| X: The dark side
|
"In most of the serious cases reported, users had collapsed unconscious or started to convulse while dancing. By the time they were noticed and taken to emergency departments, their body temperatures had soared as high as 110 degrees, their pulses were racing, and their blood pressures were plummeting. These patients with severe toxicity usually developed [scattered intravenous clotting] ... and acute renal failure. Despite treatment, death sometimes ensued from 2 to 60 hours after admission, usually due to severe hyperthermia accompanied by ... [intravenous clotting]." (Teri Randall for the Journal of the American Medical Association.) | | Photo Credit:Â Gerald L. Nino |
| Ecstasy tablets seized by U.S. Customs officials at a mail facility.
|
|
That was published in 1992, but apparently the word on Ecstasy ("X") didn't get out right away. And that article doesn't describe the so-called luckier ones, those who don't overdose but who experience cycles of anger and depression after the drug wears off -- "a depression I couldn't stand," as one teen-aged user, now in treatment, described it.Then again, you might consider this, reported in the Associated Press barely two months ago: A teenager who lived in a suburb of New York City became hooked on Ecstasy after taking it for the first time, and in short order was stealing TVs and VCRs to support his $300-a-week habit. And that for a drug that virtually all users defend as not being addictive. Ecstasy seizures by Customs increased from 400,000 tablets in 1997 to more than 9 million in the year 2000. That's 22.5 times the amount seized in 1997 or an increase of 2,250 percent in only three years.Donald Vereen of the White House Office of Drug Policy called Ecstasy "a public health problem that is behaving like an epidemic." Emergency-room admissions seem to support his view: from 250 in 1994 to more than 4,500 in 2000. And those numbers only include those who actually made it to the emergency room.The dark side of ecstasy: - March 2001: Twenty-one-year-old Dan Petrole shot to death in the driveway of the suburban Virginia townhouse he shared with his parents. A major player in the northern Virginia drug scene, police said the amount of Ecstasy found in his home was the largest seizure ever in Prince William County, Va.
- December 2000: Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, having spent only five years in prison for 19 mob murders and being placed in a witness protection program upon release, turned to drug dealing. He was indicted on federal drug trafficking charges for Ecstasy distribution.
- November 2000: In Queens, N.Y., Jeffrey Walter sold Mark Petronio $90,000 worth of Ecstasy. Claiming Walter had short-changed him on the number of pills, Petronio beat Walter to death, stuffed his body in a garbage bag, and buried him in Suffolk County, N.Y.
- November 2000: In what was reputed to be the first Cook County (Ill.) Ecstasy-related homicide, two Asian gang members murdered a 16-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who they thought was involved in the theft of $10,000 worth of Ecstasy.
|
|
|
