Publication title: National Post
First page: A.12
Publication date: Mar 27, 2009
ProQuest document ID: 330860666
Author: Cosh, Colby
Warning: this column falls under the heading "Am I slowly going insane or is there more than meets the eye here?" Canada's press has been reporting this week on a heartbreaking incident that took place at the Paul First Nation 60 kilo-metres west of Edmonton. Several girls getting ready to attend a Sunday wedding reception took what they thought was MDMA, the popular club amphetamine known as ecstasy. Three or four of them fell ill, and two went into a coma and have since died. This is a confusing event, but the reaction has been even more confusing.
Many early news accounts uncritically described the sick girls as having fallen prey to an "overdose" of ecstasy. Now, as it happens, ecstasy "overdoses" are a lot less common than you might think. Earlier this month, a top drug-safety adviser to the U.K. government, David Nutt, caught hell for pointing out that if we redefined horseback riding as a behavioural addiction called "equasy," any rational harm scale would find it to be far more lethal than ecstasy. Nutt pegged the number of acute harm events from ecstasy use, for the purposes of contrived controversy, at no more than 1 per 10,000 exposures.
Yet even this is probably a massive exaggeration of the true amount of harm from ecstasy as such. Exact figures are hard to derive precisely because toxic reactions to ecstasy are so rare, and the drug does not even seem to have an established LD-50 (median lethal dosage) for humans. As pharmacologist Richard Green pointed out in a 2004 article, "In the U. K., there are around 12-15 deaths a year in persons who have taken MDMA. Given the fact that around 500,000 young persons ingest the drug in a very uncontrolled way every week in this country, these figures do not indicate MDMA to be a particularly toxic compound." (The media, he added, was responsible for "much nonsense about MDMA being presented.")
And how many of those 12-15 deaths are actually the result of legitimate, uncomplicated overdoses, or of adverse reactions to ecstasy alone? Probably not many. A lot of "ecstasy deaths" turn out to be the result of hyperthermia and dehydration on hot, crowded dance floors. Others result from drug interactions. We might really be talking about roughly five genuine ecstasy deaths a year, against a U. K. background of about 25 million annual exposures to MDMA.
Those are long odds. Long enough to make it awfully suspicious that two girls in Western Canada should essentially drop dead at the same moment, without some common etiological element besides MDMA. Since the ill-fated girls weren't at a dance or rave, the obvious possibility that comes to mind is some impurity or adulteration in the batch of pills they took. If so, killer drugs may be circulating in the vicinity of Edmonton.
So far, there have been no other reports of adverse reactions to ecstasy. The RCMP is on the case, but for unclear reasons, they seem to find the "crazy coincidence" theory pretty satisfying. K Division spokesman Cpl. Wayne Oakes said that Stollery Children's Hospital staff found no evidence the girls had ingested anything but pure ecstasy, and he went out of his way to dismiss "rumours" that they had received a bad batch of pills. "It's not uncommon in a tragic situation like this for rumours of that nature to arise," he told CTV News, "because it's so devastating, it's so out of the norm, and they're looking for some extreme cause to rationalize a tragedy like this."
Well, yes. There are two dead girls who were alive last week; it is indeed natural to look for an "extreme cause." But it seems to me that the people who wondered about rat poison were basically showing good epidemiological instincts, and it's the RCMP's implicit explanation for the incident that should be regarded as the weird one.
The police, in general, are not known for their scientific literacy (or consistency or honesty) when it comes to illicit drugs. Like the media, they have a known susceptibility to unfounded claims and moral panics. And they are responsible for an abundant record of reported "ecstasy overdoses" that weren't. I am concerned that in this case, they may be accepting an account of events that fits the drug warrior's animistic world-view -- evil party drug kills innocent teenagers -- but that doesn't have much basis in fact.
It might be an idle question, were it not for the possible risk to other ecstasy users who have essentially been reassured by Cpl. Oakes that nobody's rave needs to be postponed just because of that downer on the rez. I appeal to the Chief Medical Examiner of Alberta to exercise diligence in protecting the welfare of this region's hippies, burnouts, flakes and slackers.
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