Traditional summer events beginning saw the return of Raves and the use and abuse of club drugs, with several overdoses and one fatality at the Memorial Day rave-dance in San Francisco. Dr Inaba shares his experiences including rock medicine in the 60s Haight.
Transcript (edited):
CNS: Welcome to the CNS Podcast featuring Dr. Darryl Inaba, research director for CNS Productions.
CNS: Darryl, it looks like the big news this week is the big rave in California, in the Bay area at the Cow Palace where several people became very ill and at least one person died of an overdose attributed to ecstasy. Its summer now and there’s likely to be a lot of festivals and musical events. There is talk of banning raves, but not musical festivals. So, hearkening back to your experience in Haight -Ashbury, what are your thoughts as we move into summer and what kind of drugs and drug activity are we likely to see?
DARRYL: Howard, I was actually in San Francisco for the Memorial Day weekend and one of my nephews went to that rave, actually it wasn’t called a rave, and it was called some sort of music scene or music festival for 2010. And so, it wasn’t advertised as a rave, but obviously it turned out to be a rave. There were a lot of drugs floating around – club drugs and a number of real bad reactions – overdoses. I think one gentleman died from a suspected ecstasy overdose or whatever drug he bought there…5 are in critical condition. So, it appears to me that they didn’t have what we used to recommend for all large gatherings…rock medicine. We would have an actual medical group to deal with whatever trauma we encountered…injuries from just stomping around, falling off of curbs and things like that, which would have helped address some of these issues. From the stories and feedback from my nephew, it didn’t seem that they had any type of rock medicine group there to deal with the 16,000 kids that came to this event. And surprisingly, ecstasy was back on the map – along with LSD, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine. It’s pretty crazy. They had enough undercover cops at the event to make over 70 arrests, which means that cops had pretty good evidence of and enough valid information that arrests would stick. A lot of cops and a lot of activity resulted in a lot of arrests at one little gathering.
CNS: It would be nice of there was a medical assistance, if you’re going to put in that much resource.
DARRYL: Yes, that’s a real sad thing because anytime you get a group of people together, you’re going to see injuries, heart attacks, you’re going to see the same things that you would see in any small city…on any given day… and there should have been some sort of emergency preparedness to deal with it. But the most amazing thing to me is that after years of decline, since about the end of 1990’s, the club drugs have really gone by the wayside. There was more interest in methamphetamine. Now we are seeing more interest in prescription opiates, prescription sedatives and heroin has come back. We thought pretty much it was the end of the club drug scenes and especially ecstasy. Ecstasy at one time was used by about 8% of high school seniors according to a study by Dr. Lori Johnson. The latest report from Dr. Johnson, in 2009 reported that number dropped to just less than 2%. So, we thought after 9-11 in 2001 that club drugs were more difficult to bring in…so street chemists were making other drugs that could maybe more profitable, but this experience in San Francisco appears to herald things to come. …the club drug scene is back with the younger population – they like to go out and dance and party. And what that means is that it won’t just be ecstasy, but a whole host of club drugs – the GHB, gamma hydroxyl butyrate drugs. You’re going to have Nexus 2CB. You’re going to have a wave of interest in psychedelics, which we see from time to time, especially as we go out of a phase of uppers, which we are just now doing, and into the next phase of downers, or coming out of downers, and into the next phase of uppers. And during those times there is sort of a flurry of interest again in the all arounders – the psychedelics, the psycho stimulants, the club drugs, the entactogens and pathogens and all the various names they want to give these substances.
CNS: As a transition item?
DARRYL: It seems to be. That’s my observation of it starting back in the 1960’s when the psychedelics became an issue and were abused. Various psychedelics exploded and then came the alphabet soup drugs like PCP and MDA and ecstasy MDMA, things like that, STP. We may see a return of Ketamine or even PCP because these are very popular with people who like to go to music events where they can become emotionally stimulated by these substances, less inhibited and therefore dance. Dancing started back in the rave scene of late 80’s into the 90’s and unlike the couple dancing you and I might be used to, in this type of setting, people under the influence of these drugs dance so individually. They’re not dancing with anybody. They’re going through gesticulations by themselves and listening to music and in a way, it’s a wonderful thing to see. They’re sort of free with the music, but it seems to take a lot of psychedelic or psycho stimulant drugs to suppress the inhibitions in order to create the motivation that allows people to do that. So, this behavior and these drugs go hand in hand. The other worrisome thing we saw during the last club drug scene in the late 80’s was the drug combinations. People would take combinations of heroin with ecstasy, LSD and ecstasy….a variety of just drugs…on their own…they would mix up and take them which caused overdoses and created serious problems. On its own, ecstasy is very, very toxic or can be very, very toxic. In all fairness, when you compare the number of doses taken and the number of people using, there are not the number of overdoses as with other drugs, but those people who do have a toxic reaction, it’s a very, very severe toxic reaction. Usually what happens is you get a hyperthermia…a morbid hyperthermia, meaning your body temperature goes out of whack and your body temperature goes way up very quickly without any compensatory mechanisms for your body to lower that body temperature and it goes up so fast and so high that actually people’s blood begins to coagulate while it’s in their blood vessels.
