> Ian Murray wrote:
>
> > > Military Foods Could Enhance Soldiers' Performance by
> > > 2025
> >
> > Now if they could just invent a food that led them to throw down
their
> > guns, embrace their "enemy" and renounce militarism...
>
> A little ecstasy might do the trick.
>
> Perhaps someone can compile a list of military food service
contractors,
> and we'll go from there...
>
> --
>
> / dave /
==========================
People had the same intuitions about acid....
[NYT] June 24, 2001 Violence Rises as Club Drug Spreads Out Into the Streets By FOX BUTTERFIELD
OS ANGELES, June 21 - It was finding an Israeli drug dealer dead in a car trunk at Los Angeles International Airport 18 months ago that gave the authorities here the first hint that the club drug Ecstasy was becoming a serious problem. He had been killed by two hit men from Israel, said Drug Enforcement Administration officials.
Then there was the shipment of 2.1 million Ecstasy pills, worth $40 million on the street, that the United States Customs Service seized at the airport last July. The pills, labeled clothing, arrived on an Air France flight from Paris, intended for another Israeli dealer here. The authorities say it was the world's largest Ecstasy bust.
And now law enforcement officials say they have seen another worrisome development this year. At a number of large all-night dance parties called raves, drawing thousands of young people to the desert east of Los Angeles, rival gangs have fought over the sale of Ecstasy. At one rave at a fairgrounds at Lake Perris in March, 102 people were arrested on charges of selling Ecstasy, assault or resisting arrest, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
What is happening in Los Angeles mirrors what is occurring across much of the nation, law enforcement officials and drug experts say. Not only is the use of Ecstasy exploding, more than doubling among 12th graders in the last two years, but it is also spreading well beyond its origin as a party drug for affluent white suburban teenagers to virtually every ethnic and class group, and from big cities like New York and Los Angeles to rural Vermont and South Dakota.
At the same time, the huge profits to be made - a tablet that costs 50 cents to manufacture in underground labs in the Netherlands can be sold for $25 in the United States - have set off increasingly violent turf wars among Ecstasy dealers.
"With drugs, it's always about the money," said Bridget Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor for New York City. "And the dealers are starting to see there is so much money in Ecstasy that more people are getting involved, and with that comes more violence."
Homicides linked to Ecstasy dealing have occurred in recent months in Norfolk, Va.; in Elgin, Ill., outside Chicago, and in Valley Stream, N.Y., police records show.
This spring, in Bristow, Va., a suburb of Washington, a 21-year-old college student, Daniel Robert Petrole Jr., was shot 10 times in the head as he sat in his car outside a new town house he had recently bought. According to court records, the local police believed Mr. Petrole was responsible for distributing more than $1.5 million in Ecstasy and marijuana in Prince William County. Two young dealers who worked with Mr. Petrole have since been arrested and charged with killing him.
In New York City last month, Salvatore Gravano, the former Gambino crime family hit man, pleaded guilty to running a multimillion-dollar Ecstasy ring in Arizona, where he was living under the federal witness protection program. Court documents showed that Mr. Gravano was accused of hatching four homicide plots to consolidate his control of the Arizona drug market, and that his organization was being supplied by Ilan Zarger, a drug dealer based in Brooklyn who had ties to the Israeli mob.
Most Ecstasy is produced in the Netherlands or Belgium and smuggled into the United States by Israeli or Russian organized gangs, either flown in as air cargo or carried on commercial flights by couriers, often dancers recruited from topless nightclubs, according to drug enforcement and Customs Service officials.
Some Dominican groups have also become involved recently, using their own established routes, and now sell Ecstasy along with heroin and cocaine from drug houses in Washington Heights in Manhattan to buyers who arrive by car from as far away as Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, the officials say.
Because it is sold as pills, Ecstasy is much easier to smuggle than heroin, cocaine or marijuana, the authorities say. Large imported shipments, originally flown into New York, Los Angeles or Miami, are then broken down and sent out by regular overnight delivery services, like Federal Express, to midlevel dealers in other cities.
Ms. Brennan, the New York narcotics prosecutor, said Ecstasy was also widely available on the Internet. Last year, her office arrested a man in Orlando, Fla., who had been selling Ecstasy on a site called House of Beans to customers in New York.
Seizures of Ecstasy by the Customs Service have jumped sharply, to 9.3 million pills in 2000, up from only 400,000 pills in 1997, said Charles Winwood, the acting commissioner of the Customs Service.
The law enforcement officials and drug experts do not suggest Ecstasy will lead to the same levels of violence or social turmoil as crack cocaine did in the late 1980's, when thousands of teenage dealers armed themselves with handguns and many mothers neglected their children.
For one thing, Ecstasy does not cause the same dangerous changes in mood and judgment as crack does. For another, crack gave only a brief high, driving addicts back to the street repeatedly in search of another dose and often leading them to rob or steal to support their habit.
Ecstasy instead induces a high of up to six hours, enhancing feelings of empathy and closeness, its users say.
But interviews with drug experts and with teenage Ecstasy addicts in treatment programs here show that the drug, known scientifically as MDMA, both a stimulant and a hallucinogen, can be disruptive and expose them to violence.
"We are dancing with danger here, because the kids and their parents think of Ecstasy as a benign party drug," said Michele Leonhart, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Los Angeles office. "They don't see what we see, that it's a neurotoxin with serious side effects, that people die from overdoses and that some of the dances in the desert are no longer just dances, they're like violent crack houses set to music."
Marcos M., a tall Hispanic teenager living in Phoenix Academy, a residential treatment center for adolescent drug addicts run by Phoenix House in Lake View Terrace, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley, said he had always thought of Ecstasy as "the white man's drug." In his neighborhood, Lincoln Heights - "the ghetto," he called it - people usually did crack or heroin. Besides, Ecstasy was too expensive, at $25 a pill. Marcos, 17, said his attitude toward Ecstasy was, "I'd rather spend my money on good stuff."
But in the past year, dealers on his street suddenly started selling Ecstasy, reducing the price to a more manageable $8 a pill.
"One day a friend was cleaning out his car and gave me a pill," Marcos recalled. "So I tried it, and an hour later, I was rolling - relaxed, kicking and chilling."
Now, he sees all ethnic groups using Ecstasy, no longer just whites.
As with other drugs, dealers often fight over Ecstasy, Marcos said. A dealer who is a friend of his sold a "boat," a package of 1,000 Ecstasy pills, to another dealer, but the second dealer claimed the delivery was short. So a fight ensued, in which his friend broke into the other man's house and took the drugs back, and the second dealer then smashed his friend's car.
The leading survey of teenage use of drugs, known as Monitoring the Future and done by the University of Michigan, has found that the proportion of 12th graders who had used Ecstasy in the previous 12 months more than doubled to 8 percent in 2000, from 3.5 percent in 1998. That is a very large increase, said Lloyd Johnston, a research scientist who directs the annual survey. Among 10th graders the percentage who had used Ecstasy in 2000 rose to 5 percent, from 3 percent in 1998.
"It is definitely continuing to increase, across all parts of the country, and equally among males and females," Mr. Johnston said. Ecstasy is still enjoying a honeymoon among young people, just as LSD did in the 1960's, before its dangers were widely known, he said.
Jessica D., a 17-year-old high school junior who came to Phoenix Academy from Canoga Park, a Los Angeles suburb, said she started taking Ecstasy pills at nightclubs and raves. She soon found herself "rolling" on the drug all the time. "I used to go to school high," she said, a smile brightening her face at the memory. "It made school more fun. Class went by faster."
Dr. Alan I. Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., said, "Contrary to what a lot of people think, that Ecstasy is a harmless drug, we are learning more and more scientifically about its damaging effects."
The bad short-term effects, Dr. Leshner said, are quick increases in blood pressure, heart rates and body temperature, leading to dehydration and hypothermia, particular problems for people who have danced in hot, crowded rooms all night.
In the longer term, Dr. Leshner said, there is now evidence that repeated use of Ecstasy can damage the brain cells that produce serotonin, the neurochemical that is critical for preventing depression and sleep disorders.
People who have used Ecstasy frequently experience memory loss and depression when the drug wears off, Dr. Leshner said.
The contest with drug smugglers continues.
Last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York announced the arrest of Oded Tuito, who was said to head the largest Ecstasy-smuggling organization yet identified.
Mr. Tuito, an Israeli who kept homes in New York, Los Angeles and Paris, "imported millions of Ecstasy pills" from Paris, Brussels and Frankfurt into New York, Miami and Los Angeles, the drug administration charged.
His organization recruited dozens of couriers, typically dancers at topless nightclubs, who each smuggled in 30,000 to 60,000 pills at a time and also took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in drug proceeds back to Europe, the authorities said.
To combat Ecstasy, the federal government and more than half the states, including New York, New Jersey and Florida, have raised the penalties for selling the drug in the past few years.
Under new federal sentencing guidelines that went into effect in May, a person selling 800 pills can now receive a sentence of five years, a much stiffer standard than the old threshold of 11,000 pills.
New York's law, enacted in 1996, is tougher than the federal standard, requiring a minimum sentence of three years for mere possession of 100 pills.
An Illinois bill, passed by the Legislature last month and awaiting the governor's signature, would carry the toughest penalties of all - an automatic 6 to 30 years for selling as few as 15 pills.
State Senator Rickey Hendon warned that the Illinois law cast too wide a net, treating teenage partygoers the same as professional drug traffickers. But Senator Hendon, a Chicago Democrat, who is black, said the law might help Illinois legislators understand the racial disparities of drug laws.
"When you see 14-year-olds going to jail for a mandatory 30 years and their complexion is no longer black," Senator Hendon said, "maybe we'll stop and think about what we're doing."