E-COMMERCE PART II

Kristin, a shy, blonde 14-year-old with braces who hugs
herself nervously while talking, began drinking and smoking marijuana
at age 12, but neither drug had the pull of ecstasy, which she
first tried in the spring of 1999. "I didn't think it was gonna be that
good, but once I tried it, it was like my life," she says. "I couldn't wait
until the next time I did it, so I did it the next day."

Like the club kids who proselytized about ecstasy ("Everything begins
with an E" was a raver mantra), Kristin found herself E-vangelizing
about the drug the way Timothy Leary's followers extolled the virtues
of LSD. "Once you do the first pill, your whole perspective on life
changes," she says. "Your whole view on the world around you, the way
you look at people.

I would look at clean people and be like, 'What is wrong with them?
They don't even know what they're missing.' And I wanted to show
people ecstasy."

Though ecstasy is relatively expensive for cash-poor teenagers,
Kristin says she rarely had to pay for it. "Most girls I know who
don't pay for their drugs had sex with the dealer and he'd give it to
them for free, but it wasn't like that for me," she says. She got the
drug by hosting afternoon ecstasy parties at her parents' home.

On the drug, "if someone says something just a little nice, like 'Hi,
how are you?,' you'll be like, 'Oh, my God, that's so nice of you,'
and you'll fall in love with them on the spot," she says. But the
bonds created by the drug vanish just as quickly. "I remember this kid
who I was so in love with when I was on ecstasy," she continues. "Then
the next day I called him and told him to come over and he said no,
and I was like, 'Whatever, I don't really care about you anyway.' He
wasn't important to me at all -- we just had that connection when we
did E together. I call it 'E love,' 'cause that's what it is, really."

After she began to miss more school, her mother read her diary and
"saw a completely different person 'cause every page was filled with
'Oh, my God, I can't wait till the next time I can do E,' " she says.
She's been enrolled with Daytop since the fall, but it's still
difficult for her to imagine life without ecstasy. "I give myself pats
on the shoulder every day, like, 'Today I'm clean another day,' " she
says, "but it's still constantly in the back of my head, because
nothing can make me feel like that."

In the early nineties, when ecstasy was prevalent only in European
rave culture and the few underground American clubs that identified
with it, two outer-borough teens named Frankie Bones and Michael
Caruso went to England to check out London nightlife.

They were fateful trips: Bones was inspired to begin throwing raves in
Brooklyn, and Caruso started Manhattan's first techno party at the
Limelight. Eventually, Bones's "Storm Raves" planted the seed for the
U.S. rave scene; the drug-distribution network Caruso allegedly ran at
the Limelight gave the city its first bona fide ecstasy bust.

"We weren't really even aware of ecstasy until the Limelight case in
1995," says Brennan. Indeed, the DEA-NYPD joint investigation into the
Limelight began only after police were contacted by the parents of an
18-year-old New Jersey man who had died from an overdose of ecstasy he
had allegedly bought there.

Until 1997, ecstasy wasn't even a controlled substance in New York
State.

By then, the drug was already old news in clubland -- it had started
spreading to the mainstream. "Law enforcement is always playing
catch-up," Brennan admits. Because it got such a late start monitoring
the ecstasy trade, Brennan says, the NYPD's lab doesn't "have a
baseline to start with in terms of assessing the purity of ecstasy
pills" the way it does with cocaine or heroin.

Lately, however, Brennan has been surprised to find supposed ecstasy
pills that actually contain antihistamine laced with insecticide.
"We're seeing all kinds of adulterated substances," she says. "You
honestly don't know what you're putting in your mouth when you're
taking ecstasy."

The current ecstasy explosion has made the market for fakes even
hotter. "People don't have qualms about what they sell as ecstasy,"
according to Murray, "as long as people pay for it." Indeed, when the
NYPD used the nuisance-abatement law to shut down the Tunnel last year
after a raid targeting ecstasy dealers there, only four of the pills
that were seized tested positive for MDMA. (Tunnel has since
reopened.) And as user demand builds for "brands" like Mitsubishi -- a
particularly potent pill illicitly stamped with the car manufacturer's
three-diamond logo -- drugmakers are putting the same insignia on
impure pills, much the way knockoff-makers sew Prada labels onto cheap
backpacks.

