A new Pill…? Has anyone heard of the Red Hearts or Love? if you have i just wanna know if ya know whats in em and stuff. if anyone can help me out with that it would be muchly appreciated.
MDMA and SEXUAL BEHAVIOR Hello. I'm a doctoral student in clinical psychology interested in the effects of MDMA on sexual behavior, the way MDMA interacts with alcohol, and other issues related to MDMA use. I've designed a CONFIDENTIAL questionnaire looking at these issues. Sponsored by Rutgers University, my study has been approved by the Rutgers University IRB, a body created to oversee research to ensure the protection of human subjects. You MUST have taken MDMA in the past month in order to participate in this study. Your participation is very much appreciated and would provide very long-needed information to honestly assess the potential of this drug for both harm and benefit. Thanks very much, your effort is appreciated. Please note that this confidential survey asks you about sexual behaviors and substance use.
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~hectorg
Hector Garcia
Survey reveals US teen use of ECSTASY, other illegal drugs declined in ’02 – Q2 2003 Survey reveals US teen use of Ecstasy, other illegal drugs declined in '02
Published by Yahoo News - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: Yahoo News
The number of American teens who tried the club drug Ecstasy last year dropped slightly, but experts warn that the drug still has a dangerous level of popularity, particularly among teens who attend all-night dance parties called raves.
A report released today shows that 2.6 million teenagers have tried Ecstasy at least once. The drug produces an intense high, but it can also lead to kidney and brain damage.
The 2002 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study surveyed 7,084 teens in grades 7 through 12 across the country and found that overall drug use among teens has declined since 1997.
In 2002, 48% of teenagers, or 11.1 million kids, reported trying an illicit drug, down from 53% in 1997. Those findings mirror the Monitoring the Future survey, a report released late last year that also found an overall drop in teen drug use.
The survey, sponsored by the New York-based Partnership for a Drug-Free America, shows that teens are more likely to view certain drugs as dangerous, an attitude that experts say usually corresponds with a downturn in substance abuse.
In fact, the survey found that 76% of kids said there is great risk in using Ecstasy regularly. Yet many teens felt there was no harm in trying the drug: The survey found that one out of nine children in America had tried the drug.
''That is frightening,'' says Scott Swartzwelder, a drug and alcohol researcher at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. He says Ecstasy is a powerful neurotoxin that can damage the learning centers of the brain after regular use.
The new survey also found that kids attending raves were seven times more likely to use Ecstasy. It is a stimulant and allows users to dance all night long.
The survey also found:
* Marijuana remains the most widely used illicit drug; four out of 10 teens reported using it at some point. But the survey found that like other drugs, marijuana use has dropped in recent years.
* Inhalant use by teens has declined significantly since 1995. This year's survey found that 10% of teens said they had abused inhalants in the past year, down from 16% in 1995.
Inhalants are household products such as glue that produce a high when sniffed.
* LSD use declined in 2002 as 8% of teens reported use of the drug at some point in their lives, down from 10% the previous year.
Parents can play a big role in making sure a child stays drug-free, Swartzwelder says. He suggests a frank talk about the dangers of drugs like Ecstasy.
''The best drug education happens around the dining-room table,'' he says.
http://news.yahoo.com/
The secret life of ECSTASY – August 2002 The secret life of ECSTASY
By The Green Party - Monday, July 29, 2002
Copyright: The Green Party
You may have seen a new anti-ecstasy billboard sporting myriad ecstasy pills and the caption 'which onE is the killer?' Well it may have something to do with the country you're in, not the pill itself.
Scare tactics are no good if clubs can lose their licence for allowing official pill testing and harm reduction is seen as 'giving in to the drugs war'
In the UK there have been around 80 deaths attributed to Ecstasy. In the same period, there were between 20-30 deaths in the Netherlands - but even the Dutch aren't sure if that many deaths were due to Ecstasy itself.
As the Trimbos Institute (Netherlands Institute of Addiction) say, 'the exact number of deaths related to the use of amphetamines and ecstasy is unclear. In the Cause of Death statistics of the CBS these substances rarely occur as underlying causes of death. Over the past 10 years no more than 1 to 3 acute deaths per year were involved.' In plain English, they are saying that so few people have problems with Ecstasy that they're not sure if it's a killer in itself.
