MDMA

If You're A Parent, You Should Know What It Means

Methylenedioxymethamphetamine -- you may not know what it is, but some
young people in Sault Ste. Marie have started to develop a craving for
the drug, more commonly known on the street as MDMA.

"People want the pure stuff and that's MDMA. It's becoming the drug of
choice for high schoolers and college age people here," said a Sault
drug dealer, who requested anonymity.

MDMA is the active ingredient in another popular drug,
ecstasy.

It's in the amphetamine class of drugs and causes the release of
several hormones into the body.

Short-term effects include increased heart rate, blood pressure and
body temperature, along with rapid involuntary eye movements and
nausea. Studies have also shown one long-term effect is apoptosis,
which is the process of programmed cell death that can eventually lead
to atrophy and structural brain damage.

The anonymous source said MDMA comes in either powder or capsule form
and is normally mixed with caffeine by users to elongate the "buzz"
that comes with use.

While ecstasy became popular in the late 1980s, many of today's drug
users crave the purer, more powerful MDMA.

"It's waves of happiness through your body. It starts with a warm
feeling in the pit of your stomach and then you're overwhelmed by
euphoria," said the source, who's used and sold the drug.

The source added MDMA has a street value of around $10 a capsule,
which usually contains 1/10of a point -- a common drug term meaning
milligram.

"For most people, all you need is 1/10of a point to get the buzz you
would off of a pill of ecstasy."

MDMA is readily available locally, said the source, adding college and
university students are stocking up in bigger cities where they attend
school and bringing it back.

"There's not a lot of entertaining things to do, so people want to do
a drug that makes everything entertaining," the source said.

The source also said he knows drug dealers who are flocking to
southern Ontario to get the drug at a discount.

"People can capitalize on the type of situation we're in here. In
Toronto, you can find it anywhere, so naturally it's cheap. People buy
it dirt cheap down there and come back here and make a nice profit,"
the source said.

And profit is something this dealer knows well, claiming he made up to
$6,000 in "a busy week" when selling harder drugs like MDMA and
cocaine, which has a street value of around $8,200 a gram.

"Cocaine numbs and puts you in a state where you have problems
expressing exactly what you're feeling, but MDMA brings the party
animal out inside of you that you might not have known was ever there."

In addition to MDMA and cocaine, the source has sold marijuana,
ecstasy and magic mushrooms.

Even with selling a wide variety of drugs, it isn't the police that
scare this dealer, but rather fellow drug pushers.

"If you stay under the radar, you'll be fine. It's other people you
concern yourself with and that's the big risk you run in this
business. I've been in battles and gone head-to-head with people and
here I stand."

The source started dealing drugs around age 14, prompted by friends'
interest in mar ijuana.

Const. Armando Tempesta heads into elementary schools to try keep kids
away from drugs at an even earlier age.

"We gear it to the Grade 6 age group because they are turning 12 and
that's the age we find where kids start to get into trouble," said
Tempesta, of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Service.

"Environment is the biggest thing for these children. One kid in Grade
6 at a school I was visiting transferred from one school to another
and found that at the new school, it wasn't cool anymore to talk about
drugs and how he was making money selling them, but at his old school
that was the norm."

Tempesta said police run a program called V.I.P. (Values, Influences
and Peers) that involves officers heading into schools to talk to
Grade 6 students about the repercussions of drug and alcohol use.

He added one of the most powerful aspects is when former drug users
are brought in to talk with students.

"They know the police are there to tell them not to do drugs because
it's our job, but other people from the public who come in and tell
them how drugs have ruined their life really gets to them."

The anonymous source said he remembers Tempesta coming into
class.

The dealer admits Tem-p esta's talks made students aware of the
effects of different drugs, but "didn't discourage me from using them."

The source argues television is not helping Tempesta's cause, driving
kids younger and younger in a search for hard drugs.

"Teens, especially ones in the popular crowd, see cocaine and MDMA as
being clean for some reason. Maybe because they hear on TV about
celebrities doing it all the time they think it's OK."