A DEATHWATCH ON RAVES

New synthetic highs have hit the social life of Canada's 15- to 25-year
olds and experts worry about their damaging effects. While reports of
overdoses, even deaths, from rave drugs are unsubstantiated, officials fear
it is only a matter of time

John Westland doesn't hang out at warehouses or clubs, but what he hears
from the teenagers he sees in his office every day is like a weather
balloon. It's telling him the vibe is getting a bit stormy in Canada's
rave scene.

Raves, the authority-figure-free zones for Canada's 15- to 25-year-olds,
are shifting from easy and breezy to edgy and unpredictable. The music
still rules; participants still jam the dance floors for the all-night
parties, crowding them to congealmentlike a pack of Twizzlers licorice.

But Mr. Westland, a social worker for the Substance Abuse Outreach Program
at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, hears that the drugs are
changing.

When the rave scene started in the late eighties, the favoured illicit
substances were marijuana and the designer drug ecstasy, known commonly as
E. Getting amped out on E or smoking pot, while not exactly benign, left
many ravers feeling cuddly and mellow.

But since the early nineties, new synthetic highs have trickled onto the
scene, drugs that are harder, riskier and with nastier effects.

The clinical world, the pocket-protector scientists and emergency-room
toxicologists, are just getting a grip on what these pastel-coloured pills,
crystals and vials of colourless liquid can do to a young brain and body.

And it looks bad. The long-term effects of some rave drugs can damage the
brain and, in some cases, induce the same symptoms as Parkinson's disease.
If mixed with the wrong substances in the wrong amounts, they can even be
deadly.

Three weekends ago, six young people landed in the emergency room of St.
Michael's Hospital after attending raves in downtown Toronto, considered
North America's "raviest" city. Lately, that's typical for the hospital.
"They don't come in slightly inebriated," said Karen Gaunt, the hospital's
emergency-room manager. "They come in acutely ill."

Ravers bristle when the media tries to paint their scene in the context of
one big hallucinogenic free-for-all. They hate what gets missed: the
euphoria, the peaceful assemblies of youth in warehouses or rave clubs,
where chunky-thighed girls and pimply computer geeks are equals with the
coolest and most attractive.

But it's these same young people who are coming into emergency rooms
unconscious, Ms. Gaunt said. And it takes a lot of work to get them to
respond.

And here's the other problem. Unlike alcohol and many hard drugs,
hospitals don't have a way to test for the designer drugs. There are
whispers about overdoses, even deaths, from the rave drugs, but the most
officials can commit to is "a strong index of suspicion."

Meanwhile, the use of these drugs is climbing. Ed Adlaf, an epidemiologist
at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, said ecstasy use
didn't even register among Ontario students in the early nineties, but that
3.1 per cent admitted using it by 1997. Students now are just beginning to
report the use of the newer drugs.

In other provinces, researchers lump designer-drug use under hallucinogens,
a category more and more popular with young people, ranging from 5 per cent
in Alberta to 34 per cent in New Brunswick as of 1996.

Still, Detective Rick Chase would let his 16-year-old daughter attend a
rave. "No problem," said the salty-voiced head of the central drug squad
for the Toronto Police. At midnight, Toronto's downtown turns into a mosh
pit of ravers jostling to get into the warehouses that offer the best
scene. Det. Chase's undercover team works outside, buying ecstasy (MDMA or
methylenedioxymethamphetamine), crystal (crystal methamphetamine) and two
tranquillizers that have made inroads on the scene in recent years with
some dangerous repercussions, Special K (ketamine hydrochloride) and GHB
(gamma hydroxybutyrate). They target the suppliers, not the users.

Det. Chase thinks the users need a wake-up call if they believe the vials
of liquid or cute lozenges embossed with cartoon characters are soft drugs.
His daughter knows the dangers; she hears them at the dinner table daily.
"She has an education that other kids don't have," Det. Chase said.

It is the crux of the problem. Not enough young people are savvy about
what they're putting in their mouths or up their noses, said Ms. Gaunt of
St. Michael's. "We get the sense that these kids don't think GHB or E is
any worse than having a cigarette."

Dr. Timothy Condon thinks it's worse, but doesn't want to be alarmist. He's
a scientist and the associate director of the National Institute for Drug
Abuse (NIDA) in Bethesda, Md., which sponsors most of the leading-edge
research on illicit drugs in the United States. "I am very, very, very
concerned about methamphetamine and ecstasy," he said. He doesn't know
enough about the other drugs -- Special K and GHB -- to give them the
"triple very" treatment.

When ecstasy first hit the street, it was the "love dove," an aphrodisiac
with a high. Ravers take it for the energy and euphoria in 50- to
200-milligram pills or gelatin capsules and pay between $15 and $50 for the
privilege. The high from ecstasy can last four to six hours, but can be
accompanied by anxiety, nausea, blurred vision and heightened heart rate
and blood pressure.

Quick on the heels of the ecstasy high can come depression or panic. Coming
down from ecstasy has created an aftermarket for other drugs. Many ravers
use caffeine or pseudoephedrine-based cough medications or asthma
ventilators to string out the high and ease the big downer. But they are
only managing the short-term effects.

