July 1, 20107:22 am
posted by Aric Thorpe, MHR
Club drug ecstasy a growing public health concern
A report from the CDC, resulting from what may be their first formal investigation into the under-reported public health problem of club drugs, has found that use of the hallucinogenic ecstasy is on the rise. The investigation found that after a Los Angeles New Year’s Eve rave 18 patients received emergency hospitalization due to an overdoes of the street drug. Another 24 year-old-man who was previously in good health was found dead in his home 12 hours after the rave. A second cluster of events occurred less than six months later in the San Francisco Bay Area in which 8 people were hospitalized and two died from ecstasy after a rave. Police had suspected that these drugs were tainted causing the deaths; however, an examination of the pills found no contamination indicating that the drugs themselves are extremely volatile. “This conclusion is supported, in part, by the lack of a common description of the ecstasy tablets ingested by patients and the finding of MDMA, but no known toxic contaminants, in the ecstasy tablet from one of the patients,” they wrote. Click here to read an article from Medpage Today that discusses this study more.
