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By Todd Zwