It’s time to talk about MDMA

Guns, cash, marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy pills, hashish and magic mushrooms are put on display at RCMP headquarters in Surrey, B.C., Monday, September 24, 2012. Photo: Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press

Another summer festival season, another slate of tragic overdoses and a few overwrought reactions about the need to ban electronic music parties.

“Party drugs” in general have been blamed for the deaths of two at a Toronto music festival and another young person at a B.C. festival. Another six were treated at a Calgary festival for overdoses, though thankfully all got help in time.

In turn, the crackdown on festival-goers began. Like a bad rerun, we’ve seen this episode too many times before. Because party drugs and attacks on electronic dance music (EDM) are all code for the same thing: E. Ex. Ecstasy. Molly. Mandy. Whatever you call it, it’s been in use for four decades and it’s not going anywhere. So it might be time to really think about the children. It’s time to talk about MDMA’s history, its Canadian connection, and that it might also be time to talk about harm reduction.

What is ecstasy? Obligatory description with bonus fun facts

The party drug known as ecstasy is essentially the chemical 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, otherwise known as MDMA. It spikes serotonin in the brain which causes users to feel extremely euphoric — the source of the “love drug” moniker often associated with MDMA.

MDMA was originally developed and patented in 1912 as a pharmaceutical  but was not widely used in psychotherapy until the 1970s. But, like other synthetic drugs, it was quickly adopted for recreational use. By the 1980s, it was growing in popularity in North America and Europe. In fact, for a time, you could go up to a bar in New York or Dallas — yes, Texas was one of the hotspots for ecstasy— and order MDMA legally.

But a spate of high-profile deaths prompted most western nations to place MDMA on their controlled substances lists. By 1988, MDMA and the precursor chemicals used to make it were part of the  United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.

Thanks — or perhaps no thanks to those international efforts — most of what’s sold in Canada as ecstasy contains little to no MDMA. The brand of ecstacy has been taken over by a bevy of chemicals that most users don’t even know exist but take willingly. With that ignorance comes rising danger and growing opportunity for international peddlers.

A map of ecstasy use around the world, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Courtesy the UN).

Does that mean there’s no such thing as “pure” MDMA?

Pretty much.

Estimates vary widely, but some suggest that less than 10 per cent of what’s sold as MDMA is actually 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Others suggest there might be some MDMA in most “ecstasy” pills, but that can range from as high as 80 to 90 per cent purity down to the single digits.

Police say they rarely seize 100 per cent pure MDMA.

“There are a large number of products that come onto the market which are sold as ecstasy but are not ecstasy,” explained Dr. Thomas Pietschmann, a Vienna-based researcher with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. He helps author the UNODC’s annual World Drug report which, in 2014, highlighted the new chemicals appearing in party drugs around the world.

“The problem is many of those substances are actually more dangerous than ecstasy,” Pietschmann said, adding that pure MDMA can be a lot safer and a lot less likely to cause overdoses than when it’s mixed.

There are common additives, like mephedrone, paramethoxymethamphetamine (PMMA), ephedrine or even caffeine, and even lesser-known chemicals that can be hard for police and toxicologists to trace. That could be why Toronto Police and the Ontario Coroner’s office are having such a hard time identifying what killed the party goers at VELD: it might be a random chemical the users thought was MDMA but is actually far from it.

Even those who sell the drug often don’t know how pure it is and trust the source before them. Street-level sources report receiving large bottles covered in characters from an undetermined Asian language. They’re told it’s pure then tell their customers the same.

“They could be anywhere, homes, garages, outbuildings in the middle of nowhere…There are no controls. Nobody is paying attention to cleanliness,” let alone what’s in the pills, explained Kristal Jones, a spokesperson with the OPP.

“We know they are smuggled in often and they are made here,” Jones added.

So is ecstasy made in Canada?

Yes, though it wasn’t always this way.

When ecstasy first burst onto the rave scene in the 1990s, it was being shipped in from Europe in a ready-to-consume form, often through Israeli channels in Russia, Pietschmann explained. Today, raw chemicals are shipped in predominantly from China and increasingly from India. It’s then “cooked” here.

In fact, though Canadian consumption of ecstasy is down, our country is increasingly named a source of the finished product for our English or American cousins.

Average ecstasy use by country, based on an analysis of annual national drug surveys conducted by each government. (Chart by Ashley Csanady)

“Surprisingly, Canada is a major manufacturer and exporter of the popular club drug ecstasy, with criminal gangs organizing the synthesis and distribution of this club drug worldwide,” according to the University of Alberta-led study, Ecstasy, legal highs and designer drug use: A Canadian perspective, published earlier this year.

The Canadian Embassy in Washington and the White House have made similar statements.

