Cheryl McCormack, 17, of Abbotsford, died after popping ecstasy with her high school friends during a sleepover. They thought it would help them lose weight.
Leonard Timothy’s heart stopped beating after coming home from the bar one night — the 38-year-old Red Deer father of two had taken an ecstasy pill.
Abbotsford Police
Cheryl McCormack, 17, died on Dec. 22 from taking ecstasy at a sleepover. She and three other girls had taken the illicit drug in order to lose or manage their weight.
The mother of 18-year-old Calgarian Daniel Dahl remembers watching her son’s brains bleed out his nose in the emergency room after he overdosed on ecstasy, his body temperature rising so rapidly that he was cooked from the inside.
These are just some in a spate of ecstasy-related deaths that have marched a morbid path through southern Alberta and British Columbia in the past few months, spurring public awareness campaigns and scaring parents and partiers. Over the past year and until now, there have been 19 deaths in B.C. and 12 in Alberta related to ecstasy overdoses —at least five in the past few weeks alone. Thirteen of those total deaths, which all occurred late last year and last month, have been linked to paramethoxymethamphetamine (PMMA) a chemical turning up inside Canadian ecstasy — which was once the street name for MDMA, or methylenedioxymethamphetamine, but has come to mean any pill passing itself off as MDMA even if it’s been so adulterated as to hardly be like the original drug. PMMA, known on the street as “Doctor Death,” is considered five times more toxic than run-of-the-mill street ecstasy. It was in the pill that Mr. Timothy took.
As police try to trace the path of this especially lethal brand of ecstasy, they are once again spreading the message that law enforcement, schools and other government bodies have been spreading for decades: Don’t touch the stuff. Just say no.
At the same time, a growing chorus of harm reduction advocates say that message isn’t working. The use of illegal drugs has not declined in recent years and there is a slice of the population that is simply determined to engage in risky behaviour, like taking drugs. The way to prevent these deaths, these advocates say, may actually be to accept that people will still take ecstasy despite the warnings and give them a safer means of doing so. If we ignore users and hope they stop, they say, the deaths will continue.
