Pubdate: Thu, 06 Jul 2000
Source: Las Vegas Weekly (NV)
Copyright: 2000 Radiant City Publications, LLC
Contact:  P.O. Box 230657, Las Vegas, NV 89123-0011
Fax: (702) 990-2424
Website: http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/
Author: Ted Oehmke
Note: Ted Oehmke is a freelance writer in New York. He has written for the 
New York Times, the New Republic and Salon, where this article originally 
appeared.

INFORMATION BLACKOUT

While rave crackdowns are occurring across the country, Congress is trying 
to block the flow of information about the culture's favorite drug: Ecstasy

It's a balmy Saturday evening on Randall's Island, where 8,000 people are 
attending the Sixth Element Electronic Music Festival, a rave-style event 
showcasing DJs from around the world. In a back corner of the grounds is a 
small folding table behind a banner that says "DanceSafe." Several young 
people are peering intently into a small cardboard box, where Soren 
Roinick, a 23-year-old DanceSafe volunteer, is testing ravers' pills for 
MDMA, the only ingredient in pure Ecstasy.

Three of the 68 pills DanceSafe will test this day contain DXM, a drug 
sometimes sold as Ecstasy that has been responsible for some recent 
injuries to ravers. Roinick tells the pill holders at the table that DXM is 
not Ecstasy, and, when mixed with MDMA, can lead to severe overheating. Two 
people say they would not take the DXM because they are already on E. 
Another guy says he will take it later, after his Ecstasy wears off. On a 
humid 95-degree day, that bit of advice may have saved a couple of trips to 
the hospital.

In an attempt to stem the growing popularity of a drug taken mainly by 
young, affluent, white people, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., recently introduced 
the "Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act of 2000." The bill proposes stiffen 
legal penalties for Ecstasy dealers. But much of the language is aimed at 
controlling information about the drug. An aide to Graham said the main 
targets are web sites that extol its virtues and announce the raves where 
people can buy it.

But the bill goes beyond even this questionable assault on free speech. It 
would ban the teaching, demonstration or distribution of information about 
Ecstasy or any other drugs defined as illicit--marijuana, cocaine, LSD, 
even Valium used without a prescription--if the people distributing that 
information know that someone will commit a crime based on what he has 
learned. Naturally, this alarms DanceSafe founder Emanuel Sferios, whose 
organization does exactly that.

"Banning lifesaving information is going to jeopardize the health and lives 
of young people," he says. "Politicians want to appear tough on drugs, so 
they come up with this bill. But it's only going to exacerbate the problem. 
It should be called the Club-Drug Harm Maximization Act."

At a press conference in May to announce the bill, Graham said, "Ecstasy is 
a proven killer--and it is on the loose. We need to shatter the dangerous 
myth that this risky designer drug is safe for consumption." The bill would 
provide funding to "educate young people on the negative effects of 
Ecstasy," and would order the head of every federal agency to post 
"anti-drug messages" on their web sites.

A nearly identical bill was discussed in the House Judiciary Subcommittee 
on Crime on June 29. Perfect timing: On June 28, the U.S. Customs Service 
announced that it had busted an international ring that allegedly smuggled 
roughly 9 million tablets of Ecstasy to the United States--the largest 
trafficking syndicate Customs claims to have cracked. Since April, 25 
people have been arrested in connection with the group. The House bill is 
sponsored by Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill. In a press release, Biggert says she 
was moved to introduce the bill after a high school student from her 
district "died after ingesting what she thought was Ecstasy, but was 
actually PMA." (Paramethoxyamphetamine is another, more toxic amphetamine.)

Of course, this is the sort of tragedy that pill testing tries to prevent, 
but the bill shows no recognition of this. A spokesman for Biggert says a 
legal analysis by the Congres-sional Research Service concluded that 
DanceSafe would only be "tangentially targeted under this law because what 
they are doing probably already constitutes a felony offense."

But Eric Sterling, who served eight years as the counsel to the House 
Judiciary Subcomittee on Crime and is now the president of the Criminal 
Justice Policy Foundation, which advocates drug law reform, has a different 
view. "This bill is designed to chill any discussion of drugs that is 
contrary to the government line," he says. "Fear of felony prosecution in 
the drug arena is an enormously heavy blanket. Small programs like 
DanceSafe run the risk of being destroyed."

Founded in February 1999 by Sferios, 30, DanceSafe is part of the "harm 
reduction" movement in the United States. Other such organizations, 
including the Harm Reduction Coalition and the Lindesmith Center, advocate 
a shift in national drug policy to view the issue of illegal drug use as a 
matter of public health, rather than law enforcement. People are going to 
use drugs anyway, the reasoning goes. Sferios says it's especially 
important to serve the dance community. "All drug use has inherent risk, 
and dance drugs in particular pose certain risks, which are increased by 
the lack of information," he says.