CNS: Not a good story.
DARRYL: No, a horrible situation with multiple hemorrhaging, internal hemorrhaging and death. And we saw a number…or a fair number of morbid hyperthermia deaths when the last club drug scene was happening.
CNS: And of course it is so difficult to tell when you get a legitimate drug versus a counterfeit one.
DARRYL: And that’s the next area that I was going to go to comment on…. you never know what you’re getting…especially at a dance. And at a club, you don’t know who’s selling it…when we did rock medicine, we would actually try and analyze the drugs that were being sold at the event, to make sure they were what they’re supposed to be. Oftentimes, 80% of the drugs sold as ecstasy, weren’t ecstasy, they were methamphetamine or MDA like ecstasy or paramethoxyamphetamine. These can be very toxic and more dangerous than actual ecstasy. And even those that did contain ecstasy were contaminated with other adulterants, they weren’t pure ecstasy. Then again, if people were at the event looking to buy some THC in a tablet, or something more organic or less dangerous, nothing will stop a dealer from saying, “Oh this is the best stuff you can ever buy” and misrepresent or sell off ecstasy, Ketamine or whatever he has and misrepresent it as THC or whatever somebody wants. So…you’ve got all of those problems with adulteration, misrepresentation. You’ve got mixtures of drugs and it’s a recipe for tragedy at these events and the kick off of happened on Memorial Day weekend in San Francisco at the big Cow Palace music event that ended with one death, 5 critically ill and several people arrested and maybe…my nephew said he saw several people were sick, which implies that the ecstasy might have been impure and tainted with some precursors or reagents. Some police are saying, no it wasn’t tainted, but the report on the drugs seized haven’t come back yet, so we don’t really know. Some people are saying that it was a wide variation in dosing. Things sold as ecstasy could range anywhere from 0 mg of MDMA, the actual methylenedioxymethamphetamine, the actual chemical that is supposed to be ecstasy, up to about 200 or 300 mg, which is about twice the actual dose of ecstasy it supposedly takes to get loaded. So, people buy from a candy raver who was dressed up like a little infant, sucking on a pacifier, that’s a candy raver…who says “I’ve got some stuff
… I’ve got the doses … pick from me”.
CNS: That’s interesting. And that makes me think of the 2 year old addicted to cigarette smoke in Indonesia which is so bizarre.
DARRYL: In this case, these are actual teenagers dressed up like infants, in little baby dresses, or …in my day, it was a nun. At big parades and events where people dressed up it was the nuns who had the best acid or the best doses, but it was a way to advertise that you’re a provider of these things. And people bought them….say someone bought one from a source and it was only about 10 mg or less of ecstasy…you need about 80 to 100 mg to feel the empathic effects people are searching for, and 10 mg, isn’t enough, so you go to the next dealer and you buy 4 more because you want to feel that, but this time 4 of them contain like 150 mg. …you are going to end up with these unwanted toxic reactions.
CNS: Obviously there’s no way to control the dosage and the purity of any given drug in a pop scene, in an illicit scene, and this compounded by a profit greed factor.
DARRYL: When we did rock medicine…one time we had Bruce Radcliff, a chemist working with us, other people would help too, we would actually set up a mini-lab to qualitatively and somewhat quantitatively test the drugs that were being sold at the event so that people would be warned that what’s being sold as THC is really PCP or something other than that. Unfortunately, law enforcement took a dim view of what we were doing and we were accused of providing quality control for dealers at these events and on the street. I told them that’s exactly what we’re trying to do! We’re trying to provide quality control…not for dealers…we’re trying to provide it for people who are going to buy the stuff whether….
CNS: So people don’t die.
DARRYL: Exactly…so, it was a sad thing when we had to quit and it’s sad that there was no rock medicine at this event because some of the problems could have been prevented or at least deal with more effectively.
CNS: Maybe we’re seeing resurgence…going back to pharming, especially by younger people. There was another article I saw in the last couple of days about a huge number, 1/3 of high school students, had …just messed around with pharmaceutical drugs. Any reader comments or critiques or suggestions are always welcome. Drop us a note and if it’s a question, we’ll try to get back to you on it.
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