" 'Extreme Ecstasy' Rolling Into USA From Canada!" - Office of National Drug Control

[Police Officer]

DANGEROUS ECSTASY-METH PILLS FLOODING INTO U.S. FROM CANADA
Dave Battagello, CanWest News Service
January 03, 2008

WINDSOR, Ont. -- Canadian-made ecstasy pills laced with crystal meth are being dumped into the U.S., prompting the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to issue a warning Thursday.

"Certainly we are very concerned about this combo product coming south," said a top official from the Washington office who asked not to be named. "Since this product is popular among the young, it's out there near schools and neighborhoods. We need people to know this (combined) drug is much more dan-gerous."

More than 55% of the ecstasy samples seized in the U.S. last year contained methamphetamine, according to the policy office.

Drug enforcement authorities in the U.S. have been working with the RCMP to learn of the origins of the ecstasy-meth combo pills, he said. Both countries have had labs analyze recent drug seizures of the pills.

"It is a significant and large-scale problem and something we are very worried about," the U.S. offi-cial said.

John Walters, director of the drug control policy office, called the "extreme ecstasy" a disturbing development.

"Historic progress against ecstasy availability and use is in jeopardy of being rolled back by Cana-dian criminal organizations," he said on Thursday. "Desperate to develop their client base, they are dan-gerously altering a product for which demand by youth and young adults had plummeted and are exploiting vulnerabilities along our shared border.
"This is alarming for the youth of both Canada and the United States."

The drug combination of methamphetamine and ecstasy can have severe health consequences, as both have toxic effects on the brain, according to policy office. Together the drugs can interfere with the body's ability to regulate temperature, leading to hyperthermia -- which can result in liver, kidney, cardio-vascular system failure and death.
The potential for a life-threatening or fatal overdose is further increased when meth-laced ecstasy is combined with alcohol.

Despite the U.S. warning, the combination of ecstasy and meth on Windsor's streets has not yet been a noticeable problem, according to a Windsor police officer in the drugs, intelligence and guns unit.

Ecstasy has not been much of a problem in Windsor as it has become much more lucrative for traf-fickers to instead sell in the U.S. where a single pill fetches between $30 and $50 -- up to 10 times the rate on this side of the border, he said.

"It is easier to get the precursors to make the drug in Canada," the Windsor officer said. "It is used here, but when we seize it, there are usually five or 10 pills. The most was 10,000. It gets shipped to [the U.S.] because they can get so much more for it."
China and India have been identified as being nearly the exclusive producers of the chemicals needed to make the street pills, said the U.S. drug authority.

"The chemicals are smuggled into Canada we believe primarily by Asian organized groups," he said. "You have criminal groups with ties to those countries who get the raw ingredients across the border to Canada and that has caused problems for both [Canada and U.S.] populations."

The RCMP estimates that the current combined production capacity of Canadian ecstasy laboratories exceeds two million tablets per week.

Law enforcement agencies along the U.S.-Canada border report large increases in the flow of ec-stasy from Canada into the U.S.

In 2003, 568,220 dosage units of ecstasy were seized federally in the northern border states; in 2006, over 5.4 million dosage units were seized.

[x cynic x]

As we all know, a severe side-effect of prohibiton is the adulteration of substances. Unfortunately this scenario presents a massive influx of MDMA being cut with an even more harmful drug. Taking multiple CNS stimulants at once will wear people's hearts out in the long run so just look at the devastation prohibition causes; and talk about precursors, as long as the demand for E is great, people will always go out of their way to acquire the riches.

Reputation Comments on this post:

very true

[Zaprenz]

...and yet any deaths attributed to such tablets will still on record probably state "ecstasy" regardless. [?Anyone able to confirm this suspision]

[Micklemouse]

And this just in (thanks suavem1 for the link!)...

From http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/us_cda_ecstasy

By Camille Bains, The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER - The head of the RCMP's national drug branch is debunking claims by the United States' drug czar, who claims organized crime rings in Canada are dumping dangerous, methamphetamine-laced "extreme ecstasy" into his country's illegal drug market.


Supt. Paul Nadeau said he doesn't know why John Walters, of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, would make such statements in a widely distributed news release without checking facts with Canadian officials.


"I shook my head when I read the release that they put out," said Nadeau, adding he's never heard of extreme ecstasy.


"That term is unknown to us, certainly in Canada, and I can tell you that I've spoken to law enforcement people in the U.S. and they've never heard of it either so it would appear that it's a term that somebody came up with in a boardroom in Washington, D.C."


The release has generated huge media buzz in the U.S., with some news outlets using names such as "turbo-charged ecstasy," which is supposedly flowing across the border from Canada.


In the release, issued earlier this month, Walters warns public health and safety leaders that more than 55 per cent of ecstasy samples seized in the U.S. last year contained meth, a stimulant that affects the central nervous system.


"This extreme ecstasy is a disturbing development in what has been one of the most significant international achievements against the illicit drug trade," Walters said.


"Cutting their product with less expensive methamphetamine boosts profits for Canadian ecstasy producers, likely increases the addictive potential of their product and effectively gives a dangerous 'facelift' to a designer drug that had fallen out of fashion with young American drug users."


Nadeau said there's nothing new about ecstasy - the so-called love drug that gained popularity during the 1990s rave scene - being laced with methamphetamine or other stimulants and that it's been happening for the last decade.


