease doing so.

“We eliminated the problem,” said former Drug Enforcement Administration diversion control head Gene Haislip. “We beat them.”

Then the 2013 movie Wolf of Wall Street plucked quaaludes from the annals of drug history and became a box office hit, making a new generation suddenly curious about the drug. It didn’t happen overnight, but now, thanks to niche underground chemists and exclusive drug concierges, quaaludes are back.

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Without the film, “quaaludes would have disappeared into oblivion”, says Jack Allocca, an honorary neuroscience fellow at the University of Melbourne and a drug pharmacology researcher. “It created such a hype around the drug. The people that are doing quaaludes are either connoisseur psychonauts, or they want to be ‘Wolf of Wall Street cool’.”

Quaaludes, a brand name for methaqualone abbreviated from “quiet interlude”, began inching their way into the pharmacopeia for drug nerds in earnest around 2018 via the darkweb, sourced from producers in South Africa, where underground chemists have long produced methaqualone. “Poppin’ all of these quaaludes, I cannot walk, it feels like I’m hovering,” one SoundCloud rapper and dealer sang in 2019 under the alias Quaalde Bandit. “Addicted to the drugs from the 70s, yeah.”

But since the end of the pandemic, they’ve been popping up more widely on certain Telegram drug menus, and Redditors are discussing their effects and optimal dosages.

“Everyone I first sold it to just knew it from the movie,” says the rapper, who did not wish to be named due to the illegality of selling quaaludes. “I’m glad it’s making a comeback. It really does help people connect.”

One regular consumer of quaaludes, who does not wish to be named because he manufactures psychedelic drugs, recalls his reaction was when he was first offered the drug at a party more than a year ago: “I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, dude.’ Because of Wolf of Wall Street, quaaludes have this proper vibe to them. They’re these very classy, ancient, extinct drugs.”

His understanding is that several chemists, mostly along the west coast, started synthesizing them because the demand for them grew after the success of the Oscar-nominated Wolf of Wall Street, but that it may have taken time to procure the precursors and establish a supply chain. “I don’t think many people were really aware of quaaludes before Wolf of Wall Street came out,” he says. “I didn’t know about them.”

The co-organiser of the party where he first took quaaludes has played a key role in reintroducing the drug to certain elite scenes. “Movies reawaken awareness about compounds,” he says. But the representation of quaaludes in the movie is akin to seeing someone chugging a whole bottle of mezcal and incapacitating themselves, he says: “It was not a great model of how it can be used to mitigate anxiety. They’re very pleasant and low-risk if used responsibly.”

In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio depicts the debauched, quaalude-addicted life of the convicted fraudster and former stockbroker Jordan Belfort, who wrote a 2007 memoir that captured a decadent era of excess and gave the film its name. “I take quaaludes 10 to 15 times a day for my ‘back pain’,” Belfort says casually in the movie.

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After the federal ban, quaaludes that had already been produced became increasingly desirable, and in 1993 Belfort discovered a batch of “Lemmon-714” quaaludes. He took too many and DiCaprio immortalizes an incident in which Belfort desperately crawled across the asphalt outside a country club and, immobilized by a prodigious quantity of methaqualone, attempted to open the door of his white sports car with his foot.

For Belfort, the sedative caused time to fracture into a puddle of drool and spent willpower. Somehow, near comatose, he managed to drive home, but he wrecked his Lamborghini in the process. Despite the chaos gradually enveloping Belfort’s life, his world of inhibitionless, quaalude- and cocaine-fuelled partying appears aspirational – particularly so given that when the movie came out quaaludes were effectively impossible to get hold of in the US.

Despite the near-fatal consequences of his “lude”-fuelled misadventures, and the obvious risks of addiction, the film etched quaaludes into popular legend, and taking them was made to seem fun, daring and even countercultural.

“The reappearance of quaaludes should surprise nobody: they are 100% back because of the film,” says drugs journalist Mike Power, author of Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That’s Changing How the World Gets High.

But it is unlikely that DiCaprio, director Martin Scorsese or even Belfort himself considered that the movie could trigger a resurgence in their use, even if it currently remains niche. Rather, the lack of availability of quaaludes perhaps made them feel more at ease with leaning into a degree of glorification in some of the scenes.

“A forgotten, esoteric, unavailable drug is the safest drug to put in a mainstream movie,” says Allocca.

Yet audiences immediately sought the drug. “Everyone I spoke to post-Wolf (at least, everyone who liked it) rapturously praised Terence Winter’s absurd dialogue, DiCaprio’s magnetism, Scorsese’s eye for beautiful grotesquerie,” wrote Angela Serratore in the Paris Review in 2014. “Most of them also included a half-whispered, wide-eyed aside: What exactly are quaaludes, and where can we get some?”

As of December 2025, Belfort appeared to remain out of the loop of their incipient renaissance. In an Instagram reel, he shows his 2.7 million followers “the quaalude corner” in his Miami Beach, Florida, home where a set of quaalude jars and art is on display. “This is the ode to quaaludes,” he says. “Thank God they’re illegal and I can’t get any, right?” In a clip earlier last year, he pretended to be on quaaludes – slurring his words and sloppily expressing love and gratitude – because so many people had apparently been asking him what the experience is like.

But quaaludes, which Bill Cosby also gave to younger women he allegedly wanted to sexually assault, aren’t to be taken lightly. The regular consumer of quaaludes, which have an uncommonly long half-life of up to 60 hours, totalled his truck after a night taking the drug in December and was lucky to emerge unscathed. And it was the physiologically addictive, potentially destructive potential of quaaludes which partly led to their scheduling four decades ago.

Quaaludes have a unique binding site on the brain’s Gaba receptor complex, which may contribute to compulsive use, with 117 related deaths in 1980 at their peak of popularity, often involving alcohol and other depressant drugs, and tolerance develops rapidly – requiring ever larger doses to achieve similar effects.

“People would lie down to go to sleep and just not wake up,” says Justin Gass, the author of Quaaludes (Drugs: The Straight Facts).

“If you are using methaqualone, it is important to be aware of the signs of addiction,” the drug information organization Drug Science says. “You may become angry or irritable when you run out of the drug, you may lose interest in your hobbies and your methaqualone use may be putting strain on your personal relationships.”

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”