ECSTASY: THE NEW REASON TO WORRY

The Agony Is The Ecstasy.

While fewer teens are turning on to marijuana, the disturbing news from the
latest annual surveys conducted by the University of Michigan and the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America is a rise in teen use of ecstasy. The
numbers are nowhere near those for pot, but they are going in the wrong
direction.

"As we turn one corner," said partnership president Richard Bonnette,
"troubling developments are coming at us from other directions ...the spike
we're seeing demands our attention."

The partnership's annual survey involved 7,290 teens across the country who
answered questions about drug use on forms that protected their anonymity.
The U-M Institute for Social Research is in its 26th year of a Monitoring
the Future survey of 45,000 8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders.

The partnership survey found trial use of marijuana continuing to decline,
and now down about 10 percent since 1997, although 40 percent of teens do
say they've used pot at least once this year. The U-M research showed a
drop of 25-33 percent in use of such drugs as inhalants, crystal meth and LSD.

But the partnership study found trial use of ecstasy
(methylenedioxy-methamphetamine) is up to about 10 percent, comparable to
use of cocaine and LSD. In the U-M research, 3.1 percent of 8th-graders,
5.4 percent of 10th-graders, and 8.2 percent of 12th-graders reported using
ecstasy in the previous 12 months, exceeding reported cocaine use.

Teens evidently attach little risk to the hallucinogenic "party drug" that
has surpassed heroin in popularity. Combined with physical exertion such as
dancing, ecstasy can cause overheating, dehydration and a spike in blood
pressure presaging a stroke or heart attack.

Teens need to know that a fundamental peril lurks in any such substance --
from inducing a destructive chemical dependence to the mere act of eating
something of uncertain content and handling. It is said that many users of
street drugs would never have loaded up the first time if they had seen the
stuff being made. The average clandestine drug lab makes a slaughterhouse
look sterile.

But nobody ever seems to see much danger in something that's just supposed
to temporarily distort reality -- at least not until reality comes crashing
down around them.