INFORMATION BLACKOUT

While rave crackdowns are occurring across the country, Congress is trying
to block the flow of information about the culture's favorite drug: Ecstasy

It's a balmy Saturday evening on Randall's Island, where 8,000 people are
attending the Sixth Element Electronic Music Festival, a rave-style event
showcasing DJs from around the world. In a back corner of the grounds is a
small folding table behind a banner that says "DanceSafe." Several young
people are peering intently into a small cardboard box, where Soren
Roinick, a 23-year-old DanceSafe volunteer, is testing ravers' pills for
MDMA, the only ingredient in pure Ecstasy.

Three of the 68 pills DanceSafe will test this day contain DXM, a drug
sometimes sold as Ecstasy that has been responsible for some recent
injuries to ravers. Roinick tells the pill holders at the table that DXM is
not Ecstasy, and, when mixed with MDMA, can lead to severe overheating. Two
people say they would not take the DXM because they are already on E.
Another guy says he will take it later, after his Ecstasy wears off. On a
humid 95-degree day, that bit of advice may have saved a couple of trips to
the hospital.

In an attempt to stem the growing popularity of a drug taken mainly by
young, affluent, white people, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., recently introduced
the "Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act of 2000." The bill proposes stiffen
legal penalties for Ecstasy dealers. But much of the language is aimed at
controlling information about the drug. An aide to Graham said the main
targets are web sites that extol its virtues and announce the raves where
people can buy it.

But the bill goes beyond even this questionable assault on free speech. It
would ban the teaching, demonstration or distribution of information about
Ecstasy or any other drugs defined as illicit--marijuana, cocaine, LSD,
even Valium used without a prescription--if the people distributing that
information know that someone will commit a crime based on what he has
learned. Naturally, this alarms DanceSafe founder Emanuel Sferios, whose
organization does exactly that.

"Banning lifesaving information is going to jeopardize the health and lives
of young people," he says. "Politicians want to appear tough on drugs, so
they come up with this bill. But it's only going to exacerbate the problem.
It should be called the Club-Drug Harm Maximization Act."

At a press conference in May to announce the bill, Graham said, "Ecstasy is
a proven killer--and it is on the loose. We need to shatter the dangerous
myth that this risky designer drug is safe for consumption." The bill would
provide funding to "educate young people on the negative effects of
Ecstasy," and would order the head of every federal agency to post
"anti-drug messages" on their web sites.

A nearly identical bill was discussed in the House Judiciary Subcommittee
on Crime on June 29. Perfect timing: On June 28, the U.S. Customs Service
announced that it had busted an international ring that allegedly smuggled
roughly 9 million tablets of Ecstasy to the United States--the largest
trafficking syndicate Customs claims to have cracked. Since April, 25
people have been arrested in connection with the group. The House bill is
sponsored by Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill. In a press release, Biggert says she
was moved to introduce the bill after a high school student from her
district "died after ingesting what she thought was Ecstasy, but was
actually PMA." (Paramethoxyamphetamine is another, more toxic amphetamine.)

Of course, this is the sort of tragedy that pill testing tries to prevent,
but the bill shows no recognition of this. A spokesman for Biggert says a
legal analysis by the Congres-sional Research Service concluded that
DanceSafe would only be "tangentially targeted under this law because what
they are doing probably already constitutes a felony offense."

But Eric Sterling, who served eight years as the counsel to the House
Judiciary Subcomittee on Crime and is now the president of the Criminal
Justice Policy Foundation, which advocates drug law reform, has a different
view. "This bill is designed to chill any discussion of drugs that is
contrary to the government line," he says. "Fear of felony prosecution in
the drug arena is an enormously heavy blanket. Small programs like
DanceSafe run the risk of being destroyed."

Founded in February 1999 by Sferios, 30, DanceSafe is part of the "harm
reduction" movement in the United States. Other such organizations,
including the Harm Reduction Coalition and the Lindesmith Center, advocate
a shift in national drug policy to view the issue of illegal drug use as a
matter of public health, rather than law enforcement. People are going to
use drugs anyway, the reasoning goes. Sferios says it's especially
important to serve the dance community. "All drug use has inherent risk,
and dance drugs in particular pose certain risks, which are increased by
the lack of information," he says.

The anti-Ecstasy bill, say civil libertarians and reduction advocates,
could easily be used against programs like DanceSafe. "When you prohibit
information about use, you are targeting people involved in harm
reduction," says Rachel King, legislative counsel for the American Civil
Liberties Union. She adds that "there are not that many people who care
about the First Amendment in the context of the war on drugs."

