RESEARCH SHOWS PURITY OF STREET DRUGS A MYTH

Ecstasy users may be placing too much trust in their dealers, since
the street drug is often cut with dangerous contaminants, says a UFV
criminologist.

"Hundreds of young people around the world die each year because they
take drugs that they believed were something other than what they
consumed," UFV researcher Darryl Plecas explains by e-mail.

Plecas and Fraser Health addictions expert Sherry Mumford were in
Oxford, England on Monday to present their paper, The Problem of
Adulterated Drugs, at an invitation-only roundtable event.

Last year Plecas presented his research on marijuana grow-ops to the
Oxford roundtable, and this year they've zeroed in on the practice
adding potentially harmful ingredients to illegal drugs, like ecstasy.

"The question is, when people are buying what they think is a party
drug such as ecstasy, is that all they're getting?" asks Plecas.

Testing has found it's often laced with more addictive drugs such as
methamphetamine, oxycontin nicknamed "hillbilly heroin," or even
ketamine, a horse tranquilizer.

Why would anyone trust a dealer in the first place on the purity
question?

"A great question," Plecas continues. "In fact, we suspect that they
will trust their dealer before they would trust their doctor.

"Part of that is perhaps a function of their suspecting that the
doctor is going to tell them that they shouldn't be taking drugs at
all and that all illicit drugs are bad."

The research team is considering further study on that precise
question of trust, and the upshot of that risky behaviour.

The manufacturers working from clandestine labs may be chemists, but
"they're not necessarily good or meticulous ones," he underlines.

Plecas says that taking contaminated street drugs can have serious
consequences, including unintentional death. Ecstasy is known as a
psychoactive drug, usually in pill or capsule form, also known as MDMA.

The sad thing is, people trust their drug dealers too
much.

"If you ask the users, they always think their drugs are pure. We know
through our research that they are often wrong," he says. "Drug
adulteration is increasingly prevalent in B.C."

The Oxford roundtable is an invitation-only forum for select leaders
in both the public and private sectors, as well as scholars, to
discuss government policy.

"I think the Roundtable was interested in our research because most of
the previous research on ecstacy is based on self-reports of users,"
Plecas adds.

For the purposes of the research study, the ecstasy was analyzed by
Health Canada and the UBC School of Pharmacy. Plecas co-wrote the
research paper with Mumford, a UFV criminal justice grad, now the
Regional Addictions Manager with Fraser Health, and Amanda McCormack
from the B.C. Centre for Social Responsibility.