TEEN DEATHS HEIGHTENING DEBATE ABOUT HOW TO DEAL WITH POPULAR DRUG

CHICAGO -- One dead after a party in suburban Chicago. Two more in
Memphis, Tenn., and another two in Portland, Ore.

The fatal consequences of Ecstasy an illegal drug that some say is this
decade's version of LSD are becoming increasingly apparent nationwide,
further stirring the debate about how to deal with the large numbers of
young people who are using it.

"It's the hottest drug going right now," says Michelle, a 19-year-old
former Ecstasy user from New York City who is now in rehab and spoke on
the condition that her last name not be used. "Anybody can get it
anywhere, anytime."

While it is most often associated with the dance parties or "raves"
federal officials say the drug also known as MDMA is so readily
available that teens can buy it at school and on the street corner.

A survey of American teens released in February found that one in four
questioned said they had a friend or classmate who had used Ecstasy,
while 17 percent said they knew more than one user. It was the first
time the nonprofit National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse
conducted a survey on the drug.

In recent months, Dr. Vasilios Pitsios says he has treated patients as
young as 14 who have arrived unconscious at the emergency room at Saint
Vincent Hospital, in the heart of Manhattan's club scene. He says many
have traveled to town from New Jersey and Long Island. And two have died
on his watch.

Pitsios says he has a frank talk with those who survive. "But how much
of that sticks?" he asks. "It's probably very little."

Some young people are taking matters into their own hands, preaching
"harm reduction" methods that they hope can save lives. Rather than
telling others to just say no, they believe it is more realistic to give
users information about Ecstasy that, they say, can lessen the drug's
damage.

"It's obvious that zero tolerance simply doesn't work," says Andrew
Epstein, a senior at Amherst College in Massachusetts who helped
organize an information session about Ecstasy on his campus this week

Among the tips he and others are spreading to young people nationwide:
Stay hydrated to avoid severe, and sometimes deadly, overheating.

They also tell users to avoid "stacking," or taking more than one tablet
in a night to enhance the drug's euphoric "I-love-everyone" effect.

Epstein says he first tried Ecstasy when he was a 17 but has cut back
from nearly monthly use to two or three times a year.

Steve Svoboda, a 24-year-old Web site designer from Chicago, says he has
done the same.

"If it's used sparingly and people know the risks, I believe the
potential for harm is greatly reduced," says Svoboda, who heads
Chicago's chapter of a California-based harm-reduction group called
DanceSafe.

Among other things, the group offers to test Ecstasy tablets for other
drugs that police and health officials say are increasingly being passed
off as Ecstasy. In February, for example, police in Fairfax County, Va.,
confiscated hundreds of Ecstasy pills laced with the drug PCP.

"When somebody tells me they've taken Ecstasy these days, I have no idea
what they've taken," says Dr. Charles Grob, director of child and
adolescent psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance,
Calif.

Grob, who conducted the first Food and Drug Administration-approved
study of MDMA's effects in mid-1990s, says the furor over the drug has
overshadowed its potential as a psychiatric treatment for such ailments
as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Michelle, the New York City teen, started using Ecstasy at 17 and
developed a four-day-a-week habit. About a month ago, she checked into a
rehab center in Millbrook, N.Y.

"You wake up in the morning with dark circles under your eyes. You're
pale. And you feel down like you can't do it anymore without Ecstasy,"
she says. "It's not worth it at all."

A Look At The Drug Ecstasy

When most people refer to Ecstasy commonly known as "X" on the street
they are most often referring to 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or
MDMA, a drug patented by Merck Pharmaceuticals in Germany before World
War I, but not tested on humans until the 1970s.

Chemically, it has structural similarities to both amphetamine and
mescaline, a hallucinogen.

Early on, some mental health experts called MDMA "penicillin for the
soul" because of its ability to get patients to drop defensive barriers
and increase intimacy and communication. Some felt it might be useful in
treating everything from phobias to post-traumatic stress disorder.

But use among young people began to spread. In 1985, the Drug
Enforcement Administration ordered that MDMA be classified as an illegal
drug.

That did little to stop its spread on the black market. By the
mid-1990s, Ecstasy had become a popular club drug in Europe and the
United States and continued to find its way to other parts of the world.
It is now sold for $20 to $35 a tablet in this country.

Experts say it is becoming increasingly popular to prolong Ecstasy's
effect by "stacking" multiple doses in one night or combining Ecstasy
with alcohol or other drugs.

Medical experts say this is a dangerous trend. They also are alarmed by
commonly used impure forms of Ecstasy that are laced with other drugs as
well as look-alike pills that are sometimes proving to be fatal. Other
problems have included dehydration and overheating, especially at dance
clubs, that also have led to death in some cases.

Source: Dr. Charles Grob, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center