Pubdate: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 Source: Toronto Sun (CN ON) Copyright: 1999, Canoe Limited Partnership. Contact: http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoSun/ Forum: http://www.canoe.ca/Chat/newsgroups.html Author: Jean Sonmor, Toronto Sun RAVE DRUGS ARE DEADLY SERIOUS You know, if it were only the politicians who don't like being woken up at night, or professional pundits who want to police everybody's lifestyle who were yelping for a rave crackdown, it would be easier to ignore. But a disturbing minor chord in the rage against raves comes from folks like Stephan Ryan, a 20-year Level 4 paramedic who worked his first and last rave on Aug. 8 and 9. "I appreciate the extra work," he explains, "but it's negligent of me basically to stand outside and wait for a tragedy to happen, to say in effect this is the overdose vehicle." He's a father and can't believe parents could really know what's going on and condone it. "They come down from Richmond Hill or Markham in their Lexuses or their Blazers to pick up their kids ... What are they thinking?" Ryan's experience in August started out grim and ended up worse. It was a nasty, rainy night and he arrived about 9:30 p.m. expecting the event to be barely under way. But already the club, The Guvernment Warehouse on Queen's Quay, was filling up and the younger kids who couldn't get in until the licensed part of the evening was over were starting to line up outside in the pouring rain. Nobody seemed to notice the discomfort. The lineup grew until he estimates there were nearly 1,000 sodden kids standing in the dark parking lot. Their ambulance was parked outside the main entrance and the signs of drug use were everywhere -- especially in the steady stream of kids to the ambulance. Most were brought out semi-conscious by their friends or security. The paramedic's job includes writing up every incident but raving is still, culturally at least, an underground activity and the fact that illegal drugs were involved made the disinclination to explain themselves even stronger. "They were very vague and evasive," Ryan remembers. "They wouldn't sign anything or tell us their names." There's no way they would go to the hospital. After a bit of oxygen and a rest they were ready to go right back to the party. For a guy like Ryan, steeped in the protocols of safety and helping, basically enabling this night of excess to continue was profoundly uncomfortable. Long before tragedy struck he made up his mind he'd never do it again. It was about 6 a.m. and dawn had broken without any reprieve from the rain. But suddenly there was a change in tempo. The music which had been loud enough to make your chest vibrate suddenly seemed to fade into the background as a tall, strong security guard brought out John Miranda. The 21-year-old was dead. Nobody knew how long he'd been gone, but "he had no rhythm," Ryan explained. Usually this situation means it's over, but the paramedics refused to believe that this healthy young man could be gone. He was still warm and even though his jaw was clenched too tight for them to get a breathing tube into his throat, they tried the more difficult nasal procedure. After 10-15 minutes they started moving to St Mike's hospital where the emergency room staff repeated their efforts, working on him furiously for another half hour. Nothing. The toxicology reports aren't back yet, but it appears he had taken or been given a mixture of so-called rave drugs. "We have no drug-screening process for these chemicals," explains Karen Gaunt, who manages the emergency services at St. Mike's hospital. Like Ryan and other professionals, she's worried about an increase in the use of designer drugs, but she's leery about blaming raves. "They could take these drugs anywhere. We don't know." But it does seem Gaunt and other emergency room specialists are seeing a sharp increase in the number of overdoses. In a meeting this week, emergency room doctors from the downtown hospitals described overdoses as a weekly occurrence. Luckily not every one results in a death, but it was only a few weeks later when another one did end that way. This time the party was in the underground parking lot of the old Cooper's Shoe factory on Alliance Ave. This time the victim was another 21-year-old man, a Ryerson business student just starting into third year in a field that promised a great future. One of his teachers, Tom McKaig, describes Allen Ho as a very likeable, polite young man who didn't act or dress outlandishly, seemed conscientious about his work and would never be the type to make adults see danger signs when they looked at him. And yet Ho, too, died after mixing rave drugs. The only difference is that he hung on for 15 hours before dying of massive internal hemorrhaging. The paramedic who took Ho to hospital won't work another rave either. It's no way to earn pocket money. "Everybody thinks these drugs are the equivalent of pot or alcohol," says Gaunt. "They aren't." Unlike many media scare stories this is one that looks scarier the closer you get. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D