Greece’s ex-finance minister Varoufakis charged over use of ecstasy decades ago

Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, a self-declared “erratic” Marxist, has been charged with promoting drug use after he publicly admitted to having popped an ecstasy pill nearly four decades ago, his party said.

The economics professor, who infuriated euro zone partners with his unconventional style and lectures during bailout negotiations at the peak of Greece’s debt crisis in 2015, said he had once tried ecstasy or MDMA – a drug commonly associated with dance parties and raves – in Australia in 1989.