THE STORY OF E

From Clandestine Labs That Dot The Dutch Countryside To The Dance Floors Of
Urban Canada, A Team Of Globe And Mail Reporters Tracks The Life Cycle Of
The Controversial 'Rave Drug' Known As Ecstasy.

In his second-floor apartment overlooking busy Middenweg Street in
Amsterdam, entrepreneur chemist Ewoud Vyfwinkel deftly shaves a few flakes
from a pill onto a plate. He sprinkles in a couple of drops of clear liquid,
then watches as the mixture turns a satisfying deep purple.

There is no tinge of green, which would denote some unwanted hallucinogen.
Nor an orange hue, which indicates amphetamine.

"This, you can see, is real ecstasy, good stuff," Mr. Vyfwinkel, 31,
explains with a genial grin. "A lot of it isn't. . . . That's why I'm in
business.."

Fed by the Internet, demand for Mr. Vyfwinkel's vials of EZ-Test, worth
about $4 apiece, has never been hotter. From Canada to Australia, Israel to
Ireland, hundreds of mail-order inquiries pour in every week from ecstasy
lovers anxious to test their tablets.

Mr. Vyfwinkel mixes his patented product of sulphuric acid and formaldehyde
in his kitchen, wearing a gas mask to protect himself from the resulting
fumes. It is scarcely a coincidence that the formula was developed in
Amsterdam.

Ten days ago, customs officials at Toronto's Pearson International Airport
made Canada's largest-ever ecstasy seizure -- 170,000 pills worth up to
$5-million on the street. They arrived aboard a flight from Paris, but
authorities were under no illusions about the shipment's true origin.

The burgeoning popularity of the so-called rave drug has sparked a
multimillion-dollar industry, with clandestine labs popping up around the
world. By almost every estimate, the Netherlands remains by far the largest
source.

There are plenty of reasons: the traditionally lenient Dutch attitude toward
drugs; a highly developed transportation infrastructure at the centre of
borderless Western Europe; a long tradition of smuggling in the southern
provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg, where the industry first flourished.

But there is nothing lenient in the Dutch attitude toward ecstasy, which
under the Opium Act is classified as a Schedule 1 hard drug. That puts it in
the same category as heroin and cocaine, whose usage within the country of
16 million is the lowest in the Western world.

The famous Dutch cannabis-retailing coffee shops are one thing. Tolerated
for almost a quarter of a century, though not technically legal, the smoky
dens that have been long popular with aging Dutch hippies and hordes of
foreign "narco-tourists" are licensed and left alone by police.

So too are the colourful and legal "smart shops" selling organic stimulants
and a host of soft-drug paraphernalia.

But synthetic ecstasy, banned in 1988, is seen very differently. Even as
demand surges elsewhere, the appetite for it here has plummeted since
peaking in 1996.

Ecstasy came to the fore in the late 1980s, when it fuelled the first of the
"acid house" raves. Plenty of raves still take place in the Netherlands, but
gone are the days when an in-house chemist would offer instant tablet
analysis. Now drugs are banned, and rave patrons are routinely searched at
the door, so they tend to pop their pills shortly before they arrive.

The Dutch wariness stems in part from a decline in quality, which the
authorities say is linked to the fact that the industry is now financed and
controlled by organized crime.

Money, together with police pressure, changed everything.

"Until the early nineties, the whole ecstasy-producing business was
relatively open, there was still contact between producers and users," says
lecturer Arno Aldelaars, the author of a book on the drug.

"But after it became a government priority to hunt the ecstasy producers, in
a couple of years there was a really big change. In 1994 we had several
executions on the highway outside Amsterdam, four in one year, all related
to the ecstasy business."

Who are the big players? For all his expertise, Mr. Aldelaars claims to have
no idea. "I don't know, I don't want to know, and I don't want them to know
me because I love life."

The chemists churning out the product from their clandestine labs are still
mostly Dutch, police believe. But since 1996, when the Netherlands banned
the sale of some key ingredients such as PMK (PiperonyMethylKeten), the
substances have been flooding in from elsewhere, particularly Eastern Europe
and Asia.

"My expectation is that in the coming years, organized crime will build up
production sites in [other] countries as well," says Assistant Chief
Constable Peter Reijnders, who heads the Synthetic Drugs Unit, set up in
1997, the only such drug squad in the world.

Pressure from perturbed European neighbours had a lot to do with the SDU's
creation. In launching the project, Prime Minister Wim Kok said he was
"greatly irritated" by the Netherlands' reputation as the world's biggest
source of ecstasy.

And as in other countries, Dutch ecstasy users have died, which also stirs
concern. Constable Reijnders regards ecstasy as a "garbage" drug that
carries more risks than users may realize.

The 55-member unit, which includes police, prosecutors, customs officers and
money-laundering experts, is serious about its mission. To some degree, this
emphasis on ecstasy may distort the true global picture, Constable Reijnders
says. No other country intercepts the same amount of the drug because no
other police force pursues it so zealously.

"They don't tolerate dealers," said one long-time ecstasy user, a 27-
year-old rave-lighting technician known as Scratch 'n' Sniff.

Most of the big busts, however, have occurred not in Amsterdam, but in the
south, which is partly why the SDU is based on the edge of Eindhoven, an
industrial city of 200,000 in Noord-Brabant near the Belgian border.

At first glance, Noord-Brabant seems an unlikely venue for mass drug
production. All looks bucolic in the flat green farmland, dotted with cows
and red-tiled roofs and home to mostly pig farmers and mushroom growers.

But the province also has a long history of smuggling. In the postwar years,
cigarettes, butter and meat were the chief commodities. Later, when the
1960s hippie upheaval began, amphetamines were the product of choice.

Then came ecstasy.

In sheds, barns and briefly rented farm houses, scores of production sites
were set up in the early nineties, producing not just drugs but a tide of
foul chemical waste.

As drug ripoffs took place, weapons, too, became common.

Pig farms provided particularly useful cover, because they generally use a
lot of electricity, as does ecstasy making, while the smell helps mask the
stink of the chemicals.

While Noord-Brabant and adjoining Limburg are still a major source of
production, operations have spread recently to central and western
Netherlands.

"Now you see it everywhere," Detective Joop Ens says. "From farms to
isolated houses to crowded areas." Pill-pressing machines have also been
found in large trucks.

With the drugs comes wholesale pollution. Leftover chemical liquid waste,
sometimes toxic, is routinely tipped into streams, dumped along back roads
and in the woods. A wall map in Detective Ens's office has 147 black pins,
locating each of last year's dumping sites.

In all, nearly 100,000 litres of pollutants were abandoned, typically in
leaky jerry cans. In 1998, another method became popular: Steal a van, fill
it with waste and blow it up. Sixteen burned-out wrecks were found last
year.

How big is the industry?

Last year, the SDU shut down 36 production sites -- almost twice as many as
in 1998 -- and made close to 200 arrests. The largest operations produced
about 100 kilograms of the drug a week, but the average yield, Constable
Reijnders gauges, was about 10 kilos. One kilo yields approximately 10,000
tablets, so the average operation makes about 100,000 pills a week, worth
about $2-million abroad.

But the total production figure is guesswork. Confiscations of the SDU's
other major target, amphetamines, dropped sharply last year, but ecstasy
production may still be rising.

Ecstasy is more popular in the Netherlands than cocaine and heroin, and much
of it is consumed at home. But Mr. Vyfwinkel, the chemist, suggests the
number of Dutch users has dropped to perhaps half the peak of 400,000 four
years ago. A full 80 per cent of inquiries about his EZ Test (motto: Just
Say Know) come from abroad.

In 1998, about 2.5 million tablets traceable directly to the Netherlands
were seized in 26 countries. A further 1.2 million pills en route to foreign
destinations were intercepted within the Netherlands.

The total for last year was slightly higher.

If caught, a first-time producer can expect a couple of years in prison,
depending on the scale of operation. After that, penalties rise to a maximum
of 12 years for exporting drugs. Parole eligibility begins at the two-thirds
mark.

Criminal lawyer Laura Hamers of Dordrecht, near Rotterdam, has defended a
number of clients on ecstasy charges, and concurs that most of the industry
is probably Dutch-controlled but that there are also connections with
Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia.

Indeed, Mr. Vyfwinkel says production is moving to Eastern Europe and
perhaps Britain.

A network of about 10 ecstasy-producing groups based in the south have been
identified, but no one organization controls the trade, Constable Reijnders
says. "One of the big difficulties we have is trying to find out who is
financing this."

Like other drug networks, the various links in the ecstasy chain rarely know
each other. Typically, one group supplies the 10 or 12 necessary chemicals.
Using heaters, distillation flasks, water and funnels, a crew of chemists
then brews up the mix and turns it into powder. The powder usually is
shipped to a different location, where machines press it into pills, often
several thousand in an hour.

From there, the distributors take over, relaying the product down the line
to a network of dealers and couriers, who usually know only the person next
up the chain.

A sizable part of the export business is done by mail, Mr. Reijnders says,
but there are any number of other ways to smuggle pills.

Countless cars and trucks stream in and out of the country each day, and the
port of Rotterdam and Amsterdam's Schiphol airport are among the busiest
transport hubs in Europe.

Most of the ecstasy seized in Canada lately was flown in from France and
Belgium, perhaps because, with the absence of borders within the European
Union, it makes sense to ship pills from a country that draws less police
scrutiny than the Netherlands.