So why do far fewer people die in the Netherlands from Ecstasy use? It may be due to the Dutch policy of harm reduction for all drugs. In the case of Ecstasy, it means 'ecstacy' pill testing in clubs as well as public warning from their health ministry when potentially lethal 'ecstasy' pills are discovered in circulation.
So does Ecstasy have the potential to kill? Ask the scientists and they will tell you that the LD50 (lethal dose that killed 50% of a group of rats/mice) of MDMA is 97mg/kg, ie. a person weighing 170kg would have to take around 150 Ecstasy pills or more before death occurred. However this is taken from the animal world and if you read the small print, you will see that the doses were administered IP, that is, injected into the membrane that holds the major organs together.
In the human world, there is anecdotal evidence that large amounts of Ecstasy can be consumed orally with no apparent long term effects. There are several instances of people consuming hundreds of pills and living to tell the tale.
So why is Ecstasy thought of as being such a big killer in the UK? There are three possible reasons, which relate to poor provision of resources for drug takers in clubs.
First of all, many clubs still do not have proper ventilation, running cold water and 'chill out' areas to prevent heatstroke, a major cause of death for Ecstasy users in the UK.
Secondly, the 'Barry Legg Act' effectively means that a club that allows Ecstasy testing can have its license taken away - the police can use Ecstasy testing as 'proof' of drug taking and have a venue shut down for good. This means a greater chance of consuming non-MDMA substances like DOB, DXM and PMA which really can be lethal.
Thirdly, the UK Government do not follow Dutch practice and publicise the discovery of lethal 'ecstasy' pills - the National Poisons Unit will test pills and pass data onto people like the police, but Joe Public is kept in the dark. Luckily, it's legal to own an Ecstasy Testing Kit in the UK.
Used correctly, MDMA doesn't necessarily have to be a killer at all - certainly in comparison with tobacco and alcohol, which kill many hundreds of thousands every year. More research into safety is needed.
http://www.greenparty.org.uk/
The ECSTASY Capital of the World The Ecstasy capital of the world
Most of the world's Ecstasy is produced in the Netherlands, and yet despite the government's best efforts to combat the production and trafficking of the drug, the Ecstasy party shows no sign of abating.
What is Ecstasy?
Perhaps traumatised by being rather unflatteringly christened Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) when invented around 1912, the little pill has adopted many pseudonyms since, including XTC, Ecstasy, E and the love drug in its search for acceptance.
The little pill, with its disproportionate stimulant and hallucinogenic properties, hit the big time when the "rave" clubbing craze started in the mid 1980s.
Its advocates say Ecstasy produces positive feelings, empathy for others, extreme relaxation and eliminates anxiety.
It also suppresses the need to eat, drink or sleep, allowing users to dance all night.
Opponents say it can lead to exhaustion and dehydration, brain damage and death. Indeed, some users have "drowned" themselves by drinking too much water while trying to compensate for the dehydrating effect of dancing frantically for hours.
The drug is illegal.
The drug party that doesn't end
The Dutch government is working hard to dispel the image that it tolerates hard drugs. However, the fact remains that the Drug Enforcement Administration in the US cites the Netherlands as the world's primary producer of the party-drug Ecstasy .
Every week, about 2 million Dutch Ecstasy pills are smuggled into the US and Ecstasy is the drug of choice for revellers in dance clubs all across Europe and America. Foreign governments, and the US government in particular are none too pleased about this at all and they never miss an opportunity to criticise Holland.
The United Nations-inspired International Narcotics Control Board also singled the Netherlands in its 2000 annual report as the bad boy of Europe when it comes to drugs production and smuggling.
But there is nothing like a good police raid to show how seriously the fight against Ecstasy is being taken.
In one month alone (March 2002), the Dutch police tell us they have broken up two major Ecstasy gangs. One was in the north of the country where three men, including two company directors, were arrested and about 100,000 Ecstasy pills seized. Investigators also found a truck containing thousands of litres of chemical ingredients, enough to make a few million more Ecstasy pills.
About a week later, Rotterdam detectives arrested nine people allegedly involved in another ring smuggling Ecstasy to the US. About 18 kilos of Ecstasy were seized.
The investigation started a few weeks earlier following a tip from the public prosecutors office in Belgium. Two couriers were arrested in Belgium with kilos of Ecstasy hidden in a specially doctored suitcase.
Police operations like these make for good news and give the impression the Netherlands has the Ecstasy gangs on the run. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The police closed down about 38 production centres back in 1998 but the party goes on and on. When the police close down one laboratory, you can be sure two more open somewhere else.
