OD Death from MDEA

this came over the dancesafe mailing list. its from a legit forensics report.

Forensic Sci Int 1998 Jan 30;91(2):91-101
Related Articles, Books
Lethal monointoxication by overdosage of MDEA.
Weinmann W, Bohnert M
Institute of Forensic Medicine, Klinikum der Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg i. Br., Germany.
A 19-year-old man died after the intake of ten tablets of Ecstasy containing 3,4-methyl-enedioxy-N-ethylamphetamine (MDEA) as the main active ingredient. According to an eyewitness the symptoms of intoxication were strong sweating, sudden aggressiveness followed by hallucinations, subsequent failure of motoric coordination, severe spasms of arms and back, complete depression of the respiratory system, unconsciousness, and collapse. Resuscitation by an emergency doctor failed. Major autopsy findings were severe vascular congestion of all internal organs, liquid post-mortem blood, numerous subpleural and subepicardial petechial haemorrhages. By GC/MS analysis, MDEA was found in large amounts in serum (12 mg/l in femoral vein, 22 mg/l in heart blood serum), urine (201 mg/l), brain (18 to 28 mg/l) and in other tissue samples. Scalp-hair was highly positive for MDEA (17 ng/mg). Besides MDEA and its metabolites only trace amounts of MDMA could be found in urine and blood; no other drugs were detected. It can be concluded that the cause of death was a monointoxication by overdosage of MDEA.

Click to expand...

i think the moral of the story is that ten of any pill is bad for you...
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"i think i'll stick to drugs to get me thru the long, dark night of late-capitalism..."
Irvine Welsh

sheesh, yep, thats a good lesson for all the peeps that are poppin that many a wknd just coz of tolerance,
SLOW DOWN you are not invinvible

man, I've seen the first few of these symptoms happen to people taking 1/2 a cK (which seems to be generally accepted as being mostly MDEA) - up to the motoric coordination failure - imagine taking 10 of the things! Some people amaze me....
I _warn_ people who have not had cK's before that they should only start with 1/2, of course the last time I told a friend this he started with 1/2, then 30 min later reckoned he could handle the other 1/2 (I told him to wait), and of course 10 minutes later he couldn't stand up or walk for the next hour....
hux.

damn, I wanna cK. I never did get my hands on one of those
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There was no other earthly reason to have these goddamned fetid plants except to get high as a coon."
- Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

What a waste of pills! *PFFT*

I have that article at home. I can give some details if you are interested.

always interested in anything you've got...
are there many other cases like this i wonder?
[This message has been edited by johnboy (edited 16 June 2000).]

I'm very interested in a mg dosage that that young lad took.
Just out of curiousity, I researched into different amounts of different drugs required to induce death. Its hard to determine, so many factors other than body weight/blood volume, but yeah I'd like to know. Anyone able to get access to that?

i hope this is a lesson to my freinds out there and all of you that dont know when to stop!!!!
you know who you are.

Ok, here's something from that article:
"A 19-year-old man consumed ten tablets of Ecstasy in his apartment at
irregular intervals from aproximately 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. According to the
statement of an eyewitness, his girlfriend, who also took three of these
tablets with "hammer" and "sickle" imprinted, the tablets were "extremely
strong". After consumption of the eight tablet the psychosimulating effect
of the drug decreased rapidly. In order to overcome this he consumed two
more ecstasy tablets.
Some minutes later he began sweating profusely, trembling and experiencing
severe spasms of the back. He was unable to walk without support. Then he
suddenly became aggressive and started shouting and talking to people who
were not present. His girlfriend helped him to bed, but fell out. He found
breathing increasingly difficult. His head was flexed backward with neck and
back being completely stiff. At that time he was unable to speak; his face
was dissorted, his arms flexed and cramped. An emergency doctor was called.
Shortly afterwards the young man suddenly started retching and salivating,
with whitish foam flowing from his mouth, before he became unconscious.
The young woman and another young man living in the flat tried to resuciate
him by exerting pressure on his chest. Mouth-to-mouth resuciation was not
carried out. When the emergency doctor arrived shortly afterwards, the young
man was unconscious, without respiration and pulse and showed wide, fixed pupils.
In spite of resuscitation measures (repeated electric defibrillation; drugs:
atropine 5 mg, suprarenin 10 mg) over a 35-min period no cardiac action could
be achieved".
Qualitative and quantitative analysis of an Ecstasy tablet found at the victims
apartment was performed by GC/MS. The active contents of the tablets were MDEA
and trace amounts of MDMA. The MDEA content was approximately 130 mg/tablet.
So the victim consumed 1,3 grams of MDEA.
As the abstract posted by Johnboy says, major autopsy findings were ie. severe
vascular congestion. Also his lungs showed signs which may occur also in suffocation.
According to the eyewitness, the young man was lying on his back with his head
flexed backward for a prolonged period of time and also lost consciousness in this
position. He was not moved into a lateral recumbent position and no mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation was carried out. It is therefore possible that respiration was
mechanically obstructed in the agonal phase, as the tongue blocked the pharynx
when he lost consciousness and the protective reflexes no longer worked.

thanks again...
so basically he died after taking 1.3 grams.
erowid gives the LD50 of MDMA at around 6 grams but gives no details on the LD50 of MDEA. is there an acknowledged LD50 amount for MDEA?
(LD50 = dose which will kill 50% of the tested animals.)
hmm sad as this is you have to wonder about someone taking 10 of any pill, especially one described as "very strong"... candidate for a Darwin award if you ask me...

the prob with LD50 doses is they cannot be extrapolated accurately to humans.
the best e.g is that the LD50 of LSD for mice is like 0.4 (cant remember the units, micro or mlli) but in rats it ss 40 something. (animals might be other way round too)
anyway the point is that here we have two animals EXTREMELY similar yet the LD50 differs by factor of 100.
hence god knows what the LD50 for humans is, we cant really test that.

er yeah, i fully realise that... still i would like to know if anyone knows anything about the toxicity of MDEA...
altho 1.3 grams is a lot it seems out of proportion to the apparent toxicity of MDMA...

if there isn't any data for the toxicity of MDEA then the best you can do is make a risk assessment of it based on what we know about mdma. it means looking at each level of dfferences b/w what we do know, and what we want to know, then taking this information and extrapolating to where we want to be. as u have probably guessed it's dodgy as.
(can someone post some MDMA LD50's)
extrapolation factors
10 for MDMA and MDEA being related chemicals
10000 for mice and humans being in the same class
basically it means that based on what we know MDEA has a toxicity which may vary by as much as 100,000 times the toxicity of MDMA(per kg of bodyweight) in mice. pretty useless.
so i guess we need to pump some mice full of MDEA to see how much they can take b4 they cark it. using animals like that has always made me feel uncomfortable, we're killing these critters to see whether or not we'd die doing the same thing.....

Mmmmm... mice full of mdea.
Do we get to eat the mice after they have od'd? (a'la "V" )
Soma

Uh... I'm rolling now... Still it comes.... Have to spam bit.. I don't do it often... @ monday i'll give those PMA references, johnboy, be patient...
Other N-alkyl-3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamines have quite similar LD50s as MDMA. (You can search by my name and LD50, I have posted these values before). Reference for this is:
Noggle FT Jr, DeRuiter J, Coker ST, Clark CR.
Synthesis, identification, and acute toxicity of some N-alkyl derivatives of 3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine.
J Assoc Off Anal Chem. 1987 Nov-Dec;70(6):981-6. (This is not in our library, so I can't get the full text without paying, poor student as I am ).
It has been hard days night...

*bump* dustbin where are you?