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Ecstasy remains a niche drug. The number of people who use it once a month remains so small--less than 1% of the population--that ecstasy use doesn't register in the government's drug survey. (By comparison, 5% of Americans older than 12 say they use marijuana once a month, and 1.8% use cocaine.) But ecstasy use is growing. Eight percent of U.S. high school seniors say they have tried it at least once, up from 5.8% in 1997; teen use of most other drugs declined in the late '90s. Nationwide, customs officers have already seized more ecstasy this fiscal year, more than 5.4 million hits, than in all of last year. In 1998 they seized just 750,000 hits.
The drug's appeal has never been limited to ravers. Today it can be found for sale on Bourbon Street in New Orleans along with the 24-hour booze; a group of lawyers in Little Rock, Ark., takes it occasionally, as does a cheerleading captain at a Miami high school. The drug is also showing up in hip-hop circles. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony raps a paean to it on its latest album: "Oh, man, I don't even f___ with the weed no more."
Indeed, much of the ecstasy taking--and the law enforcement under way to end it--has been accompanied by breathlessness. "It appears that the ecstasy problem will eclipse the crack-cocaine problem we experienced in the late 1980s," a cop told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. In April, 60 Minutes II prominently featured an Orlando, Fla., detective dolorously noting that "ecstasy is no different from crack, heroin." On the other side of the spectrum, at ecstasy.org you can find equally bloated praise of the drug. "We sing, we laugh, we share/ and most of all, we care," gushes an awful poem on the site, which also includes testimonials from folks who say ecstasy can treat schizophrenia and help you make "contact with dead relatives."
Ecstasy is popular because it appears to have few negative consequences. But "these are not just benign, fun drugs," says Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "They carry serious short-term and long-term dangers." Those like Leshner who fight the war on drugs overstate these dangers occasionally--and users usually understate them. But one reason ecstasy is so fascinating, and thus dangerous to antidrug crusaders, is that it appears to be a safer drug than heroin and cocaine, at least in the short run, and appears to have more potentially therapeutic benefits.
Even so, the Federal Government has launched a major p.r. effort to fight ecstasy based on the Internet at clubdrugs.org Last week two Senators, Bob Graham of Florida and Charles Grassley of Iowa, introduced an ecstasy antiproliferation bill, which would stiffen penalties for trafficking in the drug. Under the new law, someone caught selling about 100 hits of ecstasy could be charged as a drug trafficker; current law sets the threshold at about 300,000 pills. "I think this is the time to take a forceful set of initiatives to try to reverse the tide," says Graham.