UK - Festival death was drugs overdose

[honourableone]

A "fun loving" woman who hoped to become a police officer, died of a drugs overdose, a coroner has ruled.
Katie Jones, aged 20, and from Henllan, Denbighshire, collapsed at the Kendal Calling music festival in Cumbria last August.
A post-mortem examination showed a high level of ecstasy in her blood.
The Cumbria coroner said such deaths were rare, but when people bought street drugs made by amateurs they were taking their lives in their hands.
Miss Jones, who was working in a ceramics factory, but had ambitions to become a police officer, was attending her first music festival.
The inquest, at Kendal Coroner's Courts, heard that she had lost track of her friends and was suffering from fits when she was found by St John's Ambulance staff on 1 August 2008.



'Toxic effects'
She was taken to hospital but suffered multiple organ failure and died the following morning.
A pathologist said that post-mortem results revealed Miss Jones had taken at least three times the amount of the drug needed to "cause toxic effects".
Cumbria coroner Ian Smith said: "Ecstasy is not one of the drugs more associated with the death of young people but it does kill people and the problem is that it is manufactured by amateurs.
"When you buy something on the street you do not know what you are buying, or what you are putting into your body. The result can be death." He added: "The verdict I am going to record is that she died as a consequence of using drugs."


Published by BBC News, 29th of January 2009
Original Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/e...ia/7858233.stm

Reputation Comments on this post:

Sad, but good find, thanks for sharing.

[Sven99]

It is very sad that this happened. But I'm VERY surprised to see an article blaming prohibition and not the drug in all this.

[Herbal Healer 019]

How many people have to die before people realize ending prohibition will reduce overdoses attributed to ill equipped drug manufacturers & dumbasses who cut their drugs with dangerous substances for the sake of profit?...I guess it's just population control

[honourableone]

Agreed, though this one doesn't directly blame prohibition. I have seen frustrating anti-drug propaganda that use a lack of purity and regulation as a reason why drugs are bad and should be banned.

[Sven99]

Ok, not directly against prohibition, but attributing blame to enforcement certainly.

[RoboCodeine7610]

She died of MDMA overdose?So what does that have to do with whoever made the pill?She obviously just took too much...It's really sad to hear though.

[bman1]

Originally Posted by RoboCodeine7610

She died of MDMA overdose?So what does that have to do with whoever made the pill?She obviously just took too much...It's really sad to hear though.

Does it state she died of mdma, or "ecstasy"

[RaverHippie]

Originally Posted by bman1

Does it state she died of mdma, or "ecstasy"

They'd both be subject to impurities. It would be astounding to assume she overdosed on solely pure MDMA.

but fwiw the article did say "A post-mortem examination showed a high level of ecstasy in her blood."

meaning MDMA metabolites would have been found.

[RoboCodeine7610]

but fwiw the article did say "A post-mortem examination showed a high level of ecstasy in her blood."

meaning MDMA metabolites would have been found.

Exactly, they didn't say "ecstacy tablets" they said ecstacy, meaning MDMA.

[entheogensmurf]

Originally Posted by RoboCodeine7610

Exactly, they didn't say "ecstacy tablets" they said ecstacy, meaning MDMA.

I highly doubt that is what they meant.

[RoboCodeine7610]

I highly doubt that is what they meant.

Well, from what I know about ecstacy tablets, they're either MDMA or a mix of other drugs or simply a different drug by itself.Now what drug could they possibly mean by "ecstacy"?If it were anything else they'd say what it was.

[entheogensmurf]

Originally Posted by RoboCodeine7610

Well, from what I know about ecstacy tablets, they're either MDMA or a mix of other drugs or simply a different drug by itself.Now what drug could they possibly mean by "ecstacy"?If it were anything else they'd say what it was.

How would they know it was MDMA already?

I am simply saying that they may not know that Ecstasy is a misnomer when the intention is to say MDMA. Without the specification Ecstasy can mean anything bought as a party pill in this day in age.


They didn't note any test which confirmed MDMA or MDMA like substance...shrug.

Reports always state what they confirm or couldn't about a pill's contents, other than the street name. However, I could be recalling this incorrectly and they just use ecstasy normally then whoops!

[Potter]

Naw smurf, you've got to take this from the view of the establishment. To them, the terms are interchangeable. The average monkey boys don't see a difference, assume that ALL street drugs are dangerous and contaminated. They aren't capable of understanding the differentiations we make.

[nibble]

MDMA = Ecstasy, it's just the notorious bad quality and substitution for other drugs in "ecstasy" pills over the past few years has made them distinct. When it says ecstasy was found in a post-mortem it certainly means MDMA. You don't tend to see the term MDMA used in the media as it's a bit more of an involved chemical name, you won't see heroin refered to as diacetylmorphine for example.

[Scrubbs]

I am thinking there might have been something else in those pills. What else could it be? I did a little research and here are some of the substances people put into "Ecstasy" pills:

BZP
TFMPP
Caffeine
Aspirin
Modafinil
Ibuprofen
Procaine
Lidocaine
Ketamine
DXM
PCP
Methamphetamine
Cocaine
Fentanyl
Ephedrine
Phentermine
MDA
MDE
5-MeO-DiPT
5-MeO-DMT
Phenobarbital
Allopurinol
Acetaminophen
Diethylpropion
Metandienone
Diphenhydramine
Chlorphenylpiperazine

So as you can see, there are many substances on this list which combined with MDMA could be a very dangerous combination. Be careful peeps.

PeAcE

[shagra]

if it were specifically mdma that they found, they would say mdma rather than ecstasy. if they found a handful of chemicals that could be chalked up to having been in an ecstasy tablet or if her friends had said that she had 'taken ecstasy' as they talked to the emergency workers, the most logical thing for the report to say is that she had a ton of ecstasy in her.

[RoboCodeine7610]

Lidocaine is really dangerous to the heart in high doses even by itself, so in combination with MDMA it would probably be fatal.

[Politicalchalk]

When reading the article, Swim immediately thought that, as opposed to 3x (what I'm assuming is the) LD50 in one pill, it's completely undetermined how many she actually took and over the course of how long. It noted that this was her first festival, which can be notoriously overwhelming if not prepared, and make have just taken a whole bunch of pills...whatever the substance.