For instance, the record shipment seized at Pearson recently arrived on a
charter flight from Paris, but Canadian police tracked the 170,000 pills
from their point of origin: Rotterdam.

Landing in Canada

To the drug-enforcement crew at Pearson, cocaine remains the No. 1 target,
followed by marijuana-derived substances such as hashish and hash oil. And
just this week 71/2 kilos of heroin was intercepted.

But the discovery of ecstasy is growing the fastest.

So far this year, customs agents in Toronto have seized 15 times as many
ecstasy pills as they did in all of 1999. Last year's total was 23,000
tablets -- these days, they find that much on one person.

Since Jan. 1, nearly 350,000 pills have been confiscated in Toronto (11
busts have been linked to flights from Paris) by Canada Customs, which
represents more than 60 per cent of the ecstasy it seized around the
country. At least three-quarters of it was produced in the Netherlands, says
RCMP Staff Sergeant Bill Matheson, head of the airport's investigative unit.

Not that Pearson is the only point of entry. A parcel mailed from Belgium
labelled "hand and skin cream" turned out to be 54,000 ecstasy pills. And
recently, 144,000 pills were found in boxes said to be computer towers at
Dorval Airport in Montreal.

The police at Pearson admit to being frustrated. The airport, with its tens
of thousands of passengers every day, is in itself a "source country" for
ecstasy, they say.

Busts are usually too small to be newsworthy, and most drugs get through.
"It's amazing how much the drug trade resembles a legitimate business,"
Staff Sergeant Matheson says.

The "mules" who carry the goods into Canada are the most expendable members
of the smuggling operation. Some are professional criminals but the ranks
also include single mothers, students or even welfare recipients with no
idea of who is really employing them. All they know for sure is that they
receive a free trip to Paris, a week in a hotel and $1 to $1.50 for each
pill they carry.

Their progress is monitored by "overseers," or "controllers," who are
responsible for making sure the mules clear customs but don't make off with
the load. Here, techniques can vary. Some mules don't realize they're being
watched; others are told they're under surveillance when they're not.

A variety a techniques are used to combat the criminals.

The sniffing power of a black Labrador retriever produced the Montreal
bonanza, and Pearson has six dogs of its own. They inspect lineups, baggage
areas and sometimes an aircraft right after passengers disembark.

Customs officers are trained to pick out suspicious-looking travellers, but
most big busts -- including the record haul last week -- are the fruit of
long investigation.

Said to be the work of an Asian gang, this smuggling attempt led to the
arrest of five B.C. residents. The 170,000 pills, believed to be produced in
Holland, were "body-packed" -- kept in belts of plastic bags strapped to
waists and ankles. Some were even stitched into the lining of a spring New
York Yankees jacket that looked suspiciously bulky as a result.

Most body packs are nothing more than compartments fashioned from cellophane
wrap held together with medical tape.

The arrests followed a two-month investigation. But to hear police tell it,
the bulky clothes displayed a serious lack of professionalism and made their
targets obvious suspects.

The bust was huge, but Staff Sgt. Matheson says privately he's not sure the
170,000 pills would have supplied the greater Toronto area for more than a
week.

He also says that, after 30 years of fighting the drug trade, he is worried
by ecstasy because it is surrounded by so much positive hype and because its
target market seems so young, drawing many in their early teens.

Clever packaging only adds to the appeal. Ecstasy pills usually bear a logo
- -- tiny blue butterflies on the 170,000 seized at Pearson, for example --
designed to do what a Tommy Hilfiger patch does for a pair of jeans: create
a buzz.

"The marketers of chemical drugs are brilliant," Toronto Detective Randy
Smith says. "The bad guys have done the harm reduction themselves by putting
pretty logos on the drugs."

The Dealers

Once it clears Pearson, an ecstasy shipment enters a hydra-like distribution
network and eventually winds up in the possession of someone like Martin.

It's 10 p.m., and the 27-year-old university graduate is still coming down.
He didn't get to bed until 8 that morning and his pupils are so enlarged
it's hard to tell what colour his eyes are.

He has agreed to discuss his business, but each question takes a very long
time to answer. He operates in slow motion.

Martin has been using and selling ecstasy since 1994.

"A lot of people see [a dealer] as Joe on the street, packing a gun, chasing
you down for money," he says. "But it's not like that."

Martin, who has asked not to be identified, says he only sells to a few
friends. He says he deals in the spirit of the party, to see his friends
come out and dance.

A few years ago, one pill would go for about $40, but now, he sells it for
about $20. As more people take the drug, more people also sell it. "E's come
up from the underground," he says.

He thinks the current uproar is overblown. "I've never known anyone to die
from E."

He is especially angry that authorities have tried to link guns to raves. "A
rave is the least violent place ever. I've never seen a fight at a rave."

