DOCTOR SUSPECTS ECSTASY TAINTED

Calls It Unlikely That Three Teens Overdosed

When two girls, ages 14 and 15, died last month in an Edmonton
hospital after taking pills they believed to be the dance-club drug
Ecstasy, there were rumours that the tablets had been laced with rat
poison.

The theory made little sense from the start:Nine girls of the Paul
First Nation had taken the same pills before a wedding at the native
reserve west of Edmonton. Three became ill, two died. Lethal poisons
are not typically this selective.

The hospital did not find rat poison in the girls' bloodstream and did
find Ecstasy. But in a region desperately seeking answers to the
Ecstasy mystery -- one that deepened after another 14-year-old girl
died after taking what she believed was Ecstasy last Friday at a party
at West Edmonton Mall -- the poison theory may have been closer to the
truth, drug researchers say, than the story offered by local news
reports that the girls overdosed.

Charles Grob believes there is a strong chance that a deadly batch of
adulterated pills is making the rounds in and around Edmonton, though
health officials and law-enforcement groups have issued no such public
warning.

Dr. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was the first U. S.
researcher to conduct human tests of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or
MDMA, the technical name for Ecstasy, since it was outlawed in the U.
S. in 1984. It is rare for anyone to "overdose" on the drug in its
pure form, he said.

There are but a few dozen deaths linked annually with Ecstasy in North
America; mostly, they arise from complications, such as pre-existing
heart problems or hyperthermia that occurs when high, frenetic raver
kids overheat themselves.

But three girls, all within a few weeks of each other, in the same
vicinity, and none of whom were observed exercising hyper-actively, he
says, is too unusual to be MDMA-caused. "I think there's something
else in those pills," Dr. Grob says. "It would be awfully coincidental
if all three of these teenage girls had congenital heart problems that
had not been identified earlier. I'd put my money on a drug
substitute."

Ecstasy is generally one of the least-lethal illegal drugs available:
The chairman of the U. K. Home Office's Council on the Misuse of Drugs
stirred controversy this year when he published a paper in a medical
journal arguing that, based on mortality figures, Ecstasy is a less
pressing public health matter than the more deadly horseback riding.
But it is frequently falsely advertised. Fifty per cent or more of
pills marketed on the street as Ecstasy are actually a cocktail of a
different sort: some MDMA mixed with tranquilizers, caffeine, cocaine
or "whatever is in the back of the [manufacturer's] cupboard," Dr.
Grob says.

"The chance that this is MDMA or straight MDMA is so infinitesimal,"
says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug
Policy Alliance, a group advocating drug policy reform. "This
explanation of an overdose makes no sense."

Like Dr. Grob, he believes that the aberrant cluster of
Ecstasy-related deaths all in the same localized area surely points to
dangerous, adulterated pills on the market -- including a more toxic
substance that the three dead girls may have taken inadvertently in
lethal amounts. Cassandra Williams, who died from pills bought at the
mall party, reportedly took six; Trinity Dawn Bird and Leah Dominique
House, from the Paul Band, reportedly took five each.

"The number of fatalities associated just with pure ingestion of MDMA
is so close to zero," Mr. Nadelmann says. "This must have been
something involving a drug that was not MDMA. That's the scary thing,
that there must be something out there being marketed as Ecstasy,
which is not actually MDMA."

What may be particularly concerning, he says, is that Edmonton's
Ecstasy users are being led to believe these were simple "overdoses,"
and have not been publicly warned about this more dangerous
possibility, leaving open the worrying prospect of more deaths. The
RCMP, in charge of the Paul Band case, arrested a dealer alleged to
have sold the girls the drugs, but could not recover any samples of
the pills for analysis. Corporal Wayne Oakes says there is no evidence
of "overdose" yet, but neither is there any evidence of possible toxic
drug cocktails. Both theories must wait until the medical examiner's
pathological report, which will likely take three months or longer.
Until then, the Mounties can issue no warnings about unproven dangers.
"The whole thing is about being factual," he says.

So far, police have stuck with warning teens to stay away from drugs
altogether. "The extremely tragic consequences associated with this
drug use speaks to the dangers of illicit street drugs, regardless of
their chemical ingredients," read an RCMP press release following the
Paul Band incident. "There is a rather old saying that continues to
hold a resounding message, 'Just say no!'."

But this only goes so far, Mr. Nadelmann warns: teens who have used
Ecstasy frequently, with no ill effects (there are likely many; data
show Ecstasy use in Western Canada has roughly tripled in the past
five years) are unlikely to be much persuaded by Reagan-era
platitudes. Some experts note that warnings about particularly
dangerous pills in circulation might grab their attention. When
overdose clusters appear in Vancouver, usually involving excessively
potent heroin, police, emergency responders and clinics don't wait for
toxicology reports to get the word out to street users, says David
Marsh, a medical director at Vancouver's Coastal Health authority.

Elsewhere, however, authorities are sometimes so dedicated to the drug
war that they will not or cannot consider "harm reduction" strategies,
including drug-use safety precautions, Mr. Nadelmann says.

In Edmonton, police so far have been heartfelt in expressing sympathy
for the families of the dead victims, and in pleading with children to
stay clean. But until someone warns those children of at least the
possibility of dangerous pills being passed off as Ecstasy, Mr.
Nadelmann worries there remains a very real chance that Edmonton's bad
Ecstasy could lead to more agony yet.