The Netherlands declares war on Ecstasy
There are a number of reasons why the production of Ecstasy is centred in the Netherlands. Firstly, The Netherlands has long been a hub for international trade and transport.
Secondly, the country is traditionally tolerant when it comes to drugs. The cannabis coffee shops are an integral part of country's tourist industry. Perhaps, says the government, but we take hard drugs seriously and keep them out of the coffee shops.
Certainty things have changed since the early 1960s when amphetamines were not a controlled substance in the Netherlands and were produced by Dutch gangs for export to Scandinavia and the UK.
It was easy for the gangs to switch to Ecstasy production when the dance craze took off in the late 1980s.
The government finally made the war on Ecstasy a priority back in 1996. It set up a special police taskforce, the Synthetic Drugs Unit (USD), and set about closing down the Ecstasy plants. It all sounded very Elliot Ness; that is, until the presentation of the USD's annual report last year.
Public prosecutor Martin Witteveen said the unit did not have enough officers to follow up on many of the leads received from foreign police forces about the activities of Ecstasy gangs here. And focusing on one case sometimes necessitated officers being taken off another case, he said.
When the justice department catches a gang, it asks the courts to impose a heavy penalty. Unfortunately, what the Netherlands, and many other European countries, consider to be a heavy sentence can be likened to a slap on the wrist in places like the US and Britain.
Take the tale of the two disk jockeys. An Irish DJ was jailed for three years after he was caught with over 30,000 Ecstasy pills in Amsterdam. The court heard he was part of an international gang that smuggled Ecstasy to the US and Britain.
In contrast, a DJ from Zwolle who was extradited to US in January 2002 to face Ecstasy smuggling charges faces the rest of his life behind bars if convicted.
Dealing with the drug rings
The drug gangs operating in the Netherlands are just as multinational as Philips or Royal Dutch/Shell. Eastern European and Russian "Mafia" gangs saw the potential as an international base as soon as soon as the Soviet Bloc collapsed and moved in west.
Israel has criticised Dutch police for lacklustre co-operation in dealing with a number of powerful Israeli gangs using the Netherlands as the production centre for their growing Ecstasy empires.
And Irish drug dealers - not particular whether they sell cannabis, Ecstasy or heroin - use Amsterdam as their bolthole whenever the pressure from police or other criminals gets too much at home.
There has been a lot of international co-operation in the last few years on cutting the supply of the chemicals needed to produce Ecstasy . As a result, most of the chemicals now come from China. The Dutch are reluctant to co-operate too closely with the Chinese authorities because of their poor human rights record and their liberal use of the death penalty.
The Dutch authorities acknowledge that most of the world's Ecstasy is produced here but they point out that it takes two to tango. There is a world market out there impatiently awaiting the next batch from Holland. Each pill costs EUR 0.50 to produce but sells for about EUR 4.50. That is the bottom line.
http://www.expatica.com/
ECSTASY: Penicillin for the Soul? ECSTASY: Penicillin for the soul?
Ecstasy: a lethal class-A drug responsible for numerous teenage deaths. Ecstasy: a harmless drug that provides entertainment for millions every weekend – and could save marriages. How can opinion be so divided?
Football hooliganism could hold the key to treating a range of common psychological disorders, such as chronic stress and depression. But the clue lies not with hooliganism itself but with its remarkable disappearance. Throughout the Eighties and early Nineties, the football season was a long history of violent days, with rival "firms" engaging in running battles, trashing city centres and causing severe, occasionally fatal, injuries to each other. And then, suddenly, that stopped.
Effective policing and other social factors may have played a part, but one controversial theory credits the sudden outbreak of peace to widespread use of the illegal drug Ecstasy. In his book E for Ecstasy, published in 1994 (and now available only on the internet, at www.ecstasy.org), Nicholas Saunders describes how, in the summer of 1992, "many of the hard-core lads, who had previously been beating each other up, had spent most of the summer dancing the weekends away to the sounds of house music at raves fuelled by the drug Ecstasy."
In November of that year, the day before Manchester United were due to play Manchester City in the local derby, the two rival football gangs met in a club "after necking an E". Instead of the normal violent confrontation, the young men smiled at one another happily, before adjourning to someone's house for a few joints; one commented: "Well, who'd have thought that we would be stood side by side the night before a derby game, and there's no trouble in any of us? It's weird, innit? It could never have happened before E."
