Pubdate: Sun, 14 Jan 2001
Source: Newsday (NY)
Copyright: 2001 Newsday Inc.
Contact:  235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville NY 11747
Fax: (516)843-2986
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Author: Chastity Pratt
Note: This story was reported by Matthew McAllester in Jerusalem, Dan
Morrison in New York and Chastity Pratt on Long Island. It was written
by Pratt.

AWASH IN ECSTASY

Club Drug From Overseas Increasingly Found In Local Schools

It takes two minutes to find a student on a Long Island high-school campus 
who knows all about ecstasy.

Ten minutes and a promise of anonymity can lead to a teenage user who can 
flip open a cell phone and get the illegal pills as easily as ordering a pizza.

"If you can get pot, you can get E," one Cold Spring Harbor athlete said.

"Weed and X go well together, like milk and cookies," said a student at 
SUNY-Stony Brook.

In random interviews over several weeks, young Long Islanders and New 
Yorkers agreed that the brain-altering, feel-good stimulant known as 
"ecstasy," "E" or "X" is no longer confined to nightclubs, where it became 
a hit more than a decade ago. It has slithered out of the thumping music, 
clandestine rave-club scene and into the general population.

"It's not just limited to the club scene or these dance marathons," said 
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. "The kids are using it at house 
parties and weekend parties." Ecstasy, a neurotoxin whose chemical name is 
MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine), comes primarily from the Netherlands, 
where it is mass-produced, and from Belgium, in part because its component 
chemicals are not as tightly controlled in those countries. According to 
U.S., European and Israeli law-enforcement officials, it often is 
trafficked to the United States through a circuit dominated by Israeli 
criminals, often using couriers who, until recently, fell outside of police 
suspicion: Hasidic Jews.

With its easy manufacture, relatively benign reputation and huge markup (it 
costs about 25 to 50 cents to make one pill, which can sell for $15 to $40, 
with an average price of $20), the ecstasy business has proved irresistible 
to many not otherwise involved in drugs. Confiscations of "X" pills by U.S.

Customs last year were 12 times higher than they were just two years ago.

"There are a thousand Jimmy Pampinellas here on Long Island," said a Long 
Island source, referring to Giacomo (Jimmy) Pampinella of Franklin Square, 
a major ecstasy dealer recently sentenced to 70 months in prison. "The fact 
of the matter is that this drug is a way of life here." "It's Long Island. 
It's here, you're bored. Most people do whatever's around," said a class of 
2000 graduate of Valley Stream Central High.

"E" is a small pill often stamped with a manufacturer's logo. It lowers 
inhibitions. It produces euphoria and heightened sensual awareness, with 
few immediate side effects other than potentially dangerous dehydration 
evidenced by overheating and a terrific thirst. In the 1970s, some 
psychiatrists used it to get patients to loosen up, but it was outlawed in 
1985 after it started appearing in nightclubs.

Many kids, rarely hearing reports of death or serious overdoses from MDMA 
alone, think the drug is harmless.

"People think it's not as addictive as crack or heroin, so they do it," 
said a 22-year-old former ecstasy dealer from Hauppauge.

"It has every drug in it ... but I never heard of anything bad happening" 
to anyone, said a female Walt Whitman High student, 16, who tried ecstasy 
about five times.

Regardless of the perception, a drug being sold as ecstasy killed at least 
six people in Florida this summer. A 19-year-old woman who died there in 
August had a temperature of 104 degrees five hours after she died.

And the use of ecstasy or ecstasy mixed with other drugs is thought to have 
led to at least two deaths in New York City and Long Island, including that 
of James Lyons, 18, of Sound Beach, in 1999.

"It's a neurotoxin, brain poison," said Terry Horton, a doctor and vice 
president of Phoenix House, a rehabilitiation center in Ronkonkoma. "They 
take it because they hear about it from their friends. But what does a 
14-year-old know?" Scientists aren't as cavalier as youth about the 
possible long-term impact of ecstasy, warning of memory loss and other 
negative effects on the brain.

Law-enforcement and drug-treatment specialists say "E" is a gateway drug to 
harder drugs. And everyone agrees that pills sold as ecstasy often contain 
other drugs as well, so the buyers have no idea what they are taking.

"Basically, I could say that ecstasy led me to a lot of other drugs," said 
a 22-year-old woman from Sheepshead Bay who started using ecstasy when she 
was 14 and moved on to heroin. "When you use ecstasy a lot, it starts 
getting played out. The kick started lasting half an hour, 20 minutes, so 
that I would have to take more. At a party, I would take five or six pills 
two hours apart." A survey released in November by the Partnership for a 
Drug-Free America noted that marijuana use dropped for the third 
consecutive year, while ecstasy use has doubled since 1995. One in 10 teens 
reported that they had experimented with the drug, the survey found. The 
annual survey questioned 7,290 seventh-through 12th-graders nationwide.