Those prosecuted for distributing information on the use of E and other
club drugs would face a maximum prison sentence of 10 years along with fines.

"I don't think it's unreasonable for politicians to be worried," says Mark
Kleiman, a professor of policy studies at UCLA. He points to studies from
England showing that frequent weekend users of Ecstasy are depressed by
mid-week, every week. "But passing a law that's grossly unconstitutional is
a different question," he says.

He has no doubt that if the legislation becomes law, the courts will throw
it out. This, he says, is "part of a childish cycle the legislature has set
up where the courts are the only ones left to defend the Constitution. They
can vote for this knowing it's going to get thrown out, but then they get
to go home and tell their constituents that they're doing something about
drugs."

Chad Thevenot of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation says it's ludicrous
to block safe-drug information in the name of drug-abuse prevention. He
draws an analogy to safe-sex programs. "Giving someone a condom doesn't
make them horny; they're horny by nature," he says. "People make better
decisions when they have better information."

There's no good research on the effectiveness of harm-reduction efforts.
But there is solid evidence that the official approach to drug information
has done nothing to stop drug use. Marijuana use among high school students
nearly doubled from 1991 to 1999, according to the Centers for Disease
Control--years when the "just say no" slogan made famous by Nancy Reagan
became the cornerstone of school-based drug education. Use of cocaine more
than doubled in the same period.

"All of our research has shown that the messages so far don't work," says
Joel Brown, executive director of the Center for Educational Excellence in
Berkeley, Calif. Young people, he says, don't fall for scare tactics, and
often turn to uninformed sources who may downplay the risks.

"You have to win people's trust," says Sferios. "If part of the overall
strategy is to see the drug situation as a war, well ... the first casualty
in war is the truth."

Sferios and others point to a recent example in Florida, a hotbed of rave
culture, of what happens when the government tries to control information
related to drugs. As reported by Henry Pierson Curtis in a May 21 Page 1
article in the Orlando Sentinel, Florida drug czar Jim McDonough, a former
Army colonel, was so eager to show that his efforts against club drugs were
necessary that his office grossly overstated the number of deaths caused by
them. The Sentinel reviewed the autopsy reports of those supposedly killed
by club drugs in Central Florida, their main coverage area. Over a
three-year period, they found that at least 35 of the 60 deaths were in
fact completely unrelated to Ecstasy or rave culture.

Two days after the story appeared, Graham introduced the Ecstasy bill.
DanceSafe is reviewing the Florida autopsy reports, and will publish its
own conclusions.

A therapeutic dose (2mg/kg of body weight) of MDMA will flood the synapses
of brain cells with nearly the entire supply of the brain's serotonin, and
prevents it from being naturally recycled so it lingers longer. Serotonin
is a neurotransmitter known to play an important role in determining a
person's mood and regulation of body temperature. MDMA also triggers the
release of dopamine and norepinephrine, which increase the feeling of
energy. The three-to five-hour effect is usually one of seemingly boundless
energy, combined with an overall heightened physical sensitivity and an
increased feeling of empathy toward others. Hence the "marriage made in
heaven," cited by one raver, between Ecstasy and dancing in close quarters
with lots of other people.

Ecstasy is most likely not without biological risks, but its effects on the
brain are unclear. The most often cited studies on the neurotoxicity of
MDMA are by Dr. George Ricuarte, a neurotoxicolgist at Johns Hopkins
University. Ricuarte says MDMA causes damage to the ends of axons and may
impair memory function. Other scientists, however, say his findings are
inconclusive.

Dr. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist at Bellevue Medical Center and a
psychopharmacologist in Manhattan, says Ricuarte's memory study compared
multiple drug users with graduate students. "The best you could say from a
study like that is that people who take a lot of drugs and go to raves
don't perform as well on memory tests as grad students," Holland says.

She adds, "Nothing is conclusive about the brain and its chemistry--the
more you look, the more complicated it gets."

Her suggestion to ravers: "Use the chill-out rooms and stay cool. Drink
plenty of water, but only as much as you feel you're losing. And get your
pills tested."

A couple of hours before the finish of the rave on Randall's Island, an
emergency medical technician, who has worked for several years at venues
like Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium, is impressed. "It's much
better than we expected," she said. "With two hours to go, we've only taken
five people to the hospital, one was because of alcohol and another because
he got in a fight. The other three... we don't know what happened."

A leap of faith: The other three were probably not the three young people
who decided against taking DXM pills disguised as Ecstasy after having them
tested by DanceSafe.

Ted Oehmke is a freelance writer in New York. He has written for the New
York Times, the New Republic and Salon, where this article originally appeared.