“India and China are predominant suppliers of precursor chemicals. We find that organized crime groups are heavily involved in importing these chemicals and also in the production of synthetic drugs,” said Sgt. Richard Rollings, spokesperson for the RCMP. “It is a challenge because they will use whatever they can to get in the production of their illicit drugs” so they can be hard to identify.

That also means people will turn to alternatives. The rise of drugs like bath salts and GHB (the date rape drug that’s now become a club drug) are linked by some researchers to a falling supply of MDMA.

“Over the past few years there definitely has been an influx of chemicals coming into the country and we have been working diligently with our national partners as well as international manufacturers,” Rollings said.

Yet, one of the greatest ironies is how the global crackdown actually unintentionally increased the danger of taking ecstasy.

So attempts to combat the flow of ecstasy can be blamed for the spike in deaths?

Yes, and no.

“Over the last couple of years China has improved its controls over the precursors and this actually created a problem, particularly for those groups in Canada, because they didn’t get as (easy access) to these precursors as in the past,” said Pietschmann.

That’s prompted some gangs to cook random recipes they’ve found online, try out dangerous new chemical mixes also found online, and even to go even to try and source the chemicals that comprise MDMA precursors — again, often online. Pietschmann calls them “pre-precusors”, and that adds a whole new layer of confusion for law and border enforcement around the world. In fact, a spike in global seizures in 2007 and 2008 can be tied to a global decline in both production and consumption, Pietschmann said.

A chart on annual drug seizes from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime annual World Drug Report (Courtesy the UN)

A similar trend can be observed in Canada.

Annual ecstasy seizures at the Canadian border over the last five years. Statistics provide by the Canada Border Services Agency Chart by Ashley Csanady)

But demand didn’t dissipate completely and so drug producers and smugglers have gone a step further down the molecular food chain. In most cases in Canada, that means producing an inferior product cut with chemicals more dangerous, and often more likely to causes overdoses, than MDMA itself.

“We’re aware of a mixture of various products…. Now we see new preprecurors arriving,” PIetchsmann said, but that requires greater skill and, likely, actual chemists to work with the gangs. That could be good news for those who indulge in the love drug, as Pietchsmann said: “the purity of ecstasy has increased again.”

Meanwhile, legitimate uses are also cropping up.

There’s a growing body of research to support those claims both from North America and Europe that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy works to help people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. (In essence, patients take the drug in order to confront a trauma with a therapist, spend a few weeks in therapy talking about both experiences, then repeat once more).

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) was founded almost immediately after the U.S. classified MDMA as a schedule 1 narcotic in 1985. That classification bars it from even clinical or research use.

“So funding evaporated literally overnight once MDMA was scheduled,” said Brad Burge with MAPS. He said a lot of researchers were using MDMA when the ban fell, and it cut off leading edge research, especially in the treatment of PTSD.

“We’d be 20 years advanced in our medical research and we could be using it in any number of ways,” he said.

Is it time to talk about legalizing MDMA?

Though overall consumption of ecstasy may be down, statistics show it’s still prevalent among young people, especially those 15 to 24 years old. Almost eight per cent of youth between 15 and 25 in Canada have admitted to trying the drug, while for those over 25 that falls to 3.7 per cent, according to the 2012 Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey.

In all, about 4.4. per cent of Canadians have tried ecstasy at least once, that means the average elementary school class includes at least one kid who will try ecstasy.

According to the independent Global Drug Survey, MDMA is the fifth most consumed drug in the world, behind alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and caffeine, in that order. Three of those are already legal in most parts of the world and pot is well on its way.

So is it time we start have the same discussion about MDMA? Advocates argue that MDMA, when taken safely and in the right amounts by healthy adults, can be relatively innocuous.

New Zealand is exploring a harm-reduction model that tracks the purity of these drugs and puts them through the same level of scrutiny as prescription drugs. And B.C.’s chief medical officer has expressed interest in watching the Kiwis’ harm reduction approach.

The western province has long led the country when it comes to drug law, giving us the country’s first safe-injection site and serving as home base for its Prince of Pot, Marc Emery. And, with a new medical marijuana licensing regime run by Health Canada, the country is primed to allow for more controlled substances to at least enter the clinical market.

Burges, whose home state of California once led that country’s charge for legal weed only to be outstripped by Colorado and Washington, dreams of broader access. Legal access that would also hinder global criminal organizations which now traffic and produce these drugs.

“I think there is a space for that and MAPS is working towards a future where that’s possible. What we’d like to see is a future where people are able to use these drugs safely and effectively,” he said. “The war on drugs assumes there is only one way to use these drugs and what we’re finding is that’s simply not true.”

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