Teenagers' experimental use of ecstasy is now on par with that of cocaine, 
crack and LSD, outpacing experimental heroin use, the study found.

"I've known 12-year-olds to ask me about [buying] it,' said Jenna Pollock, 
17, who was an honors student from East Islip who used to deal ecstasy 
after school. "The last two or three years, I can't believe the amount of 
people doing it at school. Everybody basically knows [because] you're 
carrying around this big jug of water and you're grinding your teeth." U.S. 
Customs confiscated at least 9.3 million ecstasy pills in the last year, 
far more than ever before.

Despite those seizures, the supply is at record levels: About 2 million 
pills are trafficked through New York airports every week, about 750,000 of 
which are sold in the metropolitan area, the DEA estimates.

The young consumers of those pills know that ecstasy can make a user feel 
euphoric. Adolescents say they like it because it erases inhibitions. They 
forget their zits, weight, self-consciousness or what others think of them. 
It makes a person want to touch and be touched (hence the nickname "the hug 
drug"). Reminisce. Apologize. Have sex. The kids also know that rappers 
such as Eminem, Lil Kim, DMX and the late Notorious B.I.G. have praised it.

Local youth can rattle off the price ranges, brand names of ecstasy and 
tell which supersensory effects a pill gives by the colors and emblems 
stamped on them. And they know where to get it.

"It's everywhere. It's really easy. All you got to do is know a phone 
number," said the 14-year-old girl from a middle-class area of Staten Island.

Her father is a chef in a Russian restaurant. She entered rehab at age 12.

"You feel, like, all good about yourself. You illusionize, you feel like 
you're on top of the world," she said. I just started wasting all my money 
on it. I just didn't care about anything anymore. All I wanted to do was 
just get more." She and her friends would pool their money for ecstasy, 
somtimes paying for two or three tablets a day each.

The Suffolk narcotics division had only nine ecstasy cases in 1997 compared 
to 61 last year, said Insp. Mark White, commander of the narcotics division.

Nassau's narcotics division had 54 ecstasy-related cases in 1999 compared 
to about four dozen in the first eight months of 2000. The city is seeing 
significant increases as law-enforcement agencies focus on local airports, 
which they suspect are traffickers' favorite entry points in the United States.

"We've seen in the last six months to a year an increase in ecstasy use 
among adolescents in the more affluent communities," said Avery Mehlman, 
narcotics-bureau chief for Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. "It's 
definitely part of the whole club-culture scene. From my experience talking 
to kids in the region, 13-, 14-, 15-year-old kids are experimenting with 
ecstasy.

The immediate source is peers, but the importation is coming from very 
highly organized criminal enterprises." Jenna Pollock was never caught 
selling the pills. Now recovering from alcoholism, she wound up in several 
rehabilitation programs after the courts stepped in to see why she missed 
so much school last year.

She and Sean, a North Babylon High graduate who asked that his real name 
not be used, recently reminisced on the deck at the Phoenix House 
rehabilitation center in Ronkonkoma about an ecstasy pill called "the 
pigeon" that made several of their friends sick during the summer of 1999. 
"People were just puking and puking. It was probably too much heroin, too 
much MDMA," Sean said with a shrug.

"Ecstasy has so much stuff in it, it opens your eyes to other things. Some 
kids will say, 'I did that and it had coke in it, so why don't I just do 
coke,'" Jenna said. "Kids need to know from other kids what can happen. 
They need to hear things out raw. Like they can die." Rolling, as the 
ecstasy high is called, to all-night tingling sensations could end up being 
a short-cut to the emergency room. Extreme cases of ecstasy-induced 
dehydration can lead to seizures or convulsions, doctors say.

Nationwide, emergency-room visits linked to ecstasy use rocketed from 253 
in 1994 to 2,850 in 1999, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network. 
There were nine ecstasy related deaths in 1999, up from one in 1994, the 
organization reported.

Mark Howard, counselor at Phoenix House, believes the ecstasy craze is no 
different from any past drug phases.

Teenagers have taken acid, sniffed glue, sniffed "Special K" (a cat 
tranquilizer known as ketamine) inhaled laughing gas and sucked on aerosol 
cans to have fun or escape the weirdness of adolescence. They take whatever 
drugs they can get their hands on, and today, it happens to be ecstasy, 
Howard said.

"Kids do drugs. Period. That's what people don't see," Howard said, adding 
that many kids who go to rehab have used ecstasy but very rarely are they 
admitted for ecstasy use alone. Those who end up in rehab are "garbage 
heads," or those who have used a smorgasbord of drugs.

Five years ago, relatively few kids at the center had used ecstasy; now, a 
majority have likely used it, he said.

But not all of the area's communities are heavily into ecstasy.

On Wednesday afternoons from about noon until 2 p.m., the Stony Brook 
Student Union is packed for what is called "Campus Life." It's a time 
designated for activities when vendors peddle cheap jewelry and posters, 
peer health educators pass out condoms and fraternities and sororities 
gather en masse.

During a recent session, four black students, all men ranging in age from 
19 to 24, were eating chicken and pasta when a student dropped a flier for 
a spring break ski trip on their lunch table. One of the guys nodded his 
head at the flier. "It'll be there," he said, referring to ecstasy. "About 
two years ago, it was at the out-of-reach level for black people, but it's 
slowly increasing. At something like that [ski trip] of spring break, 
you'll hear about it." While an increasing number of black and Hispanic 
youth are trying the drug, ecstasy use in those communities lags far behind 
use in white communities, according to experts and students from 
communities such as Hempstead and Central Islip.

Phoenix House officials say the difference in kids' drug choice is mostly 
economic. The sentiment among minority youth who come from poorer 
comminuties is, 'Why buy a $20 pill that will last four hours and is made 
of a mystery mix of drugs when a person could get two $10 "dime" bags of 
marijuana? Money is a factor, but youth say drug choice is also cultural.

"Black kids will do a lot of crazy things, but they won't put their life on 
the line messing with something like ecstasy," said sophomore Joy Botting 
of Hempstead High. "With weed, they grow it, they bake it, they smoke it. 
You never hear ... people say, 'Oh, they died from weed.'" Rich, 19, a 
private-school graduate who goes to Nassau Community College, said he 
doesn't take ecstasy with his Hispanic friends. "They say, 'You did what? 
You're white, aren't you?'" The medical dangers associated with MDMA do not 
apply to every ecstasy pill, because a hit of ecstasy is basically a 
mystery pill until its examined, police say. Any given pill could contain 
MDMA, other drugs, baking soda or a lethal combination of "filler" 
ingredients meant to give it a desired color, texture or sensation. And 
there's no way to tell whether or not a pill was pressed in a laboratory 
setting or in some teenager's basement.

The chemical makeup of the pills presents a problem for police, said Det.

Lt. Hall Coleman of the Suffolk Police narcotics division.

"Often, the pills fall outside the legal chemical definition of MDMA; that 
means it's not illegal," Coleman said.

In New York, the sale of more than 125 milligrams or possession of more 
than 625 milligrams is a felony punishable by a prison sentence of as much 
as 8 years to life. Federal sentencing guidelines call for a prison term of 
as much as 30 years for anyone caught trafficking large quantities.

Police involved in buy-and-bust stings have netted ecstasy pills that 
contained cough medicine and caffeine. So far, they haven't found the LSD, 
heroin or cocaine that teens believe are in some pills, Suffolk crime lab 
chemists said.

Police, however, are not lulled into thinking they know the scope of the 
problem. "We could be getting everybody who's selling or one-hundredth," 
said Det. Lt. John Wolff of Nassau police. "There's no way to know." Ectasy 
at a Glance Street names: Often call a club drug or party drug, ectasy is 
also known as X, XTC, Adam, MDMA, clarity and essence.

Scientific name: 3, 4-methylenedioxymethampetamine (MDMA for short) Taken 
as: Ecstasy is usually taken in tablet form, but it can also be smoked, 
injected or taken in liquid form. Drug makers sometimes produce tablets 
with their own identifying logos.

History: Ecstasy first appeared on the streets in the United States in the 
1980s. The drug has gained in popularity, particularly for use at raves, 
where the drug provides a high with the kind of energy often assciated with 
dance and concert events.

What it is: MDMA is a synthetic drug, considered a hallucinogen with a 
chemical structure similar to the stimulant methamphetamine. The drug can 
produce both stimulant and psychedelic sensations.

Effects: Lessening of inhibitions, increase in energy, enchanced 
self-confidence, enhanced sense of pleasure. The high may last several 
minutes to an hour or more. Reportedly, this drug produces milder effects 
than those produced by older hallucinogens such as LSD and mescaline.

Risks: The drug has been shown to interfere with the body's regulation of 
serotnin, an organic compound believed to be a key in regulating mood, 
memory, sleep and appetite. Ecstasy can trigger a number of negative 
effects, sometimes weeks after the drug is taken, including: confusion, 
depression, nausea, vomiting, psychiatric problems (such as paranoia), 
hallucinations, blurred visiion, sleep problems, fainting, dimished sexual 
ability, chills or sweating (including dehydration and hyperthermia), 
restlessness, teeth clenching and muscle tension, heart and kidney failure. 
In addition, long-term use has been associated with persistent memory problems.
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