At the time, no one took Saunders's ideas seriously. But in recent months there has been a shift in attitudes to the medicinal as well as the recreational properties of the drug that apparently brought love and peace to the hearts of rival football fans. Not only does Ecstasy seem to be a relatively safe drug; it may also be a valuable tool for psychiatrists treating chronic stress and depression, according to new research.
If the story sounds familiar, it's because very much the same transformation has already occurred with cannabis. Reviled until recently by police and medical authorities alike, cannabis is now set to be downgraded as a recreational drug from class B to class C. Organised clinical trials of cannabis as a painkiller and treatment for muscle spasms are likely to result in its legalisation for medicinal use in the next couple of years, says Professor Tony Moffat, chief scientist of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. There are also promising signs of its medical benefits for glaucoma, asthma, anorexia and mood disorders.
Now there are signs that Ecstasy, known in pharmaceutical circles as MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine), is due for the same treatment. In her new anthology, Ecstasy: the Complete Guide (Park Street Press, £17.99), Julie Holland, a New York psychiatrist, says that it has a substantial therapeutic history that pre-dates its popularity as a recreational drug.
First synthesised (and patented) by Merck in 1912, Ecstasy was briefly investigated by the US Army Chemical Centre in the 1950s as a potential brainwashing tool. It came into its own, however, in the late Seventies, when it became widely used by several hundred psychotherapists attached to the Esalen Institute in California, four out of five of whom believed that it had "substantial potential as an adjunct to the psychotherapy process", according to subsequent research.
Known as "penicillin for the soul", MDMA, which works on two brain chemicals, serotonin and dopamine (essentially combining the effects of Prozac-type antidepressants and amphetamines), "induces a gentle and subtle shift in consciousness", says Dr Holland. It "makes painful psychotherapy easier and faster, like anaesthesia given during surgery to allow for deeper incisions and removal of more malignant material."
The gathering of evidence of the drug's major therapeutic benefits, however, came to an abrupt halt in 1984. At the beginning of the Eighties, "MDMA, the therapeutic tool, leaked out into the general community to become Ecstasy, the party drug", and a worried US Drug Enforcement Agency overruled a substantial pro-MDMA research lobby and placed it in the most restrictive category of controlled substances. Medical research was banned. Meanwhile, in Britain alone, up to two million people partied on it every weekend.
But the therapeutic MDMA lobby is persistent. A key activist, Dr Rick Doblin, gained a drugs policy PhD at Harvard and set up the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (or MAPS – www.maps.org) to lobby for and fund research into the medical use of MDMA. With one trial already under way in Spain, the American Food and Drug Administration approved the first US-based double-blind clinical trial of the rave drug to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in November 2001 – and there are plans in the pipeline to test MDMA's potential to support treatment for marital problems, depression and even schizophrenia. Further research, testing a form of the drug as a treatment for Parkinson's disease, is also under way at the school of biological sciences at Manchester University.
It's a remarkable about-turn, considering that the US government has, in the past two years, stiffened legal penalties for possession and stepped up efforts to publicise the dangers of Ecstasy; according to New Scientist magazine, Ecstasy offences are now "being punished more harshly in the US than those involving heroin".
A major focus of the pro-Ecstasy campaign has been to overturn the persistent media image of the drug as a potential killer and a cause of brain damage. Enthusiasts have no problem in finding evidence that refutes that graphically. Saunders used government statistics to substantiate his claim that taking Ecstasy – with around five related deaths a year at the time – carries about the same risk as fishing and horse-riding. Current figures of about 27 Ecstasy-related deaths a year are still lower than those for glue-sniffing and over-the-counter painkillers – and seem to be linked to a little-understood and extremely rare reaction called serotonin syndrome.
Intriguingly, the very experts who drew attention to Ecstasy as a potential killer have also supported the move to have it clinically tested as a therapeutic entity.
Dr John Henry, director of the National Poisons Information Service at Guy's Hospital, was the first to catalogue the risks of overheating at Ecstasy-fuelled raves, as well as the possibly greater risk of drinking too much water. But he is critical of media coverage of the drug's safety record. "The sensationalising of the deaths of two young women, one in England and another in Australia, which may have been related to hyponatremia [a low concentration of sodium in the blood] associated with drinking too much water after Ecstasy use, clearly illustrates a desire to sell newspapers rather than cogently inform," he says in a piece included in Ecstasy: the Complete Guide. "Intuitively, we know that the incidence of adverse outcomes is low, since emergency departments are not being overrun each weekend by people dying from Ecstasy use. It is the manner in which MDMA is used that poses the greatest danger to the patient."
