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Ecstasy-related deaths in B.C., Alberta spark debate over how to fix poisonous proble
Cheryl McCormack, 17, of Abbotsford, died after popping ecstasy with her high school friends during a sleepover. They thought it would help them lose weight.
Leonard Timothy’s heart stopped beating after coming home from the bar one night — the 38-year-old Red Deer father of two had taken an ecstasy pill.
Abbotsford Police
Cheryl McCormack, 17, died on Dec. 22 from taking ecstasy at a sleepover. She and three other girls had taken the illicit drug in order to lose or manage their weight.
The mother of 18-year-old Calgarian Daniel Dahl remembers watching her son’s brains bleed out his nose in the emergency room after he overdosed on ecstasy, his body temperature rising so rapidly that he was cooked from the inside.
These are just some in a spate of ecstasy-related deaths that have marched a morbid path through southern Alberta and British Columbia in the past few months, spurring public awareness campaigns and scaring parents and partiers. Over the past year and until now, there have been 19 deaths in B.C. and 12 in Alberta related to ecstasy overdoses —at least five in the past few weeks alone. Thirteen of those total deaths, which all occurred late last year and last month, have been linked to paramethoxymethamphetamine (PMMA) a chemical turning up inside Canadian ecstasy — which was once the street name for MDMA, or methylenedioxymethamphetamine, but has come to mean any pill passing itself off as MDMA even if it’s been so adulterated as to hardly be like the original drug. PMMA, known on the street as “Doctor Death,” is considered five times more toxic than run-of-the-mill street ecstasy. It was in the pill that Mr. Timothy took.
As police try to trace the path of this especially lethal brand of ecstasy, they are once again spreading the message that law enforcement, schools and other government bodies have been spreading for decades: Don’t touch the stuff. Just say no.
At the same time, a growing chorus of harm reduction advocates say that message isn’t working. The use of illegal drugs has not declined in recent years and there is a slice of the population that is simply determined to engage in risky behaviour, like taking drugs. The way to prevent these deaths, these advocates say, may actually be to accept that people will still take ecstasy despite the warnings and give them a safer means of doing so. If we ignore users and hope they stop, they say, the deaths will continue.
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Since early January, B.C.’s medical officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, has woven advice to drug users into his public comments on the ecstasy-related deaths in his province. Users should just take one pill instead of several at a time (as some of the overdosers have done), they should keep hydrated and make sure there’s a sober person there to help if something goes wrong. They should also know their dealers so they have a better idea of where the drugs came from.
Of course, he’s taken flak for that from those who are anti-drug.
Abbotsford News
Tyler Miller, the only child of Laurie Mossey and Russ Miller, died from an overdose of the party drug ecstasy, in late November.
“I understand the concerns. If nobody was doing drugs, I wouldn’t go out with a message saying ‘Here’s how to do drugs safely,’” he said. “But given we have a substantial portion of vulnerable populations doing drugs, and given that police don’t seem to be able to stop the importation or the manufacturing of drugs, the issue is how do you best deal with the situation you have? How do you mitigate risk?”
After cannabis and cocaine, ecstasy is one of the most popular drugs in Canada. Approximately 1% of Canadians said they used it in 2009, the government-funded Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey reports.
“That might seem small, but when we put it into context it’s certainly an epidemic,” said Tyler Pirie, a research and policy analyst for the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.
The broader public health community has backed the harm reduction approach, Dr. Kendall said, but it has run up against some political ambivalence, including from a federal government pushing a tough-on-crime mandate. Prime Minister Stephen Harper kept harm reduction out of his $63.8-million national anti-drug strategy. When it was unveiled in 2007, he said harm-reduction efforts such as Vancouver’s Insite needle exchange clinic were a “second-best strategy at best.”
Ecstasy is so consistently adulterated that when pure MDMA turns up on the street, it’s likely be to sold on the street under the name MDMA or sometimes “Molly.” Corporal Luc Chicoine, the national co-ordinator for the RCMP’s pharmaceutical and synthetic drug operations, has worked on the street in drug operations for 18 years and said he can’t remember ever seeing pure MDMA, which is being considered in other countries for potential treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Handout
Daniel Jeffrey Dahl
“From what we’ve seen in last three years, if there’s MDMA there’s almost always meth” in the same tablet or powder, he said, referring to methamphetamine, the highly addictive stimulant. He’s also seen MDMA cut with metallic glitter and car paint to give it an exciting look (it sells better that way, he said). Because of the clandestine nature of the way the drugs are made, it’s almost impossible to ensure its safety, Cpl. Chicoine said, adding that one can’t even trust a dealer since drugs can change hands and end up modified dozens of times before they’re ingested.