But adulterated or weakened pills are the least of law enforcement's
problems: Smugglers are getting more sophisticated, and other
organized-crime rings are competing with the Israelis. Several men
have been nabbed at JFK wearing skintight bodysuits that held more
than 7,000 ecstasy pills each; Customs officials have also found pills
hidden in software packaging, stuffed animals, and secret compartments
in carry-on luggage.

In March, Customs scored its first internal seizure when it arrested a
passenger flying into JFK from Amsterdam who had swallowed 2,800 pills
in 70 condoms.

At the same time, "organized-crime groups are putting their feelers
out" to the ecstasy trade, according to Murray. "There's so much money
to be made that these groups are saying, 'Let's get this going on,' "
Murray says. "We're going to see a stronger Mexican connection, a much
stronger Dominican connection. We're going to see bikers who were
running methamphetamine labs in the Midwest convert those labs into
ecstasy labs. We've already seen it in Vancouver. The only difference
is you start with a different chemical."

To combat the spread of the drug locally, New York state
senator Roy Goodman issued a recommendation that a defendant
be charged with ecstasy possession based on the weight of his or
her stash rather than its purity. "We're at the point right now
with ecstasy that we were with cocaine in the seventies," Goodman says.
"It's being passed out like mints by people who have no idea of its
negative effects." On July 3, New Jersey governor Christine Whitman
signed into law a bill that would put ecstasy in the same legal class
as heroin and cocaine.

"It's worse in the cities," says Dr. Mike Nelson, a physician at the
St. Vincents emergency room. "But it's also in middle America, because
they don't have anything else to do." Congresswoman Judy Biggert, who
represents the suburban Thirteenth District of Illinois, is sponsoring
a bill to double the minimum jail time for ecstasy traffickers.
"Ecstasy has been around for 20 or 30 years now, but we're finally
seeing it in the suburbs," she says. "So we're trying to send a
message to dealers and traffickers -- right now, the penalties they
receive are a joke." Similar legislation, the Ecstasy
Anti-Proliferation Act, has been introduced by Senator Bob Graham of
Florida.

Harm-reduction advocates argue that under such laws, the least
powerful people in the ecstasy-distribution business, the "mules" who
carry the drugs, would receive some of the harshest penalties.
"They'll always arrest people like me -- poor people and idiot
people," argues Van-Zyp. "The people higher up will make a lot of
money but they won't get arrested." Indeed, ecstasy couriers are
hardly an upscale bunch.

The Customs source notes with some amusement that many of the mules
recruited by the Orgad network used their $10,000 fee as a down
payment on a trailer home.

Customs and the DEA have labeled ecstasy "agony" in order to raise
awareness about the dangers of the drug, but unlike crack or cocaine
before it, ecstasy seems to have negligible social effects. "Crack is
categorically an addictive substance, so the crack epidemic was much
easier for people to understand," says Daytop Village's Porteus.
"Unlike crack or cocaine, ecstasy is the sort of drug people use to
compensate for something rather than to fulfill a craving."

While nearly every week brings the arrest of a newer, more powerful
ecstasy baron who seems to have been plucked right out of the cocaine
era, there hasn't been the kind of gang violence seen in the late
eighties and early nineties. "Ecstasy itself might not cause violent
crime," acknowledges Brennan of the DEA. But she predicts that "there
will be a rise in violence associated with organized crime as a result
of the ecstasy trade." Some cities, like Chicago, aren't taking any
chances.

In response to a series of ecstasy-related overdoses in the city (most
of which were due to pills laced with a deadly drug called PMA, or
paramethoxyamphetamine), the City Council there passed an "anti-rave"
ordinance, which makes holding such a party punishable by a $10,000
fine. One Chicago police officer even vowed to the Chicago Tribune
that "if D.J.'s know it's dangerous to come to Chicago . . . they may
think twice about coming here."

But to those who use the drug, such moral panic is hard to understand,
much less agree with. "I really don't understand what the big deal is.
Yeah, you might get a little too happy, a little too emotional; you
might even say some really stupid, cheesy things you regret later.

And yeah, there can be a pretty harsh comedown if you overdo it,"
argues one user. "But compared to crack or coke? Please! When was the
last time you saw two crackheads hugging?"