Pubdate: Sat, 22 Sep 2012
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2012 The Vancouver Sun
Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Lori Culbert

THE AGONY OF ECSTASY

In the past year and a half, 22 British Columbians have died from
using the popular party pill

Cheryl McCormack and her three girlfriends had a lot to celebrate at
their slumber party: The school term had just ended, Christmas was
just around the corner and their Grade 12 prom was only months away.

They arrived at the sleepover with pyjamas, their youthful naivete and
14 ecstasy pills.

It was Dec. 19, 2011, and the teenagers chatted about the death, just
three weeks earlier, of Tyler Miller, a 20-year-old from their
hometown of Abbotsford who had taken an ecstasy pill laced with the
lethal chemical paramethoxymethamphetamine (PMMA).

The tragic death of this smart, musical young man was a warning sign
the girls shouldn't pop their pills that night, said Cheryl's friend
Drew Fournier, 17. But the teenagers thought they had bought pure
ecstasy, so dismissed any worries.

"We still just did it anyway because we are kids," Drew
recalled.

"We literally said that night: 'It won't happen to
us.'

"But it did."

Within hours Drew was making a frantic 911 call after her best friend
Cheryl, 17, fell to the floor, unable to speak or move.

Days later, Cheryl, a bright, funny rugby player from Robert Bateman
school, was dead. The coroner found the ecstasy she took was also
contaminated with PMMA.

The deaths of Cheryl and Tyler galvanized public debate about ecstasy
at a time when more than a dozen other young people in B.C. and
Alberta had also died after taking the so-called love drug.

Privately, the mothers of the two victims connected over Facebook and
bonded in their grief, vowing to try to save other families from
experiencing such an enormous loss.

The result was a shockingly raw video made by the Abbotsford police
department, in which the two mothers and Cheryl's friends tell the
haunting stories of these deaths to warn other young people about the
dangers of ecstasy.

In June, the video was shown to 15,000 students at more than a dozen
schools in Abbotsford, and was followed by emotional speeches from
Cheryl's girlfriends.

The presentation was so successful that it is being taken on the road.
It will be shown to a school in Langley in October, and several other
B.C. school districts have also expressed interest to the police.

Tyler's buddies also spoke at the school events, often shedding tears
as they remembered their kind-hearted, funny friend.

"Having to share the notion of one of our best buds dying, it's tough
to portray to other people," said his friend Jason Peters, 19. "But
it's just the (goal) if you don't want this to happen to anyone else."

Tyler's friends speak frankly about the reason he died.

"I think he took (ecstasy) for fun, but also to experience things in a
whole new way," Josh Williams, 19, said.

"It was a beautiful escape at a terrible price."

The stories of Cheryl and Tyler are not isolated. Ecstasy-related
deaths claimed 15 lives in B.C. in 2011, and the drug was linked to
another seven as of July this year.

The numbers spiked in late 2011 and early 2012, when several of the
B.C. victims - and at least five in Calgary - were found to have taken
ecstasy laced with PMMA.

One tainted pill can kill. And it can kill indiscriminately. None of
Tyler's buddies became ill that night; neither did Cheryl's pals.

Eight months ago, Tyler's friends and family were strangers to
Cheryl's loved ones. But now this dynamic group calls itself Family X
- - after the Abbotsford police film Operation X - and plans to continue
spreading this message: If these two regular kids can succumb to
ecstasy, then everyone who uses it is at risk.

"I don't want people to think that Cheryl and Tyler were druggies.
They weren't. They were both happy with life," said Cheryl's sister,
Shawna McCormack, 20.

"They made a mistake and it cost them their lives."Cheryl, a Grade 12
student at Abbotsford's Robert Bateman high school, tinkered with
ecstasy about once a month for a year before she died, her friends
said.

She wasn't a partier and didn't drink, so "E" was a way to let loose
and have some fun for Cheryl, who got good grades in school, had two
part-time jobs and was a leader on her high school rugby team.

Ecstasy seemed safer than harder drugs like cocaine or heroin, said
Lauren Miller, 16, who hosted the slumber party in the basement of her
parents' house that fatal night.

They believed the 14 capsules of white powder they bought contained
pure ecstasy, or 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), Lauren said.

There was less chance it had been tainted in an illegal lab, the
friends thought, because it had not been turned into the
candy-coloured tablets of pressed powder that are often stamped with
cute logos and consumed at all-night raves.

The girls popped their first capsules at 9:30 p.m. and each took two
more later in the evening.

It was a regular ecstasy trip, Lauren recalled, for everyone except
Cheryl.

At first Cheryl complained her heart was beating too
fast.

Then she became so hot she took off her shirt. Her hair was sweaty,
causing her bangs to stick up.

Cheryl's eyes would take on a look of wild desperation. Her lips
turned blue.

She threw up, which is not uncommon during an ecstasy high. Cheryl's
friends gave her water and chapstick.

For a short time Cheryl appeared to be looking and feeling
better.

"And then everything just went completely downhill," an emotional Drew
said.

Cheryl was having an animated conversation with the wall. She was
speaking so quickly her friends couldn't understand a word.

They took Cheryl outside for some fresh air, but she insisted she
wanted to go back into the house. Once inside again, she stumbled so
badly that Drew yelled for Lauren to call 911.

"Then Cheryl looked at me and said, 'You don't need to call the
ambulance unless you become unresponsive,' " Drew recalled.

"It's just so haunting even thinking about it. It was so weird. That
was the last thing she said to me."

Cheryl fell to the floor and appeared to be having a seizure. Her body
then went rigid, her breathing became laboured, and she tried to speak
but no words came out.

"Her eyes were open and they had tears running down," Lauren said. "It
was like she was trapped in her own body."Scared and unsure what to do
next, Drew called Cheryl's family, who live just minutes away.

Cheryl's sister Shawna vividly remembers that 2:30 a.m. phone call:
"Drew said, 'We did ecstasy. Cheryl is not acting normal. You need to
get here right away.' "

Shawna and her mother Cathy McCormack raced there and, after taking
one look at Cheryl, told Drew to call 911.

"I was trying to get her mouth open because I was worried that she was
going to puke but her mouth was clenched so tight that I couldn't even
open it," Shawna said.

She sat on the floor beside Cheryl and stroked her little sister's
hair, saying over and over again that everything would be all right.

Drew's frantic 911 call can be heard in the Abbotsford police video,
which has now been posted on YouTube.

Drew: "It's a really big emergency. I think my friend is having 
withdrawal and she's not responding any more."

Operator: "Did she overdose on something?"

Drew: "I don't know. I think she might be. But she's not responding ..."

Operator: "How old is she?"

Drew: "Seventeen."

Operator: "Is she awake?"

Drew: "Hardly. Is she breathing? Barely ..."

Operator: "Is there anything in her mouth?"

Drew: "We can't get her mouth open ... It's clenched shut."

Operator: "So we have no idea why she's acting like this?"

Drew: "No. I know why. Because I think she's overdosing."

Operator: "On what?"

Drew: "On MDMA. It's, like, it's ecstasy. Her eyes are open but, 
literally, it's like nothing. You ask her to do anything to try to make 
it look like she's paying attention and she just doesn't. Oh my God, I'm 
really scared right now."

Cheryl was rushed to Abbotsford hospital. Her core body temperature
was 43C, compared to a norm of 37C, and her heart rate was 197 beats
per minute, roughly twice as fast as usual, Shawna said.

Countless tubes zigzagged between Cheryl's bloated, cold body and the
machines keeping her alive. It was such a horrific sight that Shawna
took a photo so she could later show her sister - who wanted to be a
nurse - how badly she had scared them.

Kali Desjardins remains haunted by the vision of her good friend
Cheryl in that hospital bed.

"I thought there would be a little tiny tube, and she would be just
lying there sleeping or something. No, you're talking so many tubes.
And she was so swollen and freezing cold," 18-year-old Kali said.

"That's the last thing I see. The picture, yeah, it is sad. But the
picture is nothing - (the reality) was worse, so much worse."

Cheryl would never see the photo taken by her sister.

Three agonizing days went by as she appeared at times to rally, but
then her major organs began to shut down.

Fifteen family members gathered in Cheryl's hospital room on Dec. 22,
after doctors advised the end was near.

"All the machines were turned off," Shawna said. "We watched as her
heart (rate) dropped lower and lower."

The death devastated her friends and family. It was also troubling for
Tyler's loved ones, coming just three weeks after he had died.Tyler's
mother, Laurie Mossey, reached out to Cheryl's mother through
Facebook. Mossey gave McCormack a favourite book about living through
grief, and the two have since bonded over their lost children.

Mossey, a compassionate and strong woman, speaks proudly of Tyler, the
only child she had with husband Russ Miller.

Labelled as gifted in Grade 4, Tyler excelled at playing the piano and
went on to make his own music. He graduated from the international
baccalaureate program at Abbotsford Collegiate in 2009, and is
remembered by his high school friends as an artsy guy who had
intelligent conversations and many girlfriends.

"A lot of people knew him as fun to be around. That's why lots of
people wanted to hang out with him," Chris Patterson, 19, said.

Tyler went to the University College of the Fraser Valley to study
general arts and business. In the fall of 2011, he was working
full-time at Starbucks and had decided to switch schools to the
Vancouver Art Institute to study music production.

Mossey, who was then a youth care worker specializing in drug and
alcohol prevention with the Abbotsford school board, first learned her
son was using ecstasy the previous summer when he left his Facebook
page open on her computer.

When confronted by his mother, Tyler promised it was no big deal.
Mossey gave her son the benefit of the doubt because he had not been a
big partier in high school.

But she made him undergo two drug tests last fall to ensure he was no
longer using. He passed both.

On Friday, Nov. 25, 2011, Mossey told Tyler she would be doing another
drug test the following week. "He said, 'OK,'" she recalled.

The next morning, Tyler's father, a mechanic, gave his son a special
gift - a used Honda Accord to help him make the commute to Vancouver
for school.

"He was really excited about the car," a teary-eyed Mossey
said.

He never got the chance to drive it.

That night, Mossey later learned, Tyler was at a party in Aldergrove
where he did ecstasy with some new friends who liked to go to concerts.

Mossey knows few details about her son's final hours, she said,
because some of the people he was with have been uncooperative.

She was told that when Tyler began to feel hot, he was given a bag of
frozen peas; when he complained about feeling funny, he was driven to
Langley Memorial Hospital; he arrived with a large cut over one eye,
suggesting he must have fallen at some point.

At 10:29 p.m. that night, Mossey was at home when she received a text
from Tyler's phone. She was excited to read it, as she had not yet
spoken to her son about his new car.

But the ominous text was sent by someone else and said she needed to
get to the hospital right away.

Like Cheryl, Tyler was hooked up to multiple machines, his hot body
was lying on a cooling pad, and he was unresponsive.

Unlike Cheryl, his death came within hours, not days.

Medical staff told Mossey and Miller to say goodbye to their only
child in the early morning hours of Sunday, Nov. 27.

"They said come hold his hands ... He is going to die now," Mossey
recalled, her eyes welling with tears.

"We just watched the monitor and watched all the buttons go
down."

The parents had an open casket funeral so Tyler's close friends could
witness first-hand the impact of ecstasy. "I wanted everyone to see
that this was real," Mossey said.

The death has left her life in "ruins," but it also ignited a
determination to protect others from the grief she is enduring.

"Because what else do you do?" Mossey asked matter-of-factly.

Both she and Cathy McCormack agreed to participate in the Abbotsford
police video.

"I felt I had to do something," said McCormack, a caring stay-at-home
mother who had no idea her academic and athletic daughter was using
ecstasy.

"I don't want this to happen to anyone else."

