AS ECSTASY USE SPREADS, DRUG DEALER VIOLENCE RISES

The Club Drug Has Broken Ethnic Barriers; High School Students Report
Increasing Exposure

LOS ANGELES -- It was finding an Israeli drug dealer dead in a car trunk at
Los Angeles International Airport 18 months ago that gave the authorities
here the first hint that the club drug ecstasy was becoming a serious
problem. He had been killed by two hit men sent from Israel, said officials
of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Then there was the shipment of 2.1 million ecstasy pills, worth $40 million
on the street, that the U.S. Customs Service seized at the airport last July.

The pills, labeled clothing, arrived on an Air France flight from Paris,
intended for another Israeli dealer here. The authorities say it was the
world's largest ecstasy bust.

And now law enforcement officials say they have seen another worrisome
development this year.

At a number of large all-night dance parties called raves, drawing
thousands of young people to the desert east of Los Angeles, rival gangs
have fought over the sale of ecstasy.

At one rave at a fairgrounds at Lake Perris in March, 102 people were
arrested on charges of selling ecstasy, assault or resisting arrest,
according to the DEA.

What is happening in Los Angeles mirrors what is occurring across much of
the nation, law enforcement officials and drug experts say.

Not only is the use of ecstasy exploding, more than doubling among
12th-graders in the past two years, but it is also spreading well beyond
its origin as a party drug for affluent white suburban teen-agers to
virtually every ethnic and class group, and from big cities like New York
and Los Angeles to rural Vermont and South Dakota.

At the same time, the huge profits to be made -- a tablet that costs 50
cents to manufacture in underground labs in the Netherlands can be sold for
$25 in the United States -- have set off increasingly violent turf wars
among dealers.

"With drugs, it's always about the money," said Bridget Brennan, the
special narcotics prosecutor for New York City. "And the dealers are
starting to see there is so much money in ecstasy that more people are
getting involved, and with that comes more violence."

Homicides linked to ecstasy dealing have occurred in recent months in
Norfolk, Va.; in Elgin, Ill., outside Chicago, and in Valley Stream, N.Y.,
outside New York City, police records show.

This spring, in Bristow, Va., a suburb of Washington, a 21-year-old college
student, Daniel Robert Petrole Jr., was shot 10 times in the head as he sat
in his car outside a new townhouse he had recently bought.

According to court records, the local police believed Petrole was
responsible for distributing more than $1.5 million in ecstasy and
marijuana in Prince William County.

Two young dealers who worked with Petrole have since been arrested and
charged with killing him.

In New York City last month, Salvatore Gravano, the former Gambino crime
family hit man, pleaded guilty to running a multimillion-dollar ecstasy
ring in Arizona, where he was living under the federal witness protection
program.

Court documents showed that Gravano was accused of hatching four homicide
plots to consolidate his control of the Arizona drug market, and that his
organization was being supplied by Ilan Zarger, a drug dealer based in
Brooklyn who had ties to the Israeli mob.

Most ecstasy is produced in the Netherlands or Belgium and smuggled into
the United States by Israeli or Russian organized gangs, either flown in as
air cargo or carried on commercial flights by couriers, often dancers
recruited from topless nightclubs, according to drug enforcement and
Customs Service officials.

Some Dominican groups have also become involved recently, using their own
established routes, and they now sell ecstasy along with heroin and cocaine
from drug houses in Washington Heights in Manhattan to buyers who arrive by
car from as far away as Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, the officials say.

Because it is sold as pills, ecstasy is much easier to smuggle than heroin,
cocaine or marijuana, the authorities say.

Large imported shipments, originally flown into New York, Los Angeles or
Miami, are then broken down and sent out by regular overnight delivery
services, like Federal Express, to midlevel dealers in other cities.

Brennan, the New York narcotics prosecutor, said ecstasy was also widely
available on the Internet. Last year, her office arrested a man in Orlando,
Fla., who had been selling ecstasy on a site called House of Beans to
customers in New York.

Seizures of ecstasy by the Customs Service have jumped sharply, to 9.3
million pills in 2000, up from only 400,000 pills in 1997, said Charles
Winwood, the acting commissioner of the Customs Service.

The law enforcement officials and drug experts do not suggest ecstasy will
lead to the same levels of violence or social turmoil as crack cocaine did
in the late 1980s, when thousands of teen-age dealers armed themselves with
handguns and many mothers neglected their children.

For one thing, ecstasy does not cause the same dangerous changes in mood
and judgment as crack does. For another, crack gave only a brief high,
driving addicts back to the street repeatedly in search of another dose and
often leading them to rob or steal to support their habit.

Ecstasy instead induces a high of up to six hours, enhancing feelings of
empathy and closeness, its users say.

But interviews with drug experts and with teen-age ecstasy addicts in
treatment programs here show that the drug, known scientifically as MDMA,
both a stimulant and a hallucinogen, can be disruptive and expose them to
violence.

"We are dancing with danger here, because the kids and their parents think
of ecstasy as a benign party drug," said Michele Leonhart, the special
agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Los Angeles
office. "They don't see what we see, that it's a neurotoxin with serious
side effects, that people die from overdoses and that some of the dances in
the desert are no longer just dances, they're like violent crack houses set
to music."

Dr. Alan I. Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in
Bethesda, Md., said, "Contrary to what a lot of people think, that ecstasy
is a harmless drug, we are learning more and more scientifically about its
damaging effects."

In the longer term, Leshner said, there is now evidence that repeated use
of ecstasy can damage the brain cells that produce serotonin, the
neurochemical that is critical for preventing depression and sleep disorders.

People who have used ecstasy frequently experience memory loss and
depression when the drug wears off, Leshner said.