Source: Irish Times
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People 'playing roulette' with ecstasy

People who take ecstasy are playing Russian roulette with their lives, a
leading pathologist warned yesterday at an inquest into the death of a
34yearold mother of three who died from the drug.

"You're dicing with death it's like Russian roulette it's a myth to say
ecstasy is a safe drug," said acting assistant State Pathologist, Dr
Margaret Bolster, at the inquest into the death of a Co Cork woman whom
coroner, Mr Frank O'Connell, asked not be named. A postmortem revealed the
woman had just 1.4 microgrammes of ecstasy per 100 millilitres of blood,
but this had been sufficient to cause cardiac arrest. There was no question
of the woman overdosing, she said.

Dr Bolster explained that there were a number of dangers associated with
taking ecstasy all of which stemmed from the fact that it was an illegal
drug manufactured in backstreet laboratories without proper controls.

The first problem was that the quantity of the MDMA amphetamine or
ecstasy in each tablet varied and there was no way of knowing either the
ecstasy or the filler concentration or whether the concentration of filler
was toxic to people.

This meant that each ecstasy tablet was a new risk for users, while there
was also a risk that different people could react differently to tablets
with the same levels of ecstasy and filler.

Dr Bolster cited a case in Dublin where two young people had shared half of
the same tablet. One had died and one had survived. It was thus impossible
to predict just how any person would react to any ecstasy tablet.

The inquest heard evidence that the dead woman's young son alerted
neighbours when he couldn't wake his mother. They found her collapsed on
her bedroom floor. A doctor pronounced her dead at the scene.

South Cork Coroner, Mr Frank O'Connell, said it was a particularly sad case
but one which highlighted the dangers of ecstasy. "Ecstasy is an absolutely
deadly drug because the tablet can come with any level of dilution."

The jury returned a verdict of death as a result of acute cardiac failure
due to the ingestion of ecstasy. The dangers of the drug should be
highlighted given the risks associated with taking it, the jury added in a
rider.

_ Copyright: The Irish Times