ECSTASY ESPECIALLY TOXIC IN QUEBEC

Added Ingredients; 'You Don't Find This In Europe Or The U.S.'

Canada's home-cooked ecstasy is among the dirtiest in the world, and
more of it is being sold in Montreal than ever before.

Many ecstasy users are unknowingly taking tablets that contain other,
more dangerous ingredients, experts say.

Ecstasy is a hallucinogenic stimulant whose chemical name is
3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine.

A 13-year-old girl from Rigaud died Monday after consuming what was
believed to be ecstasy. The Quebec coroner's office is investigating
to determine the cause of the girl's death.

"It's amazing how many drugs one finds in ecstasy tablets made in
Canada," said Dr. Stephen Kish, a researcher at the Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. "You don't find this in
Europe or the States."

The girl's death has former ecstasy users expressing concerns about
what was in the drugs they consumed, one drug counsellor says.

"About a third of the youths here used the drug," said Allan Farkas,
director of Portage West Island, a drug treatment centre in
Beaconsfield. Classes were cancelled yesterday to talk about the death.

"What we are hearing from the youths who have used it more than once
is that they had been concerned with how ecstasy was made and where
it was coming from."

In a recent joint study with Health Canada, Kish tested 20 people who
reported taking only ecstasy. In a majority of the subjects, he found
other drugs.

"We found a lot of methamphetamine - old-fashioned speed - and
another drug called MDA that is similar to ecstasy but more potent," Kish said.

Not one of the test subjects had heard of MDA, Kish said. "My sense
is that Canada has the poorest quality control of ecstasy tablets in
the world."

The pills with MDA produce a bigger high, and are probably good for
business, Kish said.

"I suspect clandestine labs in Canada have figured out the way to
keep their customers coming back is to add a substance with a high
addiction potential, and that's not ecstacy, that's speed."

Though the long-term effects of ecstasy use are still under study,
it's extremely rare for one or two tablets of the drug alone to cause
death, said Jean-Sebastien Fallu, a professor and drug researcher at
the Universite de Montreal.

Kish estimates there have been fewer than 100 cases of sudden death
from ecstasy.

"It's still Russian roulette, but with thousands and thousands of
empty chambers in the gun."

But a tablet of ecstasy mixed with methamphetamine and MDA may be
more likely to kill than a tablet of ecstasy alone, he said.