RAVE DRUGS ARE DEADLY SERIOUS

You know, if it were only the politicians who don't like being woken up at
night, or professional pundits who want to police everybody's lifestyle who
were yelping for a rave crackdown, it would be easier to ignore.

But a disturbing minor chord in the rage against raves comes from folks
like Stephan Ryan, a 20-year Level 4 paramedic who worked his first and
last rave on Aug. 8 and 9. "I appreciate the extra work," he explains, "but
it's negligent of me basically to stand outside and wait for a tragedy to
happen, to say in effect this is the overdose vehicle."

He's a father and can't believe parents could really know what's going on
and condone it. "They come down from Richmond Hill or Markham in their
Lexuses or their Blazers to pick up their kids ... What are they thinking?"

Ryan's experience in August started out grim and ended up worse. It was a
nasty, rainy night and he arrived about 9:30 p.m. expecting the event to
be barely under way. But already the club, The Guvernment Warehouse on
Queen's Quay, was filling up and the younger kids who couldn't get in until
the licensed part of the evening was over were starting to line up outside
in the pouring rain. Nobody seemed to notice the discomfort. The lineup
grew until he estimates there were nearly 1,000 sodden kids standing in the
dark parking lot.

Their ambulance was parked outside the main entrance and the signs of drug
use were everywhere -- especially in the steady stream of kids to the
ambulance. Most were brought out semi-conscious by their friends or
security. The paramedic's job includes writing up every incident but raving
is still, culturally at least, an underground activity and the fact that
illegal drugs were involved made the disinclination to explain themselves
even stronger.

"They were very vague and evasive," Ryan remembers. "They wouldn't sign
anything or tell us their names."

There's no way they would go to the hospital. After a bit of oxygen and a
rest they were ready to go right back to the party.

For a guy like Ryan, steeped in the protocols of safety and helping,
basically enabling this night of excess to continue was profoundly
uncomfortable. Long before tragedy struck he made up his mind he'd never do
it again.

It was about 6 a.m. and dawn had broken without any reprieve from the rain.
But suddenly there was a change in tempo. The music which had been loud
enough to make your chest vibrate suddenly seemed to fade into the
background as a tall, strong security guard brought out John Miranda. The
21-year-old was dead. Nobody knew how long he'd been gone, but "he had no
rhythm," Ryan explained. Usually this situation means it's over, but the
paramedics refused to believe that this healthy young man could be gone. He
was still warm and even though his jaw was clenched too tight for them to
get a breathing tube into his throat, they tried the more difficult nasal
procedure. After 10-15 minutes they started moving to St Mike's hospital
where the emergency room staff repeated their efforts, working on him
furiously for another half hour. Nothing.

The toxicology reports aren't back yet, but it appears he had taken or been
given a mixture of so-called rave drugs. "We have no drug-screening process
for these chemicals," explains Karen Gaunt, who manages the emergency
services at St. Mike's hospital. Like Ryan and other professionals, she's
worried about an increase in the use of designer drugs, but she's leery
about blaming raves. "They could take these drugs anywhere. We don't know."

But it does seem Gaunt and other emergency room specialists are seeing a
sharp increase in the number of overdoses. In a meeting this week,
emergency room doctors from the downtown hospitals described overdoses as a
weekly occurrence.

Luckily not every one results in a death, but it was only a few weeks later
when another one did end that way. This time the party was in the
underground parking lot of the old Cooper's Shoe factory on Alliance Ave.
This time the victim was another 21-year-old man, a Ryerson business
student just starting into third year in a field that promised a great future.

One of his teachers, Tom McKaig, describes Allen Ho as a very likeable,
polite young man who didn't act or dress outlandishly, seemed conscientious
about his work and would never be the type to make adults see danger signs
when they looked at him. And yet Ho, too, died after mixing rave drugs.
The only difference is that he hung on for 15 hours before dying of massive
internal hemorrhaging. The paramedic who took Ho to hospital won't work
another rave either. It's no way to earn pocket money.

"Everybody thinks these drugs are the equivalent of pot or alcohol," says
Gaunt. "They aren't."

Unlike many media scare stories this is one that looks scarier the closer
you get.