Rise Seen in Trafficking of Enhanced Ecstasy
 Jane Gross - NYTimes
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Methamphetamine-laced Ecstasy is flowing across the Canadian border into the United States, according to a warning last week from the federal government to public health and local law enforcement officials.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy reports that seizures of Ecstasy at the northern border increased tenfold from 2003 to 2006, with more than half of the contraband tablets containing methamphetamine, a vastly more addicting drug. This matches findings by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The development comes after an uptick in Ecstasy use after years of waning popularity for the club drug and just as the supply of methamphetamine is being strangled at the Mexican border. Some law enforcement and treatment experts hypothesize that the turbocharged combination is an effort by traffickers to reverse trends unfavorable to their business by marketing a new product at a new point of entry.
Ecstasy, which gained popularity in the 1990s rave culture, had been in steep decline since 2001, but began to creep upward in 2005 and 2006, when first-time users increased by 40 percent, a third of them under the age of 18, according to a variety of studies.
At more or less the same time, the supply of methamphetamine in the United States has been substantially reduced, first by shutting domestic laboratories and then by new cooperation from the Mexican government in controlling its manufacture and smuggling.
“This is simply my opinion,” said Scott Burns, a deputy director at the drug control policy office, “but drug traffickers often have to reinvent or come up with new products when what we’re doing is working.”
Steven J. Shoptaw, a professor of family medicine and a methamphetamine expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, drew the same conclusion, citing a doubling of the street price of methamphetamine nationwide as a result of tight supply. “It could be a brilliant marketing ploy in the face of enforcement success,” Dr. Shoptaw said. “First you make a variation on the product and then you move its production.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, said there was “no direct linkage” between the producers and distributors in Mexico and those in Canada. “The flow of Ecstasy from Canada is operating independently at this point from the flow of methamphetamine from Mexico,” said Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the drug agency.
But, Ms. Waite added, the drug agency’s intelligence officers are exploring whether combining the two illegal stimulants is “a marketing ploy to hook more people on meth,” widely regarded by treatment professionals as more pernicious than Ecstasy.
Treatment professionals say addiction to Ecstasy, a synthetic stimulant, is rare. But it can induce euphoria, hallucinations, memory loss, elevated body temperature and increased heart rate. Methamphetamine, also a synthetic stimulant that can reduce sexual inhibitions, is highly addictive, these experts say, with a half life of 8 to 12 hours, versus an hour or two for Ecstasy alone. In combination, these experts say, the dangers of each drug could be magnified.
To date, the “Extreme Ecstasy” or “Meth X,” as Mr. Burns called the adulterated pills, has not been the source of emergency room admissions, overdoses or new clients in substance-abuse programs, according to experts on both the law enforcement and the treatment side. But all agree that there is generally a time lag between what crosses the border and what affects communities.
“We wouldn’t expect to see sick kids, or others signs of this drug in use, for months,” said Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, founder of Phoenix House, a nationwide network of treatment centers. “But the fact that it isn’t on the ground yet doesn’t make it less ominous. Why wait until we’ve seen umpteen overdoses in the northern part of the country?”
Ecstasy, which is often adulterated with other substances, including talcum powder and sedatives, has always been most popular with dance-the-night-away young adults and teenagers. While below the peak in 2002, first-time users increased from 2005 to 2006, to 860,000 from 615,000, various federal studies say. In the same time period, the number of young adults who used Ecstasy in the past month rose to 326,000, from 231,000. And fewer 8th and 10th graders reported that they believed Ecstasy was risky.
At the United States’ northern border, federal law enforcement officials seized 5,485,619 doses of Ecstasy in 2006, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, compared with 568,220 in 2003. United States officials say that 55 percent of the 2006 seizures contained methamphetamine. Data from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, while not identical, reflects a comparable trend: 5.2 million hits seized in 2006, up from 1.1 million in 2004. According to the Canadian government, 70 percent of the 2006 samples tested were laced with methamphetamine. |
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Health & Beauty | January 2008 
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