One of the most effective weapons of the anti-Ecstasy lobby, used repeatedly on TV and in magazines, has been a set of coloured images taken from brain scans, which supposedly show that repeated use of the drug makes holes in the brain. But recently a detailed investigation has shown that the pictures are based on unreliable and inaccurate science. The original study from John Hopkins University, published in The Lancet in October 1998, used inaccurate measurement probes and was selective in the data it published. Subsequent tests of mental agility show that Ecstasy users perform as well as non-users.
So, if Ecstasy is largely safe, why criminalise it? That was the question posed at the Cheltenham Festival of Science last month, at which the "godfather of Ecstasy", Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, appeared alongside weighty academics such as the pharmacologist Les Iversen and Colin Blakemore, chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, on a platform calling for a change to drug laws.
Shulgin is a chemist with an academic career at the University of California. His research work over the past 40 years has involved designing, synthesising and evaluating psychedelic drugs. He was the man who published the chemical formula for MDMA in 1965 and wrote up the first paper on its therapeutic use.
While Profs Iversen and Blakemore stressed the lack of scientific evidence to support the law against cannabis, Shulgin went further and called for a repeal of the criminalisation of all drugs, with better drug safety brought about by "getting honest information out there, openly available to everyone, to build up a public awareness of the health problems that might be associated with drug use". Ecstasy, he said, "should be used only with access to medical advice".
There are cogent arguments for using the drug only within a therapeutic setting. Its effect reduces with use, and the so-called love effect, achieved when it floods the brain with far higher levels of serotonin than Prozac-type drugs can, stops working if the drug is used regularly, because of changes to the brain.
As the psychiatrist George Greer, medical director of the Heffter Research Institute, points out in Ecstasy: the Complete Guide, people do not necessarily change while on MDMA. "There's no guarantee that problems will be resolved. It all depends on the individuals and their intention, their willingness to work it out." The role of the MDMA therapist (usually someone who has taken the drug) is "to guide the person through a task that needs to be accomplished", says Dr Holland – "otherwise there's a risk that you'll just admire the beautiful wallpaper."
A five-year MAPS plan to introduce MDMA as a therapy in the States envisages its use as a drug taken under the supervision of a therapist. Instead of following the conventional Western medical model, which treats healing drugs as something to be administered on a daily schedule, the therapeutic use of Ecstasy should be an experience "shared by doctor and patient together", says the Californian psychologist Dr Ralph Metzner. "This model is much closer to that followed in traditional people's healing ceremonies."
In other words, if Ecstasy does follow cannabis on to the prescription pad, it could change the whole basis on which psychiatrist and client relate to each other. Anyone who says that couldn't happen might do well to remember that Manchester football derby of 1992.
http://www.independent.co.uk/
ECSTASY epidemic – June 2001 Ecstasy epidemic
By RNW.nl - June 2001
Copyright: RNW.nl
Simon sees drug taking as a question of choice. It's quite simple - "a person is entitled to abuse his body in any way he sees fit". He's 30, works in the film industry, and for the last 9 years, ‘a little something for the weekend' has meant taking a couple of ecstasy tablets whenever he goes out clubbing.
He took his first E at a rave in England. He had no idea what it was his friend was giving him. Before that, he'd smoked marijuana, taken speed and experimented with "a natural form of LSD in Zimbabwe", but, he says "that night changed my perceptions on life. It was as if someone had turned on a light in my head - everyone was beautiful. Everything just made sense. I wasn't afraid and got immense pleasure from talking and listening to people. I had time for everyone and everything." Simon enjoyed his night so much that he took another E the next morning "and partied all weekend".
Feels Like Death:
He was 21 then. Now, he says it's "still a fairly regular requirement if you go out - to take a couple of E's," but it's not always been like that first night. He's had "some freaked out experiences - I've woken up in places I don't recognise, lost days at a time." He recalls one particularly bad experience. "One night, I took two E's in one club, was drinking whisky and took a third E in another club. I thought I was dying. I felt like I was leaving my body. It felt like my blood was boiling and I passed out. My friends revived me by throwing water on me, and they looked after me".
