Pubdate: Mon, 23 Jan 2012
Source: Regina Leader-Post (CN SN)
Copyright: 2012 The Leader-Post Ltd.
Contact: http://www.leaderpost.com/opinion/letters/letters-to-the-editor.html
Website: http://www.leaderpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/361
Author: Mike Hager, Postmedia News 

DESPITE DEATHS, B.C.'S ECSTASY BUSINESS BOOMING

Street Drug Is 'Cheaper Than Alcohol'

Sam's workday usually starts late in the afternoon as Vancouver's 
aggressive partiers begin looking for a way to chemically enhance their fun.

Most nights of the week, a host of twenty-and thirty somethings call 
Sam's work phone throughout the evening and into the early morning 
looking for ecstasy and cocaine. Despite recent headlines about the 
deadly PMMA-laced ecstasy pills, Sam's phone still rings with clients 
searching for a good time.

The charismatic 30-year old drives in and around downtown Vancouver 
meeting clients in his nondescript hatchback. Sam, who agreed to the 
interview on the condition Postmedia News uses an alias, said his 
customers include kindergarten teachers, financial advisers and even doctors.

In his designer scarf and coat, Sam more closely resembles his 
customers than the stereotypical Lower Mainland drug dealer tattooed 
and clad in sparkly Affliction or Tapout T-shirts.

The University of British Columbia graduate styles himself as an 
independent businessman, carefully growing a base of patrons. He began 
with a circle of close friends and grew his roster of clients through 
word of mouth to about 150 buyers.

Some are loyal weekly callers, others occasional purchasers who 
contact him every few months. Almost every week he puts a new customer 
into his work phone, a cheap cell with a number separate from his 
personal smartphone.

"Honestly, they're like me - they're partiers," Sam says of his 
clientele. "I wouldn't say I have anyone who's an addict."

These recreational users of ecstasy and cocaine "are people with 
functioning lives," he says. On a Friday night, his first customer is 
waiting around 6 p.m. outside his workplace - a financial institution 
on Dunbar Street. After jumping into the back seat, the first thing 
the clean-cut guy in his early 30s says to Sam is, "What's with all 
the deaths, dude?"

Since last August, five British Columbians - three men and two women 
ranging in age from 14 to 37 - have died from ecstasy laced with PMMA, 
the same lethal chemical linked to a spate of recent deaths in the 
Calgary area. This year and last, there have been a total of 18 
ecstasy-related deaths in B.C. Sam reassured his client that his $10 
MDMA (a high grade of ecstasy) capsules are safe and the overdoses 
that have shaken the Lower Mainland and Calgary are most likely from 
cheaper pressed pills.

Sam agrees to drive his client to Joey restaurant on West Broadway as 
they chat about his plans for an upcoming concert. He pulls five MDMA 
pills from a hollowed-out Axe deodorant spray can and hands them to 
the man along with a baggie containing half a gram of coke in exchange 
for $90. Sam says he made $60 from that 10-minute car ride.

"My cost is higher than others because I don't have economies of scale."

Sam entered the trade after getting fed up with his postgraduate 
dead-end job. He says he hopes to retire in five years with a million 
dollars in drug money. He says he made a $9,000 profit last December - 
$1,800 on New Year's Eve alone - and though his business isn't as 
mature as he would like, he averages over $4,000 a month.

He says he loves the lack of pressure and the social aspects of his 
new career, but hates lying to friends and family - and the prospect 
of going to jail.

Sam says he buys up to four ounces of MDMA every two weeks and caps 
them himself using a machine that does a hundred at a time. His 
supplier, a drug dealer friend who first took Sam under his wing a 
year and a half ago, bought two kilograms of the drug last June. That 
stock is almost gone and they are now looking for another reliable 
batch, Sam said.

He says he doesn't cut his MDMA pills with anything, but admits he 
doesn't know what has been put into the powder by the time it gets to 
him. "I've tried a fair bunch and honestly I don't know, which is 
actually pretty indicative of probably a lot of guys out there."

He says he takes care to sample any new product himself and says his 
customers don't have to worry about overdosing on a "bad batch."

"I think people are pretty aware of it," Sam says. "Me personally, it 
doesn't worry me because I know my stuff 's okay."

Most of his clients tell him they only take one or two pills a night. 
"I can honestly say I don't feel like I'm hurting people . I'm sure 
people would disagree."

The drug has become much more mainstream, Burnaby RCMP Sgt. Scott 
Rintoul says. A synthetic drugs expert, Rintoul has talked to over a 
thousand ecstasy-using British Columbians and conducted a 10-year 
study on the drug, which he began in 1998.

By age 18, around 15 per cent of B.C.'s students have tried ecstasy, 
according to a 2008 report by the University of Victoria's Centre for 
Addictions Research of B.C. and the McCreary Centre, a non-profit 
research agency dedicated to youth health.

"I would say the market in B.C. is saturated with ecstasy and other 
similar-type drugs," Rintoul says. "When I say saturated . the drug is 
now everywhere - it's a very cheap and affordable drug.

"Cheaper than alcohol. Depending on who you're buying from, you're 
going to pay between $3 and $10 per capsule. It's available to anyone."

Sam says he doesn't sell to anyone under 20. In his own mind, he 
differentiates the party drugs like cocaine and ecstasy that he sells 
from more denigrated street drugs like heroin and crystal meth.

"To be honest I don't know anything about heroin, meth, oxy that kind 
of stuff," Sam says. "When you watch Intervention, when you see those 
people, how could you be the person giving them that?"

Sam says he would absolutely stop dealing to someone who told him they 
had an addiction. "No one's ever actually been like, 'OK, stop 
answering my calls,'" Sam says.

However, Rintoul says Sam is kidding himself if he thinks cocaine is 
not addictive. And even those who take ecstasy will end up having big problems.

"Some of the inherent risks are not only the use of the drug itself, 
but what indirect behaviour do we see from people who use ecstasy," 
Rintoul says. "Why is it called the love drug? Is it like Viagra or 
Cialis? Absolutely not.

"Because of its unique effects, people open up. Their mood changes and 
they just feel so good about themselves, so good about the environment 
they're in, that they become risk-takers."

In recent weeks throughout the Lower Mainland the drug has, on several 
occasions, claimed one victim among a group of friends all taking the drug.

Each person reacts differently to the drug and the different chemicals 
it is cut with, Rintoul says. "When we see cases of victims who 
consume the drug with friends, (we think) that person must have had a 
bad batch," Rintoul says. "The experts are saying there is no good batch.

"A single tablet has been responsible for death before and a single 
tablet will be responsible for death in the future."
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MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr.