ECSTASY WITHOUT FEAR

Dancesafe Uses Web Site To Make Rave Dosing Less Risky

My friend Elena has a Ziploc bag stuffed with red -- and -- white tablets.
The Bay Area dealer who sold them to her says they're pure MDMA -- otherwise
known as "Ecstasy" -- and she's inclined to believe him. "The stuff coming
out of the Bay Area is really good right now," she says.

If her dealer's right, shortly after she eats a pill, Elena's neural axons
will drench her brain with excess serotonin, her heart will race, and she'll
find herself overwhelmed by an exhilarating sense of deep empathy with all
humankind. Three to five hours later she'll crash, tired and perhaps
depressed from serotonin depletion. But she's got a bottle of 5HTP vitamin
supplement and a small cache of Prozac to take care of that. And though the
jury is still out on the drug's long -- term neurotoxic effects, as long as
Elena remembers to stay cool and drink water, she'll undoubtedly come down
alive. The very few so -- called Ecstasy "overdoses" have come from madly
dancing, dehydrated X -- ers giving themselves heat stroke.

But if Elena's pills aren't MDMA -- if her dealer is wrong -- she could take
a dose and die.

Black marketeers -- hampered by law enforcement's crackdown on Ecstasy
manufacture, but lured by the swelling ranks of ravers willing to shell out
up to $30 for a single dose -- have taken to substituting a pharmacopoeia of
substances for X, making it the most frequently adulterated narcotic on the
market, law enforcement says. Some bogus pills are harmless rip -- offs.
Others can prove deadly, especially in a rave setting. One X substitute, the
legal cough suppressant dextromethorphan (DXM), inhibits perspiration and
has led to a slew of club casualties. Last month, paramethoxyamphetamine
(PMA) disguised as Ecstasy hit American shores after killing several users
in Europe. Like X, PMA raises blood pressure. Unlike X, there's no limit to
how high PMA can raise it -- the more pills ingested, the higher the
pressure. Two Chicago -- area ravers died from the drug. One of them had
taken a staggering five doses.

With Ecstasy use deeply embedded in the fabric of modern dance culture --
due in no small part to the media, which by hyping raves as drug fests
guarantees that drug users will attend -- the problem of adulterated pills
threatens to destroy the very scene that spawned the current X boom. But --
not surprising in a movement that celebrates creative uses of technology --
dance aficionados have arrived at a homegrown tech solution, in the form of
a nonprofit group called DanceSafe.

Founded in Berkeley last year by 30 -- year -- old philosophy grad Emanuel
Sferios -- and already expanded to nine cities, L.A. being the latest --
DanceSafe is the domestic descendant of European "harm reduction"
organizations such as Holland's Unity group. Such groups cleave to the same
principles that birthed needle -- exchange programs and helped reduce the
spread of AIDS. "It's not that there are good drugs and bad drugs, safe
drugs and dangerous drugs," says Sferios. "There are just drugs. All of them
have an inherent risk. People who aren't willing to abstain need factual,
unbiased information about what the drugs do and how to avoid the risks."

To that end, DanceSafe last February posted an educational Web site
(http://www.dancesafe.org/) that currently racks up a formidable 130,000
hits per day. The site is rife with FAQs detailing the effects, dosages and
dangers of a whole range of illicit drugs.

What have drawn the most attention, though, are DanceSafe's drug -- testing
services. Users anonymously send questionable tabs to a DEA -- approved
Sacramento lab for gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy testing.
DanceSafe's Web site posts a revolving rogue's gallery of photos of bogus
Ecstasy tabs, along with their actual ingredients, so ravers can identify
tainted strains of X.

Since last June, the group has been taking pill testing to the people,
setting up booths at a number of raves and club events. Ravers present their
X to DanceSafe volunteers, who treat the pills using a "marquis reagent" kit
- -- basically a bottle of sulfuric acid tempered with formaldehyde. A drop or
two on a pill shaving detects the presence -- or total absence -- of MDMA,
or related compounds such as MDA and MDE. It can also identify some of the
most common Ecstasy imposters: 2CB, DXM and speed.

For a $25 donation, DanceSafe offers a marquis kit for home use. Mine
arrived in the mail two weeks ago. I gave Elena a call.

Elena fishes out a sample of each of the three Ecstasy "brands" from her
little Ziploc. One is red with an "M" design pressed into its surface. These
are "red Motorolas," and Elena's heard they're the best. "Which just means
everybody likes them," she says. "It doesn't mean they're X."

She scrapes a tiny bit of red Motorola onto a white ceramic plate, and I
pull out the marquis test bottle. A sticker on the front screams
"CORROSIVE." It's no joke -- I spill a drop, and it eats through Elena's
tablecloth like Alien blood. "That's okay," she says. "I got it at IKEA."

I tip the bottle upside down over the pile of red Motorola. Two drops slide
onto the powder, and the liquid immediately turns a purplish black. We
consult a color chart. Immediate black means there's at least some form of
MD compound in red Motorola.

A white Buddha pill also tests positive for MD. Elena moves on to a white
"Mushroom" tab, scraping some onto the plate. I douse it with another drop
from the bottle. This time, when the powder turns black, it bubbles and
gives off a satisfying acidic hiss.

We smile. This is cool.

But not everyone is so impressed. DanceSafe's programs have raised the ire
of several high -- profile anti -- drug groups, including the nonprofit
Partnership for a Drug -- Free America, a project whose efforts have
resulted in roughly $3 billion in pro bono media exposure and whose list of
funders includes Pepsi -- Cola, the U.S. Department of Education and several
pharmaceutical companies. "It's never, in our mind, a good idea to make
drugs that are illegal seem more socially acceptable, and that, in essence,
is what DanceSafe is doing," says Howard Simon, the PDFA's assistant
director of public affairs. "They could just as easily go into these raves
and pass out literature about how dangerous the drugs are, urge the kids to
hand over the drugs no questions asked, and not hand them back. But they're
choosing to test the drugs and give 'em back to the kids, and we think
that's insane."

According to Sferios, DanceSafe booths do distribute literature explaining
the dangers of Ecstasy. "But if we told kids we were planning to take their
pills away," he says, "they'd never come around to read the literature in
the first place."

"That's a nice cover," responds Simon. "But again, the bottom line is that
DanceSafe is saying, 'You're using an illegal drug? We'll help you do it.'"

If DanceSafe has its high -- profile enemies, though, it has some equally
impressive friends. The group's efforts have quickly caught the attention of
the high -- tech world, people like software millionaire Bob Wallace
(Microsoft's employee No. 9) and newly landed young IPO gentry like Paul
Phillips.

As the original chief technical officer of Go2Net -- a publicly traded
Internet portal company with a market cap of over $1 billion -- Phillips had
the financial wherewithal to go into semiretirement at the tender age of 27,
the better to embark on a career as a professional poker player. Like many
techies, he also spent years making the rounds of the rave scene, where he
says he "witnessed a lot of ignorance. There's much to hate about the drug
war, but the worst is how it suppresses information. The government claims
to be educating kids about drugs, but they're not -- they're just telling
them not to do drugs. Anything that's about getting the information out
there, I'm in favor of." Phillips first spotted a DanceSafe booth at a rave
in August 1999. The next day, he wrote Sferios a check for $10,000.

Others followed. Software designer and movie investor Ray Greenwell will
give DanceSafe all his profits from the upcoming Groove, an indie film, set
in the rave world, which Sony Pictures Classics bought at Sundance for $1.5
million. The founder of one multibillion -- dollar tech company has offered
to make his new outfit DanceSafe's corporate sponsor, Sferios says. (A
company spokesperson confirms the offer, but says her firm isn't ready to go
public.) In the last nine months, according to Sferios, DanceSafe's coffers
have swelled from negative numbers to $200,000.

That's allowed the group to breathe a little easier in the face of potential
legal threats. Sferios is relatively unconcerned, for instance, about the
Methamphetamine Anti -- Proliferation Act, a proposed federal bill that, if
passed, would make it a crime to use the Internet to disseminate information
about illegal drugs. "I hope the government tries to shut us down," he says.
"Nothing would give us more publicity, and we have a lot of money to fight
the issue in court. I don't think they want to go to war with the dot --
coms over this."

But even if DanceSafe wins that war, the group faces an uphill battle in its
efforts to change users' attitudes toward drug safety. Case in point: Elena.
Though all her tabs check positive for the presence of MD compounds, I
remind her that the marquis test can't determine a pill's overall purity.
Would she consider waiting a week while the Sacramento lab tests one of her
pills and posts the results on DanceSafe's site?

Smiling, Elena gathers up her tabs, clutching them to her bosom like a
mother cradling her child. "I care about this whole purity thing," she says.
"But not that much."