The Clubs

An Asian girl with pigtails and wearing khaki cargo pants with a loose white
T-shirt stands motionless on the crowded dance floor, her eyes closed.

"I'm not asleep," she says, smiling. "I'm listening."

The seamless, metronomic beat builds slowly and, as it culminates, the girl,
illuminated by pink and green lasers, begins to dance. Her
glowstick-wielding boyfriend, sucks on a soother and rubs her shoulders and
neck.

The scene is a club in Toronto's entertainment district, one of about 50
that now cater to the rave crowd -- mostly middle-class, suburban- bred
20-somethings who pay as much as $30 to get in the door.

The couple admit to having taken ecstasy bought from a friend in
Scarborough. "I don't know where he gets it. If you want some, I can call
him," the girl says pleasantly.

At this club, guarded by four bouncers who quickly glance into pockets,
purses and cigarette packs, the dance floor doesn't begin to fill much
before 2:15 in the morning -- closing time isn't until 6. Many of the people
dance alone, holding litre bottles of water that the club sells for $3.50
each.

At the bar, a lanky, bespectacled young man holding a water bottle says he
is an ethical dealer, "not into making guinea pigs out of kids."

He doesn't have any tablets on him that night (his cousin took his last one)
but he can get some the next day.

The cousin, a beefy man, wearing jeans and a button-down, says it is his
first time taking the drug. "The music is helping me feel comfortable. I
feel normal here. But tingly, really tingly. I want to touch you."

The Culture

There's nothing new or startling about this scene. Once underground, rave
culture has evolved into a lucrative, mainstream leisure industry. Ecstasy
is the enhancer and electronic music the lure.

Ecstasy first appeared on the radar screen in Toronto in a significant way
in 1990, when raves first found favour in the city. By 1994, there were
several events every weekend. There are now more than 100 large raves
annually in the city, attracting tens of thousands of people every week.

Raves are big business. About 100 promoters regularly organize the events:
They rent space, compete for top DJs (described as "the rock stars of the
millennium" who charge $20,000 to $40,000 a night), print flyers, hire
off-duty police officers ($45 an hour), security guards ($15 an hour) and
paramedics.

Patrons pay $15 to $30 a ticket. If the event sells out, a mid-sized rave
makes a profit of about $25,000, promoter Ryan Kruger says.

However, large dance events held in vacant buildings are quickly being
replaced by nightclubs.

Young people travel from as far away as Buffalo, Detroit, Boston and New
York to attend one of Toronto's infamous parties or clubs.

"We are really well known in the U.S. for our parties," says Detective Randy
Smith, who runs the clandestine-laboratory section of the Toronto Police
Service's major drug unit. "It's not everywhere that you can fill a building
like the Better Living Centre [on city property] with 12,000 people in one
night."

But this month Toronto banned raves from all city-owned property following a
motion by Mayor Mel Lastman, who says raves are nothing more than a haven
for drug dealers.

Many in the rave community worry that the move will push the scene
underground, where it started in the early 1990s in hockey arenas, storage
warehouses, movie sound stages and underground parking lots.

Unlike nightclubs or city-owned properties, which must abide by city
building codes, many venues do not have adequate ventilation, exits and
safety features.

This was the type of environment in which 20-year-old Allan Ho slipped into
unconsciousness in October. At about 3:30 a.m. Oct. 10, Mr. Ho was at a rave
in an underground parking lot in Toronto's east end, pumping his arms and
clenching his fists in the air -- indications of a drug-induced seizure. The
Ryerson Polytechnic University student died about 15 hours later at Humber
Memorial Hospital.

Brian Morgan, an ambulance paramedic who arrived on the scene at 3:48 a.m.,
testified at the inquest into Mr. Ho's death that the man had a temperature
of about 40 degrees and a pulse of 175 a minute. Normal body temperature is
37 degrees and a normal heart rate is 60 to 100 beats a minute.

"I was told the patient had taken some ecstasy," Mr. Morgan said.

The inquest into Mr. Ho's death ended Thursday and the five-member jury is
to present their recommendations on raves by next week.

The events are also being targeted at the provincial level. A private
member's bill -- the Raves Act, 2000 -- is currently before the Ontario
Legislature and outlines ways to promote public safety and ban illicit drugs
at raves.

Police would have authority to enter any place where they believe a rave has
violated the act and require all persons to leave.

Those in the rave community say they feel unfairly targeted. Police must
widen their focus to crack down on ecstasy use, they say.

"Ecstasy is everywhere . . . It is a middle-class drug that has crossed all
boundaries. It's at house parties, clubs, weekends at the cottage," says
David Collins of Toronto Harm Reduction Task Force, a group that works with
drug users.

"Where's ecstasy? Where isn't ecstasy?"