Abbotsford police asked a focus group of students how to warn
teenagers about ecstasy, and were told the greatest impact would come
from real stories about real people, said Const. Carrie Durocher.

While the video produced by the police is powerful, the students at
the school presentations in June connected the most with the speeches
given afterwards by Cheryl's and Tyler's friends.

"They speak about their losses, which are real and genuine and
something tangible. It is realistically something that could happen to
any of the kids that we talked to in June," said Durocher, a member of
the Abbotsford youth squad.

"Every single presentation we were at was emotional and it was raw.
There were kids who were crying. There were pockets of students
holding each other and hugging ... They were able to relate."

After showing the video to 15,000 Abbotsford students last spring, the
presentations will now be shown to a Langley school in October as well
to the B.C. Crime Prevention Association.

In addition, several other school boards, including Chilliwack,
Mission and Hope, have made inquiries about bringing the message to
their schools, said Durocher's partner Const. John Davidson.

The McCormack family designed a rubber bracelet bearing Cheryl's and
Tyler's initials, with the phrase "I live to let you shine," which
were sold for $2 each at the Abbotsford school events to support a
foundation to be established in Cheryl's and Tyler's names to help
youth stop using drugs.

More than 2,000 bracelets have been handed out, and Durocher hopes
they will give the teenagers who wear them the courage to say no when
offered ecstasy.

"E" has long been considered a relatively harmless drug, something
much safer than harder options such as crack or heroin. It is often
associated with regular young people, like Cheryl and Tyler, looking
for a euphoric high, rather than troubled drug addicts.

Before Cheryl's death, Lauren thought of her own tinkering with
ecstasy as good times. Now she finds the memories "extremely scary."

"I want people to know that ecstasy kills. I think that people don't
understand. They think it is not going to happen again," Lauren said.

Last spring students reacted with emotion and gratitude as Cheryl's
and Tyler's friends told their stories, and Drew hopes young people
will continue to listen to their first-hand accounts this fall.

"I hope (people) realize it is just a lot of normal kids doing this.
They go to school, lead a normal life," Cheryl's friend Drew said.
"They are just doing it to have fun ...

"But what happened to Cheryl and Tyler can happen to
anyone."

- ---------------------------------

[sidebar]

Ecstasy 101

* It affects the chemistry of the brain by releasing a high level of
serotonin, which plays a key role in regulating mood, energy level and
appetite.

* It can produce feelings of euphoria, friendliness, energy,
confidence and closeness to others.

* It can also produce panic attacks, anxiety, decreased appetite,
increased heart rate, high body temperature, teeth grinding and vomiting.

* An increase in body temperature as well as the increase in blood
pressure and heart rate can lead to kidney or heart failure, strokes
and seizures.

* It is made in illegal labs and often contains fillers, such as
caffeine, cough syrup, soap, LSD and other "hard" drugs. It can also
be tainted with highly toxic chemicals like paramethoxyamphetamine (
PMMA), which can be lethal in low doses.

* It is usually sold as a tablet or capsule. The tablets come in
different shapes and colours, and are often stamped with cute logos,
such as a butterfly to make them look like candy. * Ecstasy can be
addictive, but physical dependence is rare. It is not uncommon for the
drug to take on an exaggerated importance in a person's life.

* One or two tabs may be a problem for some people, because their
response to the drug often depends on factors such as age, weight,
mood, preexisting medical conditions, the size of the dose, and how
often they take ecstasy.

* The effects of a single dose may last for three to six
hours.

* It should not be mixed with prescription or other street
drugs.

* If someone is in distress, don't delay getting medical
help.

* Its recreational use began in the 1980s in the United States, mainly
by young people at all night dance parties called raves.

* It was patented in 1913 and used experimentally in the 1970s as a
supplement to psychotherapy. It became illegal to possess, traffic or
produce in Canada in 1976 and in the U. S. in 1985.

- - Source: The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health; Health Canada; BC 
Drug and Poison Information Centre
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt