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Booze and pills toxic mix
Article from: The Courier-Mail
Matthew Fynes-Clinton
March 29, 2009 11:00pm
TAKE today's typical ecstasy consumer, remove the drug from their lifestyle and what would remain? A dangerously heavy drinker.
Five years since the first Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System – an annual federal health department-funded study tracking patterns of ecstasy use – this conclusion is inescapable.
In the Queensland tranche of the research, involving a different group of more than 100 regular ecstasy users each year, 62 per cent reported drinking alcohol while under the influence of ecstasy in 2003.
After marginal growth in 2004 (63 per cent) and 2005 (64 per cent), the number of those mixing alcohol with ecstasy rose to 80 per cent in 2006 and to 83 per cent a year later.
But not only is ecstasy (or MDMA) increasingly being washed down with alcohol, it is at saturation levels.
In 2007, 88 per cent of those who reported drinking with ecstasy did so at a rate of more than five standard drinks.
In 2005, only 50 per cent of the comparative group surpassed the five-drink mark.
Employing an established screening tool, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, EDRS researchers found six in 10 ecstasy users from the 2007 Queensland sample to be at risk of "acute alcohol-related harm".
Rod Irvine, a world-renowned ecstasy boffin at the University of Adelaide's Department of Pharmacology, says the long-term effects of bingeing on MDMA and alcohol could include brain damage.
"The combination of taking these drugs and alcohol is certainly going to increase your chances of a psychological disorder or a cognitive disorder in the future," he says.
Principal EDRS investigator Stuart Kinner, from the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Research and Education Centre, warns of the "increasing normalisation"' of ecstasy.
He says an especially large spike has occurred in the state's number of female ecstasy users, identified as "hazardous and harmful" drinkers (69 per cent in 2007, up from 46 per cent).
"Ecstasy started off being an underground rave thing where people would use it and nothing else because (it was seen) as pure and wasn't like using alcohol," Dr Kinner said.
"What's happened is that the whole culture has become mainstream. We're seeing people increasingly using in licensed environments and drinking with ecstasy in risky ways.
"And we're seeing young women drinking with ecstasy at the same levels as young men."
Dr Kinner says ecstasy users are also dabbling in at least one other illegal drug.
"Poly-drug use is absolutely the norm," he says. "It's not the case anymore that you have people who use ecstasy or use cannabis. Almost everybody in the (2007 EDRS Queensland study) had used at least two illicit drugs. Typically, it's ecstasy and cannabis . . . plus (there's) a range of other substances."
Dr Kinner says users try to offset the comedown from ecstasy – often punctuated by anxiety, depression and disorientation – with cannabis, more alcohol or benzodiazepines such as Valium.
One of the 29 ecstasy experts consulted as part of the EDRS reported Valium consumption among "E" users was "normal, rather than the exception."
Courier-Mail