Tablets laced with cheap additives have fatal consequences
The explosion in popularity of the street drug ecstasy came with the rise of the rave culture during the 1980s, a time when pharmaceutical- grade MDMA was widely available.
But ecstasy tablets or capsules analyzed by law enforcement agencies routinely contain cheaper alternatives such as amphetamine, methamphetamine and a drug closely related to MDMA, paramethoxymethamphetamine, or PMMA.
At least five British Columbians have died from PMMA overdoses since August, according to the B. C. Coroners Service. It is almost certainly not the drug they thought they were buying.
PMMA produces some of the hallucinogenic effects of MDMA but not the powerful, fast- onset euphoria that comes with high- purity ecstasy, according to Vancouver- based addictions worker K. K. Kidd, a former ecstasy user.
“The problem is that [ PMMA] is lethal at such a low dose,” she said.
When PMMA is substituted for some of the MDMA in ecstasy by drug makers, users will take extra doses to try to achieve the euphoric feeling they associate with high- purity MDMA.
“When I wasn’t getting the effects of the MDMA, I would take more,” she said. “But the more MDMA [ users] are taking, the more PMMA they are getting.”
“The PMMA doesn’t kick in as fast and by the time it does you’ve taken all these pills and it’s too late,” she said.
The drug can cause the user’s body temperature to rise, leading to irreversible brain and organ damage, according to Perry Kendall, B. C.’ s provincial health officer.
The drug known as E, X or occasionally XTC was never manufactured in large amounts by its original patent- holder, Merck, but the drug was used by a handful of psychotherapists to help patients who had difficulty expressing their feelings.
Illegal manufacture was relatively easy due to the availability of its main precursor, safrole, an extract of the sassafras plant. By the early ’ 80s, highly drug- proficient labs in Europe turned out MDMA tablets to feed a growing market of teen partiers.
Canada outlawed MDMA in 1977. The United States followed suit in 1985, making manufacture and possession illegal and restricting the availability of safrole, which led illegal drug makers to begin substituting other drugs in their ecstasy tablets.
“To make more money, people are putting less MDMA in and using other items,” said Kidd.
PMMA is a natural substitute for MDMA, because of its similar chemistry and hallucinogenic qualities. The chemical precursor of PMMA is anethole, an extract of anise, which is easily ordered on the Internet from China and India.
According to the U. S. Drug Enforcement Agency, PMMA is a designer drug first manufactured for street use by clandestine laboratories in Canada in the early ’ 70s. It is sold under the street name “death.”
The manufacture of PMMA has enjoyed a resurgence since 2000, and has been implicated in deaths across western Europe, Canada and the United States, usually in users who thought they were buying ecstasy, the DEA reports.