Pubdate: Sun, 06 Aug 2000 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company Contact: 229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036 Fax: (212) 556-3622 Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://www10.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: Alan Feuer DISTILLING THE TRUTH IN THE ECSTASY BUZZ Every other week, it seems, the authorities convene another news conference to announce another sweep, another bust, another gigantic distribution network crushed. Stick your head out the window these days and you cannot help hearing about Ecstasy. Seizures of the little white pills have occurred so often in recent months that it is beginning to feel as if law enforcement officials are doing little else besides cracking down on the drug. Mafia turncoats are charged with moving it in Arizona. Israeli mobsters are caught distributing it in Brooklyn. Even New Jersey college students are rounded up on quiet campuses, accused of selling it to their peers. Ecstasy, a euphoria-producing psychedelic known to chemists as MDMA, has been around since 1912, when it was introduced in Europe as a potential appetite suppressant. It was readily -- if illegally -- available to those who cared to find it 5, 10, even 15 years ago. So why has the discussion about Ecstasy reached such a fever pitch now? Clearly, the concern about the drug is grounded in fact. It no longer is used by "club kids" alone but has spread into the professional world. It turns up in airport searches and nightclub raids, and law enforcement officials say it is pouring into the country in precedent-setting amounts. But the much-publicized crackdown has attained an almost breathless quality as each new case is touted as the biggest, the broadest to date, and as newspaper headlines and magazine covers proclaim the drug to be the scourge of the moment. At a time when less public attention is being paid to marijuana, cocaine and heroin, the fight against Ecstasy provides a renewed look into how the machinery of the drug war works in this country. It also opens a window on the lingering tensions between the authorities who prosecute the war and the drug treatment experts and sociologists who say that a law enforcement approach may result in splashy stories about arrests but is unlikely to stem drug use or the public health problems it causes. Law enforcement statistics on Ecstasy tell only part of the story, but that part is powerful. New York City officials say seizures of Ecstasy at Kennedy Airport alone have risen to 858 pounds in 1999 from 68 pounds in 1997 and 8 pounds in 1996. Nationwide, federal agents have confiscated 8 million doses of the drug this year, dwarfing the 3.5 million pills seized last year and the 750,000 in 1998, the Customs Service said. Last week, a cadre of the country's top drug officials gathered in Washington to talk about the Ecstasy trade. The prognosis was grim: use of the drug is soaring, they said, particularly among the young. Moreover, the authorities have said, the popularity of Ecstasy is slowly spreading beyond the narrow confines of the youth culture, where a typical user pops a pill or two before an evening out and rolls through a night of dancing awash in the empathetic, supersensual haze that gives the drug its name. Ecstasy, they say, has started infiltrating older castes and has even begun to pique the interest of minority groups, which have traditionally ignored it. "We are seeing Ecstasy all over the country these days in tremendous amounts," said Raymond W. Kelly, the commissioner of the Customs Service, who added that his agency had beefed up its resources in an effort to stop the influx of the drug about a year ago. "What's really happening is a convergence of several factors: better organizational skills by the criminals who distribute it, lots of disposable money out there in a healthy economy, and the promulgation of the myth that Ecstasy use has no downside." Amid such worry, however, several experts who are critical of the crackdown approach to fighting drugs have come forward to say that while the problem with Ecstasy may be growing, it is not -- at least for now -- at the panic stage. They draw comparisons to the supposed middle-class heroin crisis of the mid-1990's or the supposed rise in teenage marijuana use a few years earlier -- drug epidemics, they say, that never really panned out. For example, Michael Massing, the author of "The Fix" (1998, Simon & Schuster), which offered a critical appraisal of more than 30 years of America's efforts against drugs, pointed to a recent study that showed the percentage of high school seniors who said they had used Ecstasy in the previous month had increased only to 2.5 percent in 1999 from 1.5 percent in 1998. (That rate is low compared with marijuana use among high school students, which, according to other studies, has reached as high as 40 or 50 percent.) Mr. Massing added that another recent study had shown that only 1,024 people had sought emergency-room help because of Ecstasy in 1998, compared with 637 people in 1997. "These are tiny numbers -- not the numbers of a national crisis," Mr. Massing said in an interview last week. "The drug war establishment needs periodic crises to justify their budgets. But I think that the level of what is almost hysteria about Ecstasy is out of proportion to what's actually going on." But critics like Mr. Massing say there is equal exaggeration among the drug's devotees who claim that it provides a harmless high with little or no debilitating side effects. Although Ecstasy is often praised by its fans as a drug that lessens inhibitions, fosters comradeship and enhances sexual encounters, some medical professionals say that chronic consumption is quite dangerous. Prolonged use, they add, can lead to depression, memory loss and brain damage, while overdose can cause high blood pressure, fainting, muscle cramps and panic attacks. "There is frenzy and there is hype surrounding Ecstasy," said Dr. John Morgan, a professor at the City University of New York Medical School who researches pharmacology and drug abuse. "But there is also still a potential that there is more danger about this drug than we originally thought." For now, it appears that the war against Ecstasy has centered more on law enforcement than public health -- unlike the war on crack, for example, which encompassed an effort to roust dealers as well as a strong push to deal with the medical effects of a drug that was unquestionably damaging and often lethal. Still, as scientists learn more about Ecstasy's deleterious qualities, there is a growing movement -- especially among the authorities -- to crack down on the drug because of its medical dangers. "It's killing young people," Mr. Kelly said. "If you read a lot of the early literature on Ecstasy, it was all, 'Hey, you're going to feel great.' But we know that doesn't hold up over the long run." So far, however, these dangers have not resulted in any large-scale public health initiative. The reason, Dr. Morgan said, is that scientists are only now beginning to understand the long-term harm that Ecstasy can cause to the body and brain. "We're worried more about what damage might be discovered in the future," he added. In the meantime, a welter of criminal cases involving Ecstasy have occurred. In February, for instance, Salvatore Gravano, the Mafia hit man and informer, was arrested in Phoenix on charges of trafficking in the drug. Just last week, Kenneth S. Gregorio and Brian J. Juliano, a pair of college students in New Jersey, were taken into custody after being accused of selling Ecstasy to their classmates at Monmouth University. Mr. Gregorio hanged himself in his cell hours after being arrested. The news media have followed the lead of law enforcement officials, and drug-of-the-moment stories have fueled anxiety and created a somewhat nervous sense that Ecstasy use has gone terribly overboard. There is a nagging temptation to label Ecstasy as the drug of the 90's and beyond. After all, it has started to supplant other drugs on the radar screens of the criminal justice system, and its reputation for creating a genial glow without medical downsides catches something of the passing decade's desire for guilt-free gladness in the same sort of way that the nervous surge created by cocaine caught the restless energy of the decade before. The drug has become so prevalent that traffickers have begun to sell adulterated and even fake versions of Ecstasy -- a development that truly frightens drug experts. "If law enforcement starts really cracking down on Ecstasy, I don't think it's going to lessen demand," said Marsha Rosenbaum, who, in the early 1990's, conducted the first federally financed sociological study on the drug. "And I worry that sales of the look-alike substitutes will increase, and they can be more dangerous than Ecstasy itself." Nonetheless, the authorities insist that their efforts to stop the flow of Ecstasy did not create the hype about the drug. They say they are simply reacting to what has become the hottest commodity in the market. "We didn't make Ecstasy the flavor of the day," said Bridget G. Brennan, New York City's special narcotics prosecutor. "We respond to what's in front of us." - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake