VIOLENCE RISES AS CLUB DRUG SPREADS OUT INTO THE STREETS

LOS ANGELES, June 21 -- 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 from Israel, said Drug
Enforcement Administration officials.

Then there was the shipment of 2.1 million Ecstasy pills, worth $40 million
on the street, that the United States 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 Drug
Enforcement Administration.

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 last
two years, but it is also spreading well beyond its origin as a party drug
for affluent white suburban teenagers 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 Ecstasy 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.,
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 town house he had recently bought. According to
court records, the local police believed Mr. Petrole was responsible for
distributing more than $1.5 million in Ecstasy and marijuana in Prince
William County. Two young dealers who worked with Mr. 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 Mr. 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 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.

Ms. 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 1980's, when thousands of teenage 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 teenage 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."

Marcos M., a tall Hispanic teenager living in Phoenix Academy, a
residential treatment center for adolescent drug addicts run by Phoenix
House in Lake View Terrace, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley, said he
had always thought of Ecstasy as "the white man's drug." In his
neighborhood, Lincoln Heights -- "the ghetto," he called it -- people
usually did crack or heroin. Besides, Ecstasy was too expensive, at $25 a
pill. Marcos, 17, said his attitude toward Ecstasy was, "I'd rather spend
my money on good stuff."

But in the past year, dealers on his street suddenly started selling
Ecstasy, reducing the price to a more manageable $8 a pill.

"One day a friend was cleaning out his car and gave me a pill," Marcos
recalled. "So I tried it, and an hour later, I was rolling -- relaxed,
kicking and chilling."

Now, he sees all ethnic groups using Ecstasy, no longer just whites.

As with other drugs, dealers often fight over Ecstasy, Marcos said. A
dealer who is a friend of his sold a "boat," a package of 1,000 Ecstasy
pills, to another dealer, but the second dealer claimed the delivery was
short. So a fight ensued, in which his friend broke into the other man's
house and took the drugs back, and the second dealer then smashed his
friend's car.

The leading survey of teenage use of drugs, known as Monitoring the Future
and done by the University of Michigan, has found that the proportion of
12th graders who had used Ecstasy in the previous 12 months more than
doubled to 8 percent in 2000, from 3.5 percent in 1998. That is a very
large increase, said Lloyd Johnston, a research scientist who directs the
annual survey. Among 10th graders the percentage who had used Ecstasy in
2000 rose to 5 percent, from 3 percent in 1998.

"It is definitely continuing to increase, across all parts of the country,
and equally among males and females," Mr. Johnston said. Ecstasy is still
enjoying a honeymoon among young people, just as LSD did in the 1960's,
before its dangers were widely known, he said.

Jessica D., a 17-year-old high school junior who came to Phoenix Academy
from Canoga Park, a Los Angeles suburb, said she started taking Ecstasy
pills at nightclubs and raves. She soon found herself "rolling" on the drug
all the time. "I used to go to school high," she said, a smile brightening
her face at the memory. "It made school more fun. Class went by faster."

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."

The bad short-term effects, Dr. Leshner said, are quick increases in blood
pressure, heart rates and body temperature, leading to dehydration and
hypothermia, particular problems for people who have danced in hot, crowded
rooms all night.

In the longer term, Dr. 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, Dr. Leshner said.

The contest with drug smugglers continues.

Last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York announced the
arrest of Oded Tuito, who was said to head the largest Ecstasy-smuggling
organization yet identified.

Mr. Tuito, an Israeli who kept homes in New York, Los Angeles and Paris,
"imported millions of Ecstasy pills" from Paris, Brussels and Frankfurt
into New York, Miami and Los Angeles, the drug administration charged.

His organization recruited dozens of couriers, typically dancers at topless
nightclubs, who each smuggled in 30,000 to 60,000 pills at a time and also
took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in drug proceeds back to
Europe, the authorities said.

To combat Ecstasy, the federal government and more than half the states,
including New York, New Jersey and Florida, have raised the penalties for
selling the drug in the past few years.

Under new federal sentencing guidelines that went into effect in May, a
person selling 800 pills can now receive a sentence of five years, a much
stiffer standard than the old threshold of 11,000 pills.

New York's law, enacted in 1996, is tougher than the federal standard,
requiring a minimum sentence of three years for mere possession of 100 pills.

An Illinois bill, passed by the Legislature last month and awaiting the
governor's signature, would carry the toughest penalties of all -- an
automatic 6 to 30 years for selling as few as 15 pills.

State Senator Rickey Hendon warned that the Illinois law cast too wide a
net, treating teenage partygoers the same as professional drug traffickers.
But Senator Hendon, a Chicago Democrat, who is black, said the law might
help Illinois legislators understand the racial disparities of drug laws.

"When you see 14-year-olds going to jail for a mandatory 30 years and their
complexion is no longer black," Senator Hendon said, "maybe we'll stop and
think about what we're doing."