For him, ecstasy is integral to the clubbing lifestyle or going out to party. "It's not a way of life, but it is a social activity - like drinking". He says he must have taken well over a hundred E's in his time. The most he's ever taken in one go was seven. "I've taken the odd E during the day, but usually at a festival or a social gathering, then I might take half to get that cool buzz feeling."
Growing Tolerance:
Does he worry about his health? "I worry about my heart, but generally I have a ‘here goes nothing attitude,'" although he was dubious about buying from a guy in a club in Amsterdam once, "but the guy in the club said I could test it. I thought he was joking, but sure enough there was a table in the corner, I paid NLG20, they did a test or something, dropped a chemical on the pill and it came up the right colour…that E sent me flying"!
But, the initial high has faded for Simon. "The hype has gone, it's like cannabis now - just an accessory, part of the paraphernalia of clubbing and going out. One E used to last me 14 hours, now I can go to sleep on one. But I can feel empty, disillusioned and depressed if I do a lot of E's on a weekend. It takes me 3 or 4 days to recover. Now that I'm getting older it takes longer to deal with it, so I do it less." But he's not ready to give it all up just yet. "Talking about that first night, it gives me a buzz just thinking about it. I couldn't imagine taking my last E just yet."
http://www.rnw.nl/
International criticism of Dutch drug policy regarding ECSTASY – June 2001 International criticism of Dutch drug policy regarding Ecstasy
By RNW.nl - June 2001
Copyright: RNW.nl
International criticism of Dutch drug really hit new highs again in the early 1990's. At that time it became apparent that The Netherlands was the largest producer and exporter of ecstasy.
A couple of years earlier this new synthetic drug appeared in Europe and the United States and took youth culture by storm. It comes in the shape of a pill and after taking the right dose users feel a sense of euphoria, emotional closeness to others and are overwhelmed with positive feelings and extreme relaxation (hence the nickname ‘hug drug'). It also has a stimulant effect. On the crest of the wave of house parties and so-called raves ecstasy became a household name for partygoers everywhere, who danced all night long on a couple of pills. It is not a drug suitable for everyday use and the majority of users limits taking ecstasy to weekends. Unlike amphetamine it is not physically addictive.
Testing pills:
Ecstasy was classed as a hard drug in The Netherlands in 1988, but proved to be very easy to produce in illegal laboratories. Soon the market was flooded with pills that contained impure or addictive substances or were outright fakes. Sometimes caffeine is used to substitute the real thing, MDMA, but also related substances like MDA, MDBD, MDEA or amphetamine. In a typically Dutch move provisions were made so that partygoers could have their pills tested on purity before taking them. That measure was criticised as it seemed to condone the use of ecstasy, but it is the logical consequence of the principles of Dutch drug policy (to reduce potential harm to users). However, as acid-house, raves and techno music seem to be a fading trend, the use of ecstasy may very well be past its highpoint.
Exports:
France, Britain and Germany all complained that they were flooded with ecstasy from The Netherlands. So why did The Netherlands become such a large producer of ecstasy? The answer should be found in a combination of factors: the tolerant drug policy, relatively low prison sentences and The Netherlands' geographical position and traditional dominant role in transport and distribution. The pills are easy and relatively cheap to make. All it takes is a couple of vats of chemicals, an industrial foodmixer, a machine to stamp tablets and the ‘lab' is there. A small investment, but with an enormous potential for vast profits.
In 1996 the Dutch government made clamping down on the production and trafficking of ecstasy a priority. A special interregional police unit was set up, the Synthetic Drugs Unit (USD). Since then, dozens of ecstasy labs have been busted, but as the investment is small, new ones spring up very quickly.
http://www.rnw.nl/
UK: ECSTASY testing kits prove unreliable – Q2 2003 Ecstasy testing kits prove unreliable
Published by NewScientist.com - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: NewScientist.com
Ecstasy testing kits, used by clubbers to screen out dud pills are unreliable, according to a "blind" test of pills with known ingredients.
Testing kits based on reagents that change colour in the presence of chemicals in the ecstasy family are available around the world, mainly via the internet. They typically consist of one to three small chemical bottles and are designed to be portable, so that the user can carry out a test in the toilet of a nightclub for example.
