YOUNG TEENS EMBRACING ECSTASY DRUG

BURLINGTON, ONT. -- In a dark basement in this wealthy residential city
sandwiched between Toronto and Hamilton, a group of teens has gathered to
celebrate the end of a school week.

One of them uses a razor to shave a tiny pill emblazoned with a blue
Superman logo into a powder that is formed into a line on the top of a
formica coffee table. A pretty girl holds back her long brown hair and
takes a sniff. Then another pill is found and it's someone else's turn.

The people whose job it is to rid Canadian streets of ecstasy still call it
a club drug. But the high-school students who are buying it for $10 or $15
a tablet are just as happy to ingest it -- by nose or by mouth -- at a
beach party or in a friend's recreation room.

"Most of the time I've snorted it but most people pop them," says
16-year-old Kirsten, a popular Grade 11 student who spoke to The Globe and
Mail on condition that her real name not be used.

Kirsten said she takes ecstasy because of the feelings of euphoria it brings.

You feel "very happy," she said. "You have a lot of energy. You're running
around and you're really, really anxious, like you can't sit in one place,
and you can't relax. And you usually don't sleep."

Kirsten tried ecstasy for the first time last summer when her boyfriend was
given a few pills. "It's so accessible it just became a daily thing," she
said. "I personally haven't gone a weekend without doing it in almost four
months."

Five years ago, ecstasy -- the street name for
methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) -- was only a minor player in Canada's
illicit drug market. Health Canada, which analyzes batches of illegal drugs
seized by police, reported just 303 positive ecstasy tests in 1998-99.

That tripled the following year and quintupled to 1,511 positive tests in
2001-02.

When the popularity of raves diminished, the use of ecstasy dropped off
slightly. But as young adults abandon ecstasy along with the rave culture,
teens are stepping in to keep suppliers in business.

The 2001 Ontario Student Drug Use Survey found that nearly 10 per cent of
all students in that province in Grades 11 and 12 had taken the drug. And
the number of Grade 9 students who reported trying it jumped to 7.2 per
cent in 2001 from 2.3 per cent in 1999.

That survey, which polls thousands of high-school students and is
considered one of the most accurate measures of teenage drug use, is
conducted every two years and is due to be updated next month. But police
and drug counsellors say they don't have to wait for confirmation of the
size of the problem.

Sophia Labonte, a counsellor with Kid's Help Phone, a help line for
Canadian youngsters, said telephone calls about ecstasy have climbed
considerably in the past two years.

"There has been a substantial increase," she said.

The young callers ask about long-term effects of taking the drug "or if
they take it and mix it with other drugs what will happen," said Ms. Labonte.

"We also get callers who have taken it and are freaking out about it
because of the effects that they had the next day."

Those effects can be pretty drastic, said Kirsten. It's difficult to get
the energy to walk from one side of the room to the other.

"You really sketch out. It's horrible. You sit and you stare."

Only in rare cases is ecstasy deadly. But it is such a new drug that the
long-terms effects are not fully understood. Some studies suggest it causes
brain damage, particularly memory loss, but that is still a subject of
debate. It definitely interferes with the body's ability to regulate its
temperature, which can cause hyperthermia leading to heart, kidney, and
liver problems.

And it's addictive.

Kirsten said she is the only one of her friends who has not tried to quit.

"Everybody else has tried to stop. They're all like 'we'll try to stop
until this particular day and then we're not going to do it for a really
long time, or at least we'll try and cut down,' " she said. "But I'm not
going to make any promises to myself or anybody else I can't keep."

Most of the ecstasy being sold in Canada is manufactured in the Netherlands
but the RCMP says domestic production has increased dramatically in recent
years.

Corporal Scott Rintoul, of the RCMP's Provincial Drug Awareness Service in
British Columbia, said the amount of ecstasy confiscated at the border may
have dropped to 1,768,740 tablets in 2002 from 2,069,709 tablets in 2000
but "there is more ecstasy out on the street today than ever before."

"When the rave scene gained momentum worldwide and eventually hit Canada,
ecstasy kind of followed it. . . . Today that rave scene is dying a really
quick death but there is more ecstasy than when the rave scene was hot and
heavy. It's in the schools and in the school dances. It's big at house
parties."

Drug manufacturers are clever, he said. They stamp the pills with happy
faces, Harry Potter logos or the marks of famous fashion designers -- or
the blue Supermans, orange pentagrams and pink spades that Kirsten and her
friends have tried.

The decorative touches are a direct appeal to the teenage market and the
kids are buying, said Corp. Rintoul.

"The youth have this attitude that they are resilient, that they are men
and women of steel and nothing is going to happen to them."

At the Halton Regional Police, where the drug squad is trying to control
ecstasy at Kirsten's school and so many others, Detective Constable Ed Gies
said "tons of youths are using it."

Det. Const. Gies worries about overdoses and he worries about the unknown
long-term effects on kids like Kirsten. But it's so easy to obtain, that
the police have been waging a frustrating battle.

"It's definitely scary," he said. "If these kids are out there asking for
it, they're going to find it, that's for sure."