Ecstasy Epidemic

Designer drug ecstasy is being consumed by more and more young people in Spain, convinced it is a safe recreational drug. The rising number of deaths tell a different story.

400 to 500 young people in Spain consume Ecstasy at least once a month, 43% of them for “new sensations”. Ecstasy is the most consumed drug for the 14 to 18 year old age group, with seven per cent of Spain’s teenagers saying they consume it on a regular basis.

Ecstasy is based in MDMA, a drug used in the First World War by the German Armed Forces, which supplied it to their front line in the trenches to inhibit appetite and to give the soldiers added energy. Easy and cheap to produce, ecstasy is seen by many young people as a sort of “non-drug” which is safe to take before a party. With police resources concentrating more on heroin and cocaine, ecstasy has had a free reign.

It is the rising number of deaths among teenagers who consume this drug which proves that it is not a safe drug, but a killer.

Ecstasy factories use a number of drugs in the composition of the tablet, any one of which can cause serious side effects in those who take them. Other consumers take ecstasy with great quantities of alcohol, which provokes a violent reaction and others die from heart attacks, exhaustion or from excessive consumption of water, since the drug provokes thirst, exacerbated through dancing

The Spanish National Drugs Plan is investigating ways to combat the widespread use of ecstasy, before more teenagers die. The figure in Spain is five deaths in the last rtwo months.

A spokesperson for the National Drugs Plan declared that “These products are extremely dangerous, and these deaths prove this. These are substances which are manufactured without any degree of control, mixed with other substances which can provoke unforeseeable effects in the consumer”.

Ecstasy is far from being a safe, recreational drug to be consumed at raves. It is a killer, manipulated by the unscrupulous and targeted at the innocent and unsuspecting.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru