Dear Bruce Smith,
I am writing to you after reading your article ‘The Clubland Danger Drug’. I believe that your claims are misleading and possibly dangerous. For your own personal information MDMA (Crystal MDMA) is the same drug as is in a conventional ecstasy tablet. This being said the purity levels will obviously be vastly different as a gram of MDMA is not being sold as a single dose of the drug. So using the statistics shown in your article could cause an unknowing individual to be fearful of a purer drug. The main problem other than drugs legality is the amount of harm which they can cause. Now, ecstasy pills sold in the UK are notoriously impure and often contain other substances completely to MDMA (the original ‘ecstasy’ drug). This can be dangerous as many of the adulterants in pills are more harmful than MDMA. I can provide an example using the BBC article ‘Scientists Want New Drug Rankings’. Experts have shown that ecstasy (or MDMA) are safer than Amphetamines, 4-MTA (which is a research chemical*), Ketamine and many other drugs found in adulterated pills. Unfortunately many of the adulterants which can be found in street ecstasy are missing from the article; PMA a close cousin of MDMA has been found in pills and needs only a tiny miss measure in dose and the user is in trouble. What I am saying is that if crystal MDMA is weighed out into doses correctly (the average recreational dose being 100mg) the dangers are less than that of a pill. Even if the dose is miss-measured you would have to eat more than a gram to cause a serious problem in most cases.
“Most of the cases of serious toxicity or fatality have involved blood levels of MDMA… up to 40 times higher than the usual recreational range.” (Kalant H., 2001)
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/165/7/917 – Canada Medical Journal
‘In the UK, fewer than 100 deaths a year can be attributed to MDMA, a similar number to those who die annually from aspirin.’ – Taken from an article on Wikapedia.
In your article you state that users would be unable to cope with the crystal form of MDMA leading to dehydration and death. This appears to be a scare tactic as we all know ecstasy deaths are rare. If you care to watch the BBC’s documentary ‘What if drugs were legal’ (available to watch online at video.google.co.uk) you will get some good information on statistics. Dealing with hydration on MDMA is the same as dealing with hydration on MDMA containing pills (although not with adulterated pills) and you seem to be encouraging people to drink more on crystal MDMA which could result in a person over-hydrating causing brain swelling. This was the fate of the late Leah Betts. In an interview on Americas ABC television channel special ‘ecstasy rising’ (this can also be found on Google) the coroner of Leah Betts said that it was his belief that if anyone, even a sober person had drunk as much water as Leah Betts had before she died they would also die. The reason he sighted MDMA as attributing to her demise was due to the fact he had never seen a case of someone drinking that much water. My point being that your article may have done more harm than good.
I hope you have read my letter through and may know a bit more than you did before.
Perhaps you could run an article about harm reduction and safer ecstasy use, possibly tell the public about testing kits available over the internet (EZ Tests is the company) which can help you find out if your pill contains a undesired or harmful adulterant. Possibly you could also point people at http://www.pillreports.com (Pill Reports Ecstasy Test Results Database) which contains other people test results for pills. There are many methods of harm reduction and I believe that is what we need.
*A research chemical is a drug which has had little or no laboratory testing. These drugs can be dangerous if used irresponsibly or without knowing what you’re taking. Many of these show up in adulterated pills. 2c-t-7 (which has claimed lives in America) and DOI (which resulted in hospitalising young men in Brighton) are two examples.
Yours Sincerely,
Jack A Daly