The kits, which can test up to 150 pills, do not claim to measure the dosage or purity of a pill, but simply the presence or absence of MDMA - the chemical name for ecstasy - or very similar compounds. Clubbers use them to screen out pills that are likely to contain other, potentially more dangerous, substances. PMA, for example, is sometimes sold as ecstasy but has been associated with several deaths in the US, Europe and Australia.
The experiments revealing the unreliability of the tests were carried out by Rebecca Murray and colleagues at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "This is going to create a false sense of security," she told New Scientist. Murray believes the kits performed badly because the colour charts provided do not match well with the colours actually observed. Also, assessing the changes is very subjective and especially challenging if lighting conditions vary.
Better than nothing
"We'll be the first to admit that ecstasy testing kits are not terribly accurate," says Ian Baker, of DanceSafe, the San Francisco charity that supplied the test kits. "The instructions for the kit very explicitly state its limitations."
But while ecstasy remains illegal, he says, a fallible test is better than no test at all. "We try very hard to avoid giving users a false sense of security." The group sell a few hundred kits a month in the US.
Murray's team gave eight pills each to two testers who had never used the kits before. The experiments were "blind" - the researchers knew what was in the pills but the testers did not. Two of the tablets contained MDMA, while the rest were composed of other compounds sometimes found in pills such as ketamine, morphine, caffeine and d-norpropoxyphene.
The first tester rated seven of the pills, including both the MDMA tablets, as not containing the drug, the researchers told the American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference in Chicago last week. The one pill the tester believed had tested positive in fact contained morphine.
Pushing purity
In contrast, the second tester thought six samples contained MDMA, rating the ketamine and d-norpropoxyphene tablets as negative. One of the testers, University of Florida toxicologist Bruce Goldberger, says: "I failed miserably."
However, testing kits have had a noticeable effect on pill purity, says Matthew Atha, director of the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit, based in Wigan, UK. "The number of duds has dropped," he says.
Amsterdam based company EZ Test were the first to start marketing the kits and have sold about 300,000 tests worldwide in the past six years. "There are no 'good' pills," says Ewoud Vijfwinkel of EZ Test. "All we can give is an indication as to what is inside, that's a lot more reliable than a dealer's word on quality."
http://www.newscientist.com/
Harry Potter ECSTASY Old Hat Harry Potter X old hat here
by San Francisco Examiner - Monday 4 February, 2003
New York City is abuzz over Harry Potter. Not the book, not the movie, not the action figure -- the ecstasy tablet.
Monday, NYC detectives uncovered a $6 million, 14-person drug smuggling ring set to move nearly a half-million pills imprinted with the image of the popular children's hero.
"These Harry Potter brands are targeting a young audience," a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration told police and the press.
Local clubgoers say Harry's old hat and that the ecstasy scene has moved on.
"I doubt there's any audience for those, young or old," said Mike "Mechanic" B., 24, a queer club regular and occasional purveyor of MDMA (ecstasy) tablets.
"Potter pills are sooo last year."
Technically speaking, he's right. Ecstasydata.org, which maintains an online database of branded MDMA pills, first logged the purple, 168mg Potter pill in November 2002. The organization has already logged 1,076 varieties of logo ecstasy, with 30 originating in The City.
"It's really easy to brand a tablet on a pill press. Dealers imprint black market pills to identify and separate their brands from other pills," Mike said over breakfast in his Castro home.
J.B., a 35-year-old MDMA dealer who mostly markets his product to the younger rave and dance market, says the reason there are so many different branded pills on the market is simple: Copycats.
"Once a logo is known for being a quality drug, other people will copy that logo to try to sell more of their drug," J.B. said, "so then you have to create a new imprint."
Police nationwide have been cracking down on the sale of ecstasy and other club drugs, with local arrests netting huge hauls of hundreds of ecstasy tablets at a time.
According to ecstasydata, ecstasy tablets have debuted in San Francisco bearing the Star of David, the yin/yang, the Motorola and Volkswagen logos, the recycling symbol, and the nationally popular Tweety Bird image.
"I started the Sylvester Cat imprint," boasts Mike, who has since moved on to ripping off fashion icons.
As in Europe, pills bearing the Louis Vuitton imprint, the Gucci interlocked G, and the Armani logo are popular with The City's older poppers, he said.
Mike and J.B. don't agree that the Harry Potter pills are aimed at children, noting that there are already dozens of pills branded with "child" images such as Sylvester Cat, Superman and Mary Poppins.
"We're not marketing to kids with our logos, we're just trademarking our product," J.B. said.
