ECSTASY OVERHYPED AS A DANGER TO TEENAGERS

I'm surprised that teenage drug use warranted a front-page story and a
two-page spread. ("In ecstasy's shadow: Innocence meets evil in a magnetic
little pill as the stamp of an underground world of dancing and drugs
creeps out of the dark," April 9.) That teenagers use drugs is old news.
Now it's ecstasy they're using, and parents are scared. Should they be?

Why does ecstasy carry sentences five times heavier than heroin, when it's
relatively harmless to our physical bodies? The search for dangerous
consequences to ecstasy use has had experts scrambling for years, with no
scientifically sound results.

Despite pages of half-truths and gross omissions, your story got one thing
right when you called ecstasy "the perfect 21st-Century drug for a
generation raised on Ritalin and Prozac." When parents, teachers and
doctors would rather control children through medication, how do these
children wake up?

Ecstasy jolts the user into awareness, and it is this awareness that
parents fear. From birth, our children are told that they can change the
world. And now, they are realizing that they truly can. Is this what
everyone is afraid of? That this generation will create a world without the
need for fear or hate?

Isn't that what we've all said we wanted?

Katherine Harris

Detroit