Pubdate: Mon, 28 Aug 2000
Source: Slate (US Web)
Copyright: 2000 Microsoft Corporation
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Website: http://slate.msn.com/
Forum: http://slate.msn.com/code/fray/theFray.asp
Author: Jack Shafer
Cited: DanceSafe - http://www.dancesafe.org

ECSTASY MADNESS!

There's no mistaking the warning signs. Reporting so gullible you giggle.
Inaccuracies so gross you groan out loud. Sourcing so hysterical you ask if
it's a put-on. You look away and tell yourself, never mind, it's only a
thousand-word story on Page B2 of the "Metro" section that few will read.

But you force yourself to look at the page again, and you think of your
professional duty. This is your mind. This is your morning newspaper. This
is the Washington Post on drugs.

More precisely, this is the Washington Post on MDMA--a k a "Ecstasy," "e,"
and "XTC." Steven Gray's Aug. 26 story, "Md. Mobilizes Against Use of
Ecstasy; Drug's Rampant Growth Has Officials Rushing to Warn Teens, Parents
and Police," deserves a prominent place in a forthcoming anthology of
erroneous drug reporting. Have the societal taboos against illicit drugs
become so pervasive and so corrosive of the truth that reporters like Gray
have nothing to lose--not their jobs, not the respect of their peers, not
even their pride--by publishing the most ridiculous exaggerations about
dope?

A new state of Maryland study is the hook for Gray's story: Police seizures
of Ecstasy during the past two years are up. In Montgomery County alone, the
number of doses seized by police "grew from 20 in all of 1998 to more than
6,600 in the first six months of this year." Similar increases are noted in
Fairfax County. Could the dramatic increases have something to do with
stepped-up enforcement? Gray doesn't ask.

"I just keep hearing about 'Ecstasy, Ecstasy, Ecstasy,' " a teacher named
Sally Eller at a "teen substance abuse recovery facility in Gaithersburg"
tells Gray. MDMA use among the young set has reached "epidemic proportions,"
Eller says, adding that 60 percent of her students reported using the drug
in the last six months. What's the big surprise here? That kids in a
drug-abuse-recovery facility love to talk about drugs and love to take them?

Despite Gray's hype, the evidence of a growing MDMA "epidemic" among
teen-agers remains scant. A federal government study (
http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/keyfindings.pdf ) shows that MDMA use
among high-school seniors has seesawed in the late '90s. In 1996, 6.1
percent of all 12th-graders said they had tried MDMA at least once. In 1997,
the number rose to 6.9 percent, then dipped to 5.8 percent in 1997, before
going up to 8 percent in 1999. As John Cloud wrote in his excellent June 5
Time magazine cover story, "Ecstasy remains a niche drug. The number of
people who use it once a month remains so small--less than 1 percent of the
population--that ecstasy use doesn't register in the government's drug
survey."

Gray next turns to unnamed Maryland drug officials, who report that Ecstasy
"pills are sometimes laced with methadone, cocaine, heroin, LSD and other
unknown substances." Those reports conflict with the findings from a Drug
Enforcement Administration conference on Ecstasy and "club drugs" held
earlier this summer in Washington, D.C. According to this report (
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/reports/dea_ecstasyconf2000.htm ) from the
conference, the DEA's David Gavin told the gathering that, yes, some Ecstasy
tablets analyzed by the government contained other controlled substances
such as MDEA and MDA--MDMA's chemical cousins--as well as amphetamine,
methamphetamine, and ketamine. But Gavin said nothing about methadone,
cocaine, heroin, or LSD. You can be assured that if the DEA ever detected
those substances in purported Ecstasy pills, it would be happy to share the
news.

Another speaker, Dr. Mark Gold, a professor at the University of Florida's
Brain Institute, characterized the rumors that some MDMA contains heroin as
an urban myth. The DEA's drug database has never turned up a pill that
contained both MDMA and heroin, he told the gathering.

Added Gavin, "Less than 1 percent of all analyzed samples by [DEA], are
bogus. They contained caffeine, ephedrine, dextromethorphan,
caffeine-ephedrine, ephedrine plus dextromethorphan, or even over the
counter antihistamine Benadryl."

(A word to the wise: Dextromethorphan [DXM] is one particularly dangerous
drug masquerading as Ecstasy. For more information on DXM, see the DanceSafe
fact sheet http://www.dancesafe.org/dxm.html . To order a test kit to
identify bogus or adulterated Ecstasy tablets, go here
http://www.dancesafe.org/ekits.html . And for the 1999 results from
DanceSafe's Ecstasy Laboratory Pill Analysis Project click here
http://www.dancesafe.org/eresults1999.html .)

As Gray's story winds down, he offers an anecdote so outlandish that it must
be another urban myth: "One characteristic of Ecstasy users is that they
grind their teeth," he writes, which is absolutely true.
"One substance abuse counselor told the story of a 16-year-old girl who had
used the drug so much, she ground down her teeth to the point that she
needed dentures." Until verified, this denture story belongs with the tale
of the LSD users who went blind looking at the sun.

Gray concludes his piece with this lamentation from Beth Kane-Davidson, the
program director at a Bethesda, Md., treatment center: "If you want to know
what the problem is, it's that the kids have their own information about
Ecstasy."

But with the Washington Post and the drug-abuse industrial-complex peddling
such transparent disinformation, who can blame kids for seeking their own
sources?
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