"It's not like we sat down and created an image, like Joe Camel, in order to attract children. Cigarette companies, now they market to kids."
Inspector Gavin McEachern, of the SFPD's Narcotics division, said he has seen a large quantity of blue dolphin-embossed tablets on the street, but that the rising trend is in nonbranded pills and a new, off-white capsule (the latter often adulterated).
"At least when they had those silly logos on them we knew what they were. It clearly wasn't an Advil or anything," he said.
"Without the markings, we don't know if it's a standard prescription tablet or not. It could be Ritalin, who knows?
World: Bangkok police arrest 13, seize 1.5 million speed pills – February 2003 Bangkok police arrest 13, seize 1.5 million speed pills
Published by The Star Online - Monday 4 February, 2003
Copyright: The Star Online
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP): Police in Bangkok arrested 13 Thais and seized nearly 1.5 million methamphetamine tablets worth about 30 million baht (US$678,997) in weekend drug raids, officials said Monday.
Police raided a suspected drug den in a run-down hotel in the outskirts of Bangkok on Sunday, seizing 500,000 speed pills, a .22 caliber gun, a pipe containing 0.45 kilogrammes (1 pound) of C4 plastic explosive and two detonators, and a car police, Gen. Sant Sarutanond said in a statement.
They arrested four unidentified men and Wutthipong Chuahongkaew, 40, an alleged stolen vehicle trafficker known for trading cars for drugs in neighbouring Cambodia, he said.
Sant said the raid was planned using information from a previous arrest in northern Thailand. "It's a vast network,'' he said.
In another raid, police on Saturday stormed a house in suburban Bangkok, arresting a couple and confiscating nearly 1 million methamphetamine tablets.
Separately, three suspected drug dealers were killed Thursday in a shootout with undercover police in northern Thailand.
The bullet-ridden bodies of Sekan Saelee, Sutham Laoyeepa and a third unidentified man were found at the scene along with 100,000 methamphetamine pills, two pistols and a hand grenade, police said.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has vowed to take tough action to root out drug traffickers, and King Bhumibol Adulyadej reminded the government recently that methamphetamines pose a serious threat to Thai society.
Thai anti-drug agencies have accused the United Wa State Army, a former rebel group now allied with the Myanmar government, of flooding Thailand with methamphetamines.
The Thai military has estimated that at least 1 billion speed tablets will be smuggled into Thailand from neighbouring Myanmar, also known as Burma, in 2003.
http://thestar.com.my/
World: ‘Millions’ have tried ECSTASY in Europe – January 2003 'Millions' have tried ecstasy
Published by BBC News - December, 2002
Copyright: BBC News
Between three million and 3.5 million adults in the EU have probably tried ecstasy at least once, says a European drug monitoring body.
Up to half a million have taken it once a week or more at some time in their lives, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
In a review of the situation across the EU's 15 member states, the Lisbon-based agency found that most users of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs are not people on the "margins" of society or in any way disadvantaged.
Instead, most are students or young professionals, most of them relatively well off.
"These trends seem to have established themselves rapidly across the EU," said Mike Trace, the Centre's chairman.
"The main reasons people say they consume ecstasy is to feel more pleasure when they dance, and to have fun," the Centre said in statement.
"Other recreative drugs are consumed to gain confidence or energy, or in search of new experiences."
Policy-makers
Whilst noting that reducing the risks to the ever greater numbers of "normal" young people who take drugs is one of the main concerns of policy-makers at local, national and international level, the centre warned of the need for responses to the problem to be realistic and well-founded.
"The consequences and risks of recreative consumption of drugs should be the object of scientific assessment," it said.
In particular, it called for action to break the close link between excessive consumption of (legal) alcohol - "the mind-altering substance most frequently consumed for recreative purposes" - and (illegal) drugs.
To be effective, it said, such action should be taken in cooperation with bars and clubs on the one hand, and the drinks industry on the other.
The work of the centre in monitoring developments in member states and acting as an information exchange is at the heart of an increasing tendency for EU member states to learn lessons from each other's experiences and move more in step in policy terms.
Recent developments include, in Portugal, the decriminalisation of possession and consumption of small quantities of any drug, and in the UK the downgrading of cannabis to a class C drug - effectively decriminalising its possession and use.
The centre is one of a number of specialised institutions under the aegis of the European Commission, each based in a different EU member states.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
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