DUTCH LEGAL RULING HITS ECSTASY FIGHT

Foreign ecstasy traffickers wanted by police in their home countries
may be allowed to walk free from Dutch jails because Europe's most
popular illicit party drug is now being manufactured in so many
different variants that no existing judicial definition can cover them
all.

In a decision that will further strain relations between Europe's
biggest "E" producer and its neighbours, the Dutch high court has
ruled that foreign suspects will be freed unless requests for their
extradition include a precise chemical formula for the pills
concerned, and the formula matches one banned under Dutch drug laws.

"The problem is that heroin, cocaine and hash or marijuana all have a
fixed, internationally-recognised composition. That's not the case for
ecstasy," said Jozef Rammelt, a Dutch lawyer specialising in
international law.

"In cross-border legal terms, ecstasy no longer really exists because
so many compounds are now on the market. What this ruling amounts to
is a signal that international norms for synthetic drugs have to be
established urgently. Other European countries may not like this
decision, but we can no longer go on like this."

The little-noticed February ruling, which has so far gone unreported,
marks a new victory for manufacturers around Europe who for the past
decade have played a cat-and-mouse game with police, constantly
altering the composition of their synthetic drugs to avoid
prosecution.

One such ecstasy variant, 2C.T.2, is potentially lethal but legal in
many European countries and sold over the counter in Amsterdam coffee
shops. Described as a "psychedelic amphetamine", it comes from the
family that includes MDMA, the banned ecstasy compound.

Even more worryingly, another pill posing as ecstasy, yellow with dark
brown flecks but without a trademark logo, was recently found on sale
in Holland containing 8mg of the poison strychnine.

A Dutch justice ministry spokesman said suspected drug dealers from
Germany, Britain and France were currently in Dutch prisons pending
extradition hearings. He could not say how many suspects were
involved, but Mr Rammelt said he knew of at least two who had been
released since the high court's decision.

First synthesised in 1912, ecstasy began to be widely used in the US
as a recreational drug before being banned there in 1985, and is now
outlawed across Europe.

Evidence is increasingly emerging that the small white tablets,
initially seen as a harmless clubber's pick-me-up with few
side-effects, could have disastrous long-term consequences, and even
the traditionally liberal Dutch authorities launched a campaign
earlier this year telling teenagers that "one pill can kill".

The drug and its variants can be produced by anyone with rudimentary
knowledge of chemistry, using recipes obtained from the internet and a
small manually-operated pill-making machine. Industrial-scale
laboratories can make 10,000 pills an hour, at a cost of 10-20p each.

"Compared to cocaine and heroine, synthetic drugs offer major
advantages to traffickers," said a report from the French police
anti-drugs unit last year. "They are the drugs of the future: easy to
make, easy to modify to evade the law, easy to transport and easy to
sell for vast profit."

According to British police figures, 87% of ecstasy consumed in
Britain is either manufactured in or imported from the Netherlands.
Part of that production may now have shifted to eastern Europe
following a crackdown by Dutch police that has seen 35 underground
laboratories discovered in recent years.

But August De Loor, who runs a drugs advice clinic in Amsterdam, says
the crackdown has made things worse. "All it has done is reduce the
quality of the ecstasy because it's harder to produce pure stuff now.
The consumers still want it, so they will still look for it. But they
end up taking junk - possibly dangerous junk - instead," he said.