LOOKING FOR ECSTASY

Winnipeg's Newest Pill Of Choice Can Bliss You Out - Or Wreck You

Dave is a typical 29-year-old Winnipegger - clean-cut, polite, holds down a
steady job.

Almost every weekend, he gets together with his middle-class, professional
friends, kicks back and doles out tiny little pills: Ecstasy, an illegal
stimulant with some hallucinogenic properties.

"My friends are all intelligent, motivated, career-oriented people," says
Dave, who prefers to call himself an ecstasy "provider" - not a dealer.
"They aren't young kids fresh out of high school and they know what they're
doing. People do this drug because they enjoy it."

Welcome to the brave new world of recreational drug use. Ecstasy, the
empathy-inducing methamphetamine variant long associated with the
underground rave scene, is going upscale.

While alcohol, marijuana and cocaine continue to be the most commonly
abused drugs in this city, ecstasy and a handful of other so-called club
drugs are storming out of the underground and into the mainstream - to the
horror of police and dismay of health officials.

One little pill Before 1998, Winnipeg police had never seized so much as
one little pill of ecstasy, which is formally known as
methylendioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. Now, Winnipeg police and RCMP fear
ecstasy use is about to take off in a city that usually takes a while to
catch on to the trends of larger centres.

On its heels are several lesser-known, more dangerous chemicals: GHB,
crystal meth and ketamine.

"It's a fairly new phenomenon in Winnipeg," says Det. Sgt. Ron Trakalo of
the city police vice unit's drug section. "I have nothing good to say about
ecstasy - it has no medical use and it's a very dangerous drug."

Ecstasy can induce a state of bliss that's been described as something
similar to the effects of LSD or mescaline, only without the hallucinations
and severe emotional swings. By unleashing a flood of serotonin, a key
neurotransmitter in the brain, the $30 drug leads users to experience a
feeling of loving empathy and euphoria - basically the opposite of paranoia
- - for four to six hours, users say.

In low doses, it may also increase heart rates and induce visual
distortions, exhaustion, anxiety or panic attacks, and mild depression
after use. In the most severe cases, repeated use of the drug in
combination with excessive physical activity may cause severe overheating
and dehydration, which in turn may lead to internal organ damage and heart
problems. Recent medical literature also suggests long-term ecstasy use
impairs the brain's ability to produce more serotonin, but this is still a
matter of medical debate.

Reefer Madness The most severe cases of adverse reactions to ecstasy are
rare and are usually cited by authorities in an attempt to scare away
potential users - the same way LSD was dealt with in the '60s and marijuana
was demonized during the Reefer Madness days of the early 20th century. The
fact is, tens of thousands of Canadians take ecstasy every weekend without
suffering ill effects, health officials in Ontario estimate.

Still, there is truth to the dangers of using ecstasy. In Toronto, police
attributed nine deaths indirectly to ecstasy use in 1999. Halifax and
Vancouver reported one death each.

In the past 14 months in Winnipeg, two teenage males underwent liver
transplants within three weeks after ingesting a drug they believed to be
ecstasy.

Granted, that's nothing compared to the fatalities caused by alcohol alone
each year. But what concerns Trakalo the most is the use of ecstasy by
younger teens - especially clean-cut kids who normally wouldn't do so much
as take a puff off a joint. Such is the allure of a feel-good drug that was
considered harmless only 15 years ago and was legal in the United States
until 1986.

"It's called a hug drug. It makes you feel good and makes you want to be
friendly to everybody," Trakalo says. "But kids have no idea what the
actual effects are and they may get caught up in the moment and just take
it. There's no doubt in my mind there's going to be deaths in Manitoba."

While Dave the Dealer scoffs at the notion that ecstasy can be lethal, he
shares Trakalo's concern about younger users. In his opinion, 14-year-olds
from the 'burbs have no business ingesting psychologically powerful
chemicals with still-unknown physiological effects.

"You can't do anything about it, but I don't agree with it," says Dave, who
fears the growing popularity of the drug will lead to its abuse by people
too young to handle its effects.

"Because of its availability, younger people are taking it. And because
younger people, who are generally more irresponsible, are taking it, that's
where people are going to start frowning on things.

"Parents are going to trip out because, 'My kid came home wasted on
something and wouldn't tell me what it was and I knew it wasn't acid.'
Suddenly, it's a secret and they start judging it."

Aside from talking to people on the street, the actual prevalence of
ecstasy in Winnipeg is difficult to gauge. Survey research suggests one in
10 Grade 11 students and one in 20 university students have tried the drug.

Winnipeg police have seized only several hundred hits of ecstasy, which is
sold in capsules or as tablets pressed with designs, which can be anything
from a corporate Mitsubishi or Rolls Royce logo to Teletubbies or Mickey
Mouse heads.

But the flow of ecstasy is much, much larger. "The availability of a drug
like E has gone through the roof," says Dave. "A few years ago, it was not
talked about - now it's everywhere."

Most ecstasy seizures take place at international borders and airports,
where the drug arrives in massive quantities from underground labs and
illicit tablet presses in Europe and the U.S. West Coast.