"According to our stats the presence of methamphetamines in ecstasy is dropping," he said, adding tests by the RCMP indicate that currently, about 35 per cent of ecstasy pills contain meth, down from 75 per cent several years ago.


"Why now do they feel the need to announce this to the world?" Nadeau said of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Walters' office did not return calls from The Canadian Press.
But John Carnavale, an economist who worked for four previous U.S. drug czars between 1989 and 2000, said Walters is "cherry-picking data" to blame Canada.


He said that's likely because of Canada's harm-reduction approach to dealing with drug addiction, compared with the "user accountability" model American drug czars have preached.
"It was news to me that Canada was allegedly emerging as the source of supply (for ecstasy). Mexicans have really dominated the market, given the data up to now," Carnavale said.


Walters' news release could actually create demand for a form of extreme ecstasy, Carnavale said from Gaithersburg, Maryland.
"If I was a meth dealer in Canada I would certainly rebrand mine to 'extreme ecstasy.' "


Nadeau said that while the RCMP is concerned about drugs being smuggled into the United States, he disputes information in the release that is falsely attributed to the force.


"The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) estimates that the current combined production capacity of Canadian ecstasy laboratories exceeds two million tablets a week," it says.


"We have no idea where they came up with that," Nadeau said.
"In the final analysis this stuff is driven by demand," he said. "If the U.S. population has an insatiable appetite for this stuff somebody's going to be producing it for them so that's the part of the equation they never seem to talk about."


While Walters said in the release that ecstasy use had recently "plummeted" in recent years, Nadeau said that contradicts the statistics.


"If anything, in the last 10 years, synthetic drugs, whether they be ecstasy or meth, the demand for them has gone through the roof."
Scott Rintoul, spokesman for the RCMP's Drugs and Organized Crime Awareness Service in Vancouver, said there's no doubt Canada is a major synthetic drug supplier for the U.S. and other countries, with 65 per cent of the production happening in British Columbia, followed closely by Ontario.


He said that for years, producers made ecstasy from a powder imported from Europe, but that it has more recently been replaced with a cheaper liquid precursor from Asia.

Hope you don't mind the title change PO!

[Joe Duffy]

^^^Wow that’s crazy, surely American paid politicians would never engage in the use of disinformation, propaganda and outright lies against their own tax paying supporting citizens, surely that would be more in line with evil minded fascist dictators and crazy religious fundamentalist terrorists supporters.

[UberDouche]

Exactly my thoughts.

[Senor Gribson]

of course! it's CANADA'S fault the war on drugs is failing!

*singing* blame canada! blame canada!

Reputation Comments on this post:

v.amusing

[0utrider]

A few weeks ago, when U.S. drug czar John P. Walters warned that Canadian drug traffickers were flooding our country with methamphetamine-laced "Extreme Ecstasy," it came as news to drug warriors in Canada. Paul Nadeau, head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's national drug branch, recently told the Canadian Press he did not understand why Walters would say such a thing:

"I shook my head when I read the release that they put out," said Nadeau, adding he's never heard of extreme ecstasy.
"That term is unknown to us, certainly in Canada, and I can tell you that I've spoken to law enforcement people in the U.S. and they've never heard of it either so it would appear that it's a term that somebody came up with in a boardroom in Washington, D.C."...
Nadeau said there's nothing new about ecstasy—the so-called love drug that gained popularity during the 1990s rave scene—being laced with methamphetamine or other stimulants and that it's been happening for the last decade.
"According to our stats the presence of methamphetamines in ecstasy is dropping," he said, adding tests by the RCMP indicate that currently, about 35 per cent of ecstasy pills contain meth, down from 75 per cent several years ago.
"Why now do they feel the need to announce this to the world?" Nadeau said of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

I don't know. Maybe to justify their budget by keeping the public in a constant state of alarm about drugs? Walters' press release made it sound as if putting meth in MDMA tablets was a new, growing, scary yet exciting phenomenon linked specifically to Canada:

Alarmingly, more than 55 percent of the Ecstasy samples seized in the United States last year contained methamphetamine. Cutting their product with less-expensive methamphetamine boosts profits for Canadian Ecstasy producers, likely increases the addictive potential of their product, and effectively gives a dangerous "face lift" to a designer drug that had fallen out of fashion with young American drug users.

Confusingly, Walters claimed Ecstasy dealers were ripping off their customers by substituting a cheaper drug for MDMA yet also somehow providing extra value by fortifying the pills with meth. As I noted at the time, the ONDCP's warnings about "Extreme Ecstasy" could be mistaken for advertising, which is often the case with government's anti-drug propaganda. "If I was a meth dealer in Canada," a former ONDCP economist tells the Canadian Press, "I would certainly rebrand mine to 'extreme ecstasy.' " Likewise, I'm sure Canadian pot growers were grateful for Walters' warnings about their "crack of marijuana."
[Thanks to Caleb O. Brown for the tip.]

http://reason.com/blog/show/124526.html

[OiledMandible]

Comedy gold!

[radiometer]

Have these people had their heads where the sun doesn't shine for the last three years or so?

Canada has been the chief source of "ecstasy" in the US for quite a while now, and the problem with meth-laden pills has been rampant for years.

[SuprSonik]

SWIM found it kind of comedic how straight-shooting the Canadians were, after reading such an enormous load of BS from the US Drug Czar. It's sad however, that this man is representing SWIM's own country. Embarrassing.