A dark-haired boy writhes against the tiled wall of a high school bathroom. He clutches his chest, gasps for breath and then drops his head into his hands and begins to pull at his hair. A packed crowd of adults watches him in silence, jotting down notes.
The lights come up, and an onslaught of questions follows the first public viewing of Ecstasy: Lives Out of Balance, a documentary for public schools put out by Santa Clara County health officials. The film was made in response to what health officials call an ecstasy epidemic in the South Bay.
The popular “rave” drug is crossing over to at-home use, health officials warn, citing a 2010 survey of 1,850 Santa Clara high school students that found that one in four say they have tried ecstasy, or MDMA.
But some local scientists who study the effects of psychoactive drugs are calling the county’s epidemic claim a new form of Reefer Madness propaganda.
“MDMA is a relatively safe drug, without a lot of risks, that really should be legal for recreational use—and most certainly it should be available for medical use,” says David Jay Brown, a researcher and writer based in Santa Cruz who calls the anti-drug campaigns short on science and long on politics.
While not everyone agrees with that assessment, even those charged with monitoring the trafficking of drugs in Santa Clara County say it’s not time to panic about an ecstasy epidemic.
“I haven’t seen a huge spike in it,” says Jim Sibley, the supervising deputy of the narcotics unit at the district attorney’s office. “We’ve seen ecstasy for a long time—for the better part of 15 years. It comes and goes.”
If anything, Sibley says, it’s the drugs that aren’t MDMA or ecstasy that can do the most damage. MDMA, colloquially referred to as Molly, often comes in through black-market shipments of pills or capsules containing powder, Sibley says, which can lead to the drugs being cut with methamphetamine, ketamine, benzopiprozene (BZP), or dextromethorphan (DXM).
According to county figures, five people have died from taking drugs they thought were ecstasy since 2009.
“The frightening thing, when you look at it, is that so few of them actually contain [MDMA],” Sibley says. Of the tablets seized by law enforcement, Sibley estimates that as few as one in four may actually contain MDMA.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