RCMP have seized 110,000 hits of ecstasy at Toronto's Pearson International
Airport this year alone. The pills were strapped to the bodies of
passengers arriving from Paris - including two teens, aged 16 and 17, who
taped 34,000 hits to their legs in February.

"I knew people who used to fly back and forth from England with 10,000 at a
time," says Dave, a small-time dealer who gets his ecstasy from Vancouver
and deals in quantities of only 50 or 100 pills at one time.

Perhaps the biggest danger associated with the drug is that nobody can be
sure what they're purchasing is actually ecstasy.

In Vancouver, a point of origin for ecstasy sold in Winnipeg, only 23 per
cent of the ecstasy batches seized by RCMP from June 1998 to December 1999
turned out to contain MDMA and no other active ingredients, said Cpl. Scott
Rintoul of the Lower Mainland RCMP drug awareness section.

And only half of the seized drugs contained ecstasy at all. The rest
contained substances such as caffeine, cold and cough medications such as
pseudoephedrine and dextromethorphan, or more dangerous chemicals such as
methamphetamine, regular speed, PCP, MDA (a more toxic relative of ecstasy)
and ketamine, which is sometimes sold on its own as a club drug called
Special K or Vitamin K.

Meanwhile, Winnipeg RCMP estimate "less than 50 per cent" of the ecstasy
seized in Manitoba turns out to be actual MDMA, said Staff Sgt. Dave Roach
of the "D" Division drug section. Only Winnipeg police are finding most of
their ecstasy is actually ecstasy - but again, city police seizures remain
small (462 pills in just over two years).

"The fact is, you're saying this is ecstasy, but how do you know? You only
know because someone told you," says Dr. Wes Palatnick, a toxicologist by
training and the director of emergency at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre. "

"The stupidest thing you could ever do is buy E from someone you don't know
in a bar," adds Dave the Dealer, who says he ingested ketamine once and had
the worst experience of his life.

"I assumed it was E and I did not enjoy for even a moment what was going
on. It was horrible. I couldn't get off my couch. I could barely move
across my room to turn on music."

Some drug users intentionally take ketamine, which is used commercially as
a veterinary anesthetic, to achieve an immobilizing high known as the
K-Hole. Another "new" drug is GHB, a colourless, odourless liquid taken to
achieve simultaneous ecstasy and alcohol-like effects.

Overdoses of the unpredictable GHB, one vial of which has been seized by
Winnipeg police, can easily cause unconsciousness. GHB "comas" have already
sent several users to emergency wards in Winnipeg, the HSC's Palatnick
says. In the U.S., the liquid is known as a date-rape drug. Its use has
resulted in fatalities and manslaughter charges.

Ketamine is rare in Winnipeg. But another substance sold as ecstasy -
methamphetamine, otherwise known as crystal meth or crank - is apparently
on the rise.

This highly toxic and extremely addictive drug, which has been abused for
decades, was present in the system of a Vancouver teen who died last year
in the middle of a rave, collapsing in the middle of the dance floor.
Winnipeg police seized a quarter-pound of the substance three weeks ago and
consider the drug the No. 1 new risk in Winnipeg, Trakalo said.

Winnipeg RCMP also made a recent seizure of an ounce of PCP, an
unpredictable anesthetic that hasn't been used as a recreational drug since
the '80s, Const. Annette Levis said. That leads police to believe the drug
may have been destined for sale as ecstasy.

The proliferation of bogus pills has led a group of volunteer
harm-reduction advocates in San Francisco to set up a mail-in
ecstasy-testing service. With the approval of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency, the Web site dancesafe.org uses an accredited lab to test pills
sent in from anonymous sources - only to find the same substances
masquerading as ecstasy that the RCMP found in Vancouver.

An unknown substance is a possible culprit in the cases of two Winnipeg
males who suffered fulminant liver failure about three weeks after taking a
drug they believed to be ecstasy. In both cases, the teens required
transplants after more than 99 per cent of their livers essentially rotted
away.

"When you see two cases in one year (involving ecstasy), you're extremely
disturbed," said Dr. Kelly Kaita of the Health Sciences Centre's liver
diseases unit. The exact cause of the liver failures - the first cases of
their kind in Canada - remains unknown.

The bigger health concern is what officials call "polydrug use" - the
consumption of a variety of drugs at once. At the Addictions Foundation of
Manitoba, clients in the adult treatment program report ecstasy use along
with the use of marijuana and alcohol, but never ecstasy alone, supervisor
Ian Wallace said.

"We're still talking about minor consumption in this community," he says.
Like the police, he's more concerned about the rise of methamphetamine use.

But there is a lot of ecstasy out there, according to police and street
sources such as Dave. That means most ecstasy users are not seeking medical
attention.

"If they have a minor problem, they deal with it at home," says Palatnick,
noting there's a widely held belief that ecstasy is safe.

"In reality, the drug has adverse effects - any drug has adverse effects.
Most people will have no problem, but the occasional person will pay the
price, like the kid who lost his liver."