A recent NIDA-sponsored study on monkeys showed that using ecstasy for four
straight days, in the same doses that a committed clubber would take
recreationally, had long-term effects on the animals' brains. The neurons
that make serotonin (the same brain chemical, if in short supply, is
associated with depression) were damaged by the ecstasy regimen.

It appears the understanding of crystal methamphetamine is even more damning.

The use of this drug, both inside and outside the rave scene, is growing;
it's a particular nuisance in rural Alberta and the Midwest states, where
ranch-house laboratories augment the supply coming up from Southern
California's super labs. These small labs cook up methamphetamine using
everything from battery acid to Drano as solvents and over-the-counter cold
remedies as ingredients.

Crystal use is the worm in the apple of the peace-love-unity-respect mantra
that committed ravers repeat. The drug is easily contaminated with the
toxic solvents used to make it and has the typical speed-like effects of
raising the heart rate and blood pressure, and possibly causing
convulsions. It's also one of the more violence-inducing of the rave
drugs, leading to paranoia and aggression. It's not an urban myth about
heavy methamphetamine users scratching their faces until they bleed. The
condition is called formication. Sufferers think bugs are crawling all
over them.

The tragedy of crystal, favoured for a longer energy burn than the
Energizer Bunny, is that it seems to be used more at the shallow end of the
age pool; it's 13- to 18-year-olds who generally snort, eat or inject the
small crystalline grains for $10 to $30 a vial. They're called tweakers or
skeletons. Dr. Condon said the clinical research on crystal
methamphetamine should serve as a wake-up call for the young people who
take it. "It compromises the brain's ability to both make and take up
dopamine," he said.

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York have made the
first correlation between this damaged dopamine production and its effects
on the body. They found that crystal-methamphetamine addicts with the
fewest dopamine receptors had the worst tremors and memory loss.

Dr. Condon said he has heard of crystal users turning up at doctors'
offices with some of the same symptoms as people who develop Parkinson's
disease, another ailment related to damage in the part of the brain that
manufactures dopamine. But they are much younger when tremors begin.

"It's pretty serious," he said.

Researchers know about the rave drugs only as isolated entities. Purity is
a wild card for users. Both ecstasy and crystal methamphetamine can
contain additives, everything from detergent to PCP or angel dust, or the
two drugs are mixed together.

Mixing it up is what lands a lot of young people in hospitals. That's
especially true for the tranquillizers, GHB and Special K, a veterinary
drug, both of which induce trance-like effects. The distance between the
euphoric effects of GHB, for instance, and unconsciousness is as thin as a
moth's wing. An alcoholic drink, or another drug, combined with GHB can
sink a user into the black hole of a dead faint.

That's where the irony lies. Mr. Westland said most of his clients have
viewed raves as a "mental vacation," not a terminal one.

RAVE DRUG PRIMER

ECSTASY The high: The high from ecstasy (MDMA
methylenedioxymethamphetamine) lasts four to six hours per 50 to 200 mg.
tablet. It fills users with a sense of euphoria, energy and sociability.
But that can be undercut by a 'bad trip' if the drug is cut with other
things such as crystal methamphetamine and PCP. The lows: Users may suffer
from hallucinations, rapid heart beats, muscle stiffness and teeth grinding
problems. Insomnia and weight loss can also occur. Long-term effects
include damage to the neurons in the brain that manufacture serotonin.

CRYSTAL METHAMPHETAMINE The high: Like ecstasy, crystal methamphetamine
gives users a load of energy, but this energy has more edge and is less
predictable, and lasts from 8-to-14 hours. It is also a more addictive
high than ecstasy. The lows: Crystal meth is also associated with increased
heart rate, blood pressure and risk of convulsions and teeth grinding.
Long-term effects include damage to the brain's ability to manufacture and
use dopamine, resulting in many of the same symptoms suffered by people
with Parkinson's Disease.

SPECIAL K The high: Special K (ketamine hydrochloride) is based on a
tranquilizer that veterinarians use to put your cat out. It is a liquid
drug, that gets dried into crystals. Users smoke or snort it for the
deeply hallucinogenic trance it induces, known as the K-hole, which can
last 30 minutes to two hours. The lows: The trance-like state makes users
vulnerable. Along with GHB, Special K is suspected to have been used as a
rape drug. The drug can cause short-term memory loss, visual problems and
dangerous breathing difficulties.

GHB The high: Also known as liquid Ecstasy or goop, GHB (gamma hydroxy
butyrate) is a tranquilizer in a clear liquid form that is taken in small
doses to induce its feeling of relaxed drunkeness. The lows: It is that
same feeling that makes GHB another suspected rape drug. GHB is also
highly reactive with other substances, and particularly deadly when
combined with alcohol or other drugs. It can cause breathing difficulties,
vomiting, seizures and delirium.

EPHEDRINE The high: Taken in the form of over the counter cold medications
or inhalers which contain pseudoephedrine or in its herb form, ephedra,
this substance is usually taken at three times its maximum prescribed dose
of 60 mg., to produce a speed-like effect for as long as three-to-four
hours. Often taken to help ease the come-down from crystal meth or ecstasy.
The lows: Ephedrine increases heart rate and blood pressure, and is
considered dangerous for anybody with a weak heart.