But there are ways for drug users to test for chemicals lurking in their drugs. U.S.-based organization DanceSafe.org has been selling test kits — made from a solution of selenious acid in sulfuric acid — that identify certain chemicals so one knows the makeup of the pill or powder they’re ingesting.
DanceSafe sets up booths at parties and raves to test drugs for partiers, just as government workers in the Netherlands, Norway, Austria and Switzerland have been known to do.
The Trip! Project, a harm reduction peer-initiative run by a public health clinic in Toronto, has obtained test kits carried surreptitiously over the border (they’ve been seized in the past), and handed them out to volunteers who help people test their own drugs at house parties. The volunteer can’t test the drugs for the user because that would be considered trafficking under Canadian law, said Lisa Campbell Salazar, a former co-ordinator of Trip! and current co-ordinator of the Queen West Harm Reduction Program at the Central Toronto Community Health Centre. Trip! will still go to parties, many of them underground since the rave scene fizzled out, hand out information and ensure people stay hydrated to keep their body temperatures down.
They also counsel users if they need someone to talk to since MDMA has been known to open up people’s emotions.
This is an undated photo of Leonard “Lennie” Timothy from Facebook. Timothy died recently in Red Deer from Ecstasy.
Ms. Campbell Salazar, 28, is herself a recreational user of MDMA, which she differentiates from ecstasy. She always tests her drugs with home testing kits —something older, more dedicated users are more likely to do than the kids are — but thinks the government can save lives by making information about lethal drug concoctions known.
“If Health Canada were to release drug information, not just for judicial purposes but for public health, it definitely would save lives,” she said.
Health Canada has sophisticated drug testing that can determine chemical compounds found in drugs seized by the RCMP, said Cpl. Chicoine. It does not share the results of any of these tests with the public, said Gary Holub, a Health Canada spokesperson, adding that home test kits are “unreliable.”
“The best way to avoid harm from illicit drugs, including ecstasy, is to avoid using them,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Post.
In the meantime, education is the best tool both harm-reduction advocates and those advising abstinence have at hand.
Online social networks have helped party drug users, especially teenagers and post-secondary students, seek out safer drugs and party in a safer way, said Nick Boyce, a former volunteer with Trip! and current provincial director of the Ontario HIV and substance use training program. Sites like ecstasydata.org also identify different drug concoctions by their street names and tell users what’s in them. Of course, that would never be definitive, he said, just as the test kits can only identify the presence of additives that the user is specifically testing for: a test for meth, for instance, might not tell you if the pill contains PMMA.
Police in Abbotsford, where two ecstasy-related overdoses besides Ms. McCormack’s occurred in the past few months, are preparing to go all-out with a new campaign to warn students off ecstasy. The campaign will acknowledge the recent deaths in B.C. and Alberta and tell students about what happens to the body when these drugs are ingested.
“I guess there might be people on the harm-reduction side who take issue with what I’m saying, but I’m concerned about keeping people safe and keeping them on the planet,” said Abbotsford Police spokesperson, Constable Ian MacDonald.
And while harm reduction advocates insist there are ways to keep drug users safe (one of the big ideas being legalization), people like Cpl. Chicoine say it’s impossible.
“At the end of the day you have to remember that the only reason why those drugs are being produced is because somebody, somewhere is making a ton of cash on your $5 or $10 on your one or two tablets you purchased,” he said. “If there is money involved and with no regulation and control, someone’s going to make a lot of money and they don’t care what they put in. They don’t care about the user.”
Legalization would only increase the ranks of people taking ecstasy, he said. “We have enough legal junkies on the street,” he said, referring to people who guzzle mouthwash and hand sanitizer or sniff gas and glue, all items you can buy in a shop. “Do we really need more?”
And from where Dr. Kendall sits, the only thing he can do is keep spreading the word about harm reduction, hoping those who do choose to take drugs can be a little smarter about it.
“I’d like to see the deaths come down, clearly, but I think we’re limited in our ability to get the messages out.”
National Post
• Email: sboesveld@nationalpost.com | Twitter: sarahboesveld