The anti-Ecstasy bill, say civil libertarians and reduction advocates, 
could easily be used against programs like DanceSafe. "When you prohibit 
information about use, you are targeting people involved in harm 
reduction," says Rachel King, legislative counsel for the American Civil 
Liberties Union. She adds that "there are not that many people who care 
about the First Amendment in the context of the war on drugs."

Those prosecuted for distributing information on the use of E and other 
club drugs would face a maximum prison sentence of 10 years along with fines.

"I don't think it's unreasonable for politicians to be worried," says Mark 
Kleiman, a professor of policy studies at UCLA. He points to studies from 
England showing that frequent weekend users of Ecstasy are depressed by 
mid-week, every week. "But passing a law that's grossly unconstitutional is 
a different question," he says.

He has no doubt that if the legislation becomes law, the courts will throw 
it out. This, he says, is "part of a childish cycle the legislature has set 
up where the courts are the only ones left to defend the Constitution. They 
can vote for this knowing it's going to get thrown out, but then they get 
to go home and tell their constituents that they're doing something about 
drugs."

Chad Thevenot of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation says it's ludicrous 
to block safe-drug information in the name of drug-abuse prevention. He 
draws an analogy to safe-sex programs. "Giving someone a condom doesn't 
make them horny; they're horny by nature," he says. "People make better 
decisions when they have better information."

There's no good research on the effectiveness of harm-reduction efforts. 
But there is solid evidence that the official approach to drug information 
has done nothing to stop drug use. Marijuana use among high school students 
nearly doubled from 1991 to 1999, according to the Centers for Disease 
Control--years when the "just say no" slogan made famous by Nancy Reagan 
became the cornerstone of school-based drug education. Use of cocaine more 
than doubled in the same period.

"All of our research has shown that the messages so far don't work," says 
Joel Brown, executive director of the Center for Educational Excellence in 
Berkeley, Calif. Young people, he says, don't fall for scare tactics, and 
often turn to uninformed sources who may downplay the risks.

"You have to win people's trust," says Sferios. "If part of the overall 
strategy is to see the drug situation as a war, well ... the first casualty 
in war is the truth."

Sferios and others point to a recent example in Florida, a hotbed of rave 
culture, of what happens when the government tries to control information 
related to drugs. As reported by Henry Pierson Curtis in a May 21 Page 1 
article in the Orlando Sentinel, Florida drug czar Jim McDonough, a former 
Army colonel, was so eager to show that his efforts against club drugs were 
necessary that his office grossly overstated the number of deaths caused by 
them. The Sentinel reviewed the autopsy reports of those supposedly killed 
by club drugs in Central Florida, their main coverage area. Over a 
three-year period, they found that at least 35 of the 60 deaths were in 
fact completely unrelated to Ecstasy or rave culture.

Two days after the story appeared, Graham introduced the Ecstasy bill. 
DanceSafe is reviewing the Florida autopsy reports, and will publish its 
own conclusions.

A therapeutic dose (2mg/kg of body weight) of MDMA will flood the synapses 
of brain cells with nearly the entire supply of the brain's serotonin, and 
prevents it from being naturally recycled so it lingers longer. Serotonin 
is a neurotransmitter known to play an important role in determining a 
person's mood and regulation of body temperature. MDMA also triggers the 
release of dopamine and norepinephrine, which increase the feeling of 
energy. The three-to five-hour effect is usually one of seemingly boundless 
energy, combined with an overall heightened physical sensitivity and an 
increased feeling of empathy toward others. Hence the "marriage made in 
heaven," cited by one raver, between Ecstasy and dancing in close quarters 
with lots of other people.

Ecstasy is most likely not without biological risks, but its effects on the 
brain are unclear. The most often cited studies on the neurotoxicity of 
MDMA are by Dr. George Ricuarte, a neurotoxicolgist at Johns Hopkins 
University. Ricuarte says MDMA causes damage to the ends of axons and may 
impair memory function. Other scientists, however, say his findings are 
inconclusive.

Dr. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist at Bellevue Medical Center and a 
psychopharmacologist in Manhattan, says Ricuarte's memory study compared 
multiple drug users with graduate students. "The best you could say from a 
study like that is that people who take a lot of drugs and go to raves 
don't perform as well on memory tests as grad students," Holland says.

She adds, "Nothing is conclusive about the brain and its chemistry--the 
more you look, the more complicated it gets."

Her suggestion to ravers: "Use the chill-out rooms and stay cool. Drink 
plenty of water, but only as much as you feel you're losing. And get your 
pills tested."

A couple of hours before the finish of the rave on Randall's Island, an 
emergency medical technician, who has worked for several years at venues 
like Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium, is impressed. "It's much 
better than we expected," she said. "With two hours to go, we've only taken 
five people to the hospital, one was because of alcohol and another because 
he got in a fight. The other three... we don't know what happened."

A leap of faith: The other three were probably not the three young people 
who decided against taking DXM pills disguised as Ecstasy after having them 
tested by DanceSafe.

Ted Oehmke is a freelance writer in New York. He has written for the New 
York Times, the New Republic and Salon, where this article originally appeared.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D