What’s the difference between MDMA and bleach? Nobody has to make propaganda to prevent people from drinking bleach. Seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? Pretty much everyone agrees that drinking bleach has horrible down-sides and absolutely no up-side. So when parents tell kids that bleach is poison and don’t drink it, the rest of the world pretty much nods its head and agrees. Hence, people seldom drink bleach unless they intend to harm themselves.

MDMA and other illegal drugs are treated like bleach by the drug warriors. They say that illegal drugs are poison, and that the only answer is to never take them, ever. But the reality is that lots of people disagree with the drug warriors on this point. Lots of people think that illegal drugs have up-sides that offset their down-sides, and that becomes rapidly obvious to anyone who has any exposure to the world outside their front door. It doesn’t take much interacting with people to learn that lots of them think illegal drugs are awesome.

So, a kid’s parents and the government all tell her that drugs are poison and using even once can kill you. Her friends are telling her that they have used bunches of times and (statistically speaking) none of them have died yet. What do you think she does?

Apparently, she takes six pills and dies.

The parents of a 14-year-old Edmonton girl who died after taking [what she believed to be] ecstasy are struggling to understand why their daughter, who was part of an anti-drug program, took the pills.  “Cassie had gone through DARE,” said Angela Eyre, Cassie Eyre’s mother. “She knew about drugs because I told her I didn’t ever want her to take any. And she had told me she wouldn’t because it would ruin her complexion. Her parents later learned she had taken six pills and each one was three times the normal dosage, adding they think it was the first time she had taken the drug.

The bolded sentence really sums up what’s wrong with anti-drug propaganda. News flash, mom: telling your daughter you don’t want her to take drugs does not result in her “knowing about drugs.”

This story is so heartbreaking to me. I’m sitting here wondering, “How could she not know that was a fatal mistake?!” Six pills of ecstasy all at once when you’ve never taken the drug before is a suicidally stupid dose. Although it is rare for people to actually overdose on pure MDMA, street pills often contain substances other than what they are purported to contain (see the site ecstasydata.org for a stunning insight into the variety of substances that are sold as “ecstasy”). It’s unlikely that the pills intentionally contained poison, if only because drug distributors don’t make money by killing their customers, but it’s entirely possible that the pills contained some other drug or adulterant that was much more toxic or potent than MDMA. The national post writes:

Dr. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was the first U. S. researcher to conduct human tests of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, the technical name for Ecstasy, since it was outlawed in the U. S. in 1984. It is rare for anyone to “overdose” on the drug in its pure form, he said.

There are but a few dozen deaths linked annually with Ecstasy in North America; mostly, they arise from complications, such as pre-existing heart problems or hyperthermia that occurs when high, frenetic raver kids overheat themselves.

But three girls, all within a few weeks of each other, in the same vicinity, and none of whom were observed exercising hyper-actively, he says, is too unusual to be MDMA-caused. “I think there’s something else in those pills,” Dr. Grob says. “It would be awfully coincidental if all three of these teenage girls had congenital heart problems that had not been identified earlier. I’d put my money on a drug substitute.”

“The chance that this is MDMA or straight MDMA is so infinitesimal,” says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, a group advocating drug policy reform. “This explanation of an overdose makes no sense.”

Like Dr. Grob, he believes that the aberrant cluster of Ecstasy-related deaths all in the same localized area surely points to dangerous, adulterated pills on the market — including a more toxic substance that the three dead girls may have taken inadvertently in lethal amounts. Cassandra Williams, who died from pills bought at the mall party, reportedly took six; Trinity Dawn Bird and Leah Dominique House, from the Paul Band, reportedly took five each.

This girl died, at least in part, because of ignorance that was foisted upon her by her parents, her teachers, her government, and the DARE organization. She died because nobody ever sat down with her and said:

“When you try a drug for the first time, try a small dose and pay attention to how your body responds to it. Some people are very sensitive to certain drugs, and even if all your friends are taking it, you can’t assume that dosages that are normal for them are safe for you. Once you have taken small doses of a drug, you can work your way up to doses that are effective at producing the results you are looking for. While doing so, continue to monitor your body’s response both during and after the drug’s effects, and watch out for symptoms of harm. Be aware that street drugs can have widely different potency, even amongst pills in the same batch, and they may contain lots of chemicals in addition to the drug you think you are taking, so you should really never take a large amount all at once, unless you have a way of being very certain of the actual amount of drug you are taking.”

The adults in her life might have simply been ignorant of these little tidbits of wisdom, but even if they had never used drugs (statistically unlikely), there’s no excuse for their ignorance. Accurate information is available to us about all kinds of experiences that we have not had personally. Passing on that information to kids is part of a parent’s responsibility. You teach your kids to look left, then right, then left again before crossing the street. Why the FUCK would you not teach your kids that taking six ecstasy pills all at once is a bad idea? None of the adults in her life wanted to tell her that, probably because they equated giving useful, accurate information with endorsement of drug use. This turned out to be a fatal fallacy. This girl was educated with propaganda instead of truth, and the propaganda contributed to her death.

Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that this was not actually the first time she used ecstasy. If she was a regular user and had built up a tolerance, it’s possible that six pills was her normal starting dose, which seems insane to me, but to each their own I guess. In that case, the blame for her death falls on drug prohibition, which makes it impossible to standardize and validate the contents of a pill.

Here are some links to actual, useful information about Ecstasy and MDMA. Maybe this post will save a teen from overdosing. A rough guide to Ecstasy— an excerpt from The Book of E. Erowid’s MDMA FAQ. Erowid’s more general MDMA page. Lastly, just in case you didn’t believe the anti-bleach propaganda, here is some information on bleach poisoning.