OVERLY SENSITIVE TEST FOULS MILITARY'S WAR ON ECSTASY

Hundreds Of Sailors Hit With False Findings

The U.S. military's effort to reverse sharp increases in the number of
personnel using the drug Ecstasy hit a snag recently, when a new urine test
turned out to be too sensitive - flagging hundreds of sailors who may have
taken nothing more serious than over-the-counter cold medicines.

The turn of events has set back the fight against an illegal,
euphoria-inducing drug that military officials regard as an emerging threat
to troop safety and even, some say, to military readiness.

Though the overall use of illicit drugs has steadily fallen since the
military began random testing two decades ago, the number of active-duty
personnel testing positive for Ecstasy grew from 93 in 1998 to 1,070 in
2000, the last year for which figures are available.

"It's the fear factor," Col. Michael L. Smith, chief of the military's drug
testing and education programs, said of the concerns over rising Ecstasy
use. "Since we started testing, it's doubled and tripled every year."

The linchpin of the anti-Ecstasy campaign was to have been a new test able
to spot it in urine up to three days after ingestion - three times longer
than the current test.

The military advertised it to troops as an unforgiving detection technique,
and Vice Adm. Norbert Ryan Jr., the chief of naval personnel, issued a
stern warning in January. "If they have used Ecstasy in the past," he wrote
in a letter to Navy commanders, "let them know of the new and better
mousetrap."

The Navy was to have served as a guinea pig for the new test. If the test
proved successful, its use would extend to the other armed forces.

But tests of about 32,000 sailors in January identified a staggering 699 as
positive for either Ecstasy or methamphetamine use. Follow-up tests using a
more precise - and more labor-intensive - confirmation method found that
only nine of the 699 samples contained Ecstasy and 31 contained
methamphetamines.

The other 659, officials say, were false positives that experts believe
were triggered by cold medicines with chemical properties similar to
Ecstasy. The military is doing further analysis to determine the exact cause.

Military officials estimate it could take several months to a year to find
a test that is better able to distinguish between Ecstasy and innocuous
compounds such as the decongestant pseudoephedrine. "It's a
disappointment," said Capt. John F. Jemionek, a senior Navy biochemist who
is helping evaluate the Ecstasy tests.

The maker of the new test, Microgenics Corp., disputes the suggestion that
its Ecstasy screen is flawed, saying the U.S. military is the only client
to find fault with it. In the meantime, the military has reverted to its
current, weaker Ecstasy test as officials search for a more effective product.

The urgency of the anti-Ecstasy effort is a result both of the
random-testing results and of several highly publicized cases:

- - In January 2001, a Navy lieutenant commander in San Diego was sentenced
to five years in prison after pleading guilty to dealing Ecstasy on an
aircraft carrier.

- - A dozen military police officers from the 16th Military Police Brigade at
the Fort Bragg, N.C., Army base were charged last spring with using or
selling Ecstasy and other drugs.

- - Last year, four cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado were sent to
military prisons after being convicted of using or selling Ecstasy.

The scandal prompted the Air Force Academy to increase random testing and
start tests on weekends, to catch Friday-night users who assumed the drug
would leave their systems by Monday morning.

At the Naval Academy, five midshipmen have tested positive for Ecstasy
since January 2000, and all were expelled, an academy spokesman said.
Though that is less than 1/50th of 1 percent of the 26,000 urine samples
tested, Ecstasy was still more likely to turn up in midshipmen's urine over
that period than marijuana or cocaine. (In the military population as a
whole, marijuana and cocaine are still much more common than Ecstasy.)

Ecstasy is a synthetic, amphetamine-like drug, usually taken as a pill,
that is part hallucinogen and part stimulant.

It first caught the attention of the U.S. military in the early 1990s. The
drug was taking root in Europe as part of the growing "rave" movement of
late-night music and laser parties, and U.S. military police soon found
that some troops stationed there had been using it, Smith said. "They were
isolated incidents, but enough to make us concerned," he said.

In 1997, the military added an Ecstasy test to the battery of random drug
tests it administers to personnel, most of whom are tested at least once a
year.

The 1,070 samples found positive in 2000 represent just 1/20th of 1 percent
of the 2.4 million tested and is far smaller than the suspected rate among
civilians. Still, defense officials worried because the rise in Ecstasy use
bucked the two-decade decline in overall levels of drug use.

In 1981, about 28 percent of military personnel reported using an illicit
drug in the month before the Pentagon survey. By 1998, the year of the last
survey, that number had declined to 2.7 percent.

"If you don't address something as it first begins," said William F.
Flannery, the chief of the Navy's alcohol and drug abuse prevention
program, "you [may] have a major catastrophe because someone is on Ecstasy
while on the job."

The military formed a club drug task force two years ago, and began
advertising the dangers of Ecstasy to the troops over a Web site,
videotapes, newsletters and in speeches by its anti-drug officers. "Ecstasy
will not only kill your Navy career, but it can also kill you," a recent
article by the Navy Wire Service begins. "For this reason, the Navy has
targeted the drug Ecstasy ... as a hazard to readiness and force protection."

The Navy wrote a computer program for test scheduling, adopted last year by
the entire military, to make it harder for sailors to guess when their
turns would come up. And military police dogs are being trained to sniff
out Ecstasy.

But military officials also wanted a better test. They entered into a
contract with Microgenics Corp., a biotech company in Fremont, Calif., that
received approval last year from the Food and Drug Administration for its
urine screen. The screen is just that: its purpose is to identify a
subgroup of samples likely to contain Ecstasy. Those it identifies as
positive are then tested individually with a more time-consuming and
labor-intensive method.

Drug-testing laboratories use screens to reduce the number of samples sent
for confirmation only to those most likely to contain illicit drugs. But
the U.S. military complained that the Microgenics screen didn't do a good
enough job winnowing out samples that didn't contain Ecstasy.

Smith acknowledged that the new test may have caught actual
Ecstasy-containing samples that the current test would have missed. But it
reeled in so many benign samples that it proved of little value as a
labor-saving device.

Microgenics officials say that the Navy is the only one of about 20 users
of the screen, including the British military, to complain about its
accuracy. Its own laboratory tests, cited in submissions to the Food and
Drug Administration, showed a high level of accuracy and very low
"cross-reactivity" with cold medications.

Still, company officials said that the U.S. military tries to detect drugs
at much lower concentrations than most other users of its product, and said
that might explain a high rate of interference from over-the-counter drugs.

"I'm very hesitant to say what the Navy did. ... I can't tell if it's being
misapplied," said Lorenzo A. Ajel, the company's director of marketing
operations. "We did not have the opportunity to look at what the data
looked like."

Navy officials are also not sure why the test didn't work as advertised.
"We haven't gotten a straight answer from them either," Cmdr. Lisa K.
McWhorter, manager of the Navy's drug-testing program, said of Microgenics.