Pubdate: Thu, 14 Mar 2002
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2002 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper.
Contact:  http://www.sunspot.net/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Ariel Sabar
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mdma.htm (Ecstasy)

OVERLY SENSITIVE TEST FOULS MILITARY'S WAR ON ECSTASY

Hundreds Of Sailors Hit With False Findings

The U.S. military's effort to reverse sharp increases in the number of 
personnel using the drug Ecstasy hit a snag recently, when a new urine test 
turned out to be too sensitive - flagging hundreds of sailors who may have 
taken nothing more serious than over-the-counter cold medicines.

The turn of events has set back the fight against an illegal, 
euphoria-inducing drug that military officials regard as an emerging threat 
to troop safety and even, some say, to military readiness.

Though the overall use of illicit drugs has steadily fallen since the 
military began random testing two decades ago, the number of active-duty 
personnel testing positive for Ecstasy grew from 93 in 1998 to 1,070 in 
2000, the last year for which figures are available.

"It's the fear factor," Col. Michael L. Smith, chief of the military's drug 
testing and education programs, said of the concerns over rising Ecstasy 
use. "Since we started testing, it's doubled and tripled every year."

The linchpin of the anti-Ecstasy campaign was to have been a new test able 
to spot it in urine up to three days after ingestion - three times longer 
than the current test.

The military advertised it to troops as an unforgiving detection technique, 
and Vice Adm. Norbert Ryan Jr., the chief of naval personnel, issued a 
stern warning in January. "If they have used Ecstasy in the past," he wrote 
in a letter to Navy commanders, "let them know of the new and better 
mousetrap."

The Navy was to have served as a guinea pig for the new test. If the test 
proved successful, its use would extend to the other armed forces.

But tests of about 32,000 sailors in January identified a staggering 699 as 
positive for either Ecstasy or methamphetamine use. Follow-up tests using a 
more precise - and more labor-intensive - confirmation method found that 
only nine of the 699 samples contained Ecstasy and 31 contained 
methamphetamines.

The other 659, officials say, were false positives that experts believe 
were triggered by cold medicines with chemical properties similar to 
Ecstasy. The military is doing further analysis to determine the exact cause.

Military officials estimate it could take several months to a year to find 
a test that is better able to distinguish between Ecstasy and innocuous 
compounds such as the decongestant pseudoephedrine. "It's a 
disappointment," said Capt. John F. Jemionek, a senior Navy biochemist who 
is helping evaluate the Ecstasy tests.

The maker of the new test, Microgenics Corp., disputes the suggestion that 
its Ecstasy screen is flawed, saying the U.S. military is the only client 
to find fault with it. In the meantime, the military has reverted to its 
current, weaker Ecstasy test as officials search for a more effective product.

The urgency of the anti-Ecstasy effort is a result both of the 
random-testing results and of several highly publicized cases:

- - In January 2001, a Navy lieutenant commander in San Diego was sentenced 
to five years in prison after pleading guilty to dealing Ecstasy on an 
aircraft carrier.

- - A dozen military police officers from the 16th Military Police Brigade at 
the Fort Bragg, N.C., Army base were charged last spring with using or 
selling Ecstasy and other drugs.

- - Last year, four cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado were sent to 
military prisons after being convicted of using or selling Ecstasy.

The scandal prompted the Air Force Academy to increase random testing and 
start tests on weekends, to catch Friday-night users who assumed the drug 
would leave their systems by Monday morning.

At the Naval Academy, five midshipmen have tested positive for Ecstasy 
since January 2000, and all were expelled, an academy spokesman said. 
Though that is less than 1/50th of 1 percent of the 26,000 urine samples 
tested, Ecstasy was still more likely to turn up in midshipmen's urine over 
that period than marijuana or cocaine. (In the military population as a 
whole, marijuana and cocaine are still much more common than Ecstasy.)

Ecstasy is a synthetic, amphetamine-like drug, usually taken as a pill, 
that is part hallucinogen and part stimulant.

It first caught the attention of the U.S. military in the early 1990s. The 
drug was taking root in Europe as part of the growing "rave" movement of 
late-night music and laser parties, and U.S. military police soon found 
that some troops stationed there had been using it, Smith said. "They were 
isolated incidents, but enough to make us concerned," he said.

In 1997, the military added an Ecstasy test to the battery of random drug 
tests it administers to personnel, most of whom are tested at least once a 
year.

The 1,070 samples found positive in 2000 represent just 1/20th of 1 percent 
of the 2.4 million tested and is far smaller than the suspected rate among 
civilians. Still, defense officials worried because the rise in Ecstasy use 
bucked the two-decade decline in overall levels of drug use.

In 1981, about 28 percent of military personnel reported using an illicit 
drug in the month before the Pentagon survey. By 1998, the year of the last 
survey, that number had declined to 2.7 percent.

"If you don't address something as it first begins," said William F. 
Flannery, the chief of the Navy's alcohol and drug abuse prevention 
program, "you [may] have a major catastrophe because someone is on Ecstasy 
while on the job."

The military formed a club drug task force two years ago, and began 
advertising the dangers of Ecstasy to the troops over a Web site, 
videotapes, newsletters and in speeches by its anti-drug officers. "Ecstasy 
will not only kill your Navy career, but it can also kill you," a recent 
article by the Navy Wire Service begins. "For this reason, the Navy has 
targeted the drug Ecstasy ... as a hazard to readiness and force protection."

The Navy wrote a computer program for test scheduling, adopted last year by 
the entire military, to make it harder for sailors to guess when their 
turns would come up. And military police dogs are being trained to sniff 
out Ecstasy.

But military officials also wanted a better test. They entered into a 
contract with Microgenics Corp., a biotech company in Fremont, Calif., that 
received approval last year from the Food and Drug Administration for its 
urine screen. The screen is just that: its purpose is to identify a 
subgroup of samples likely to contain Ecstasy. Those it identifies as 
positive are then tested individually with a more time-consuming and 
labor-intensive method.

Drug-testing laboratories use screens to reduce the number of samples sent 
for confirmation only to those most likely to contain illicit drugs. But 
the U.S. military complained that the Microgenics screen didn't do a good 
enough job winnowing out samples that didn't contain Ecstasy.

Smith acknowledged that the new test may have caught actual 
Ecstasy-containing samples that the current test would have missed. But it 
reeled in so many benign samples that it proved of little value as a 
labor-saving device.

Microgenics officials say that the Navy is the only one of about 20 users 
of the screen, including the British military, to complain about its 
accuracy. Its own laboratory tests, cited in submissions to the Food and 
Drug Administration, showed a high level of accuracy and very low 
"cross-reactivity" with cold medications.

Still, company officials said that the U.S. military tries to detect drugs 
at much lower concentrations than most other users of its product, and said 
that might explain a high rate of interference from over-the-counter drugs.

"I'm very hesitant to say what the Navy did. ... I can't tell if it's being 
misapplied," said Lorenzo A. Ajel, the company's director of marketing 
operations. "We did not have the opportunity to look at what the data 
looked like."

Navy officials are also not sure why the test didn't work as advertised. 
"We haven't gotten a straight answer from them either," Cmdr. Lisa K. 
McWhorter, manager of the Navy's drug-testing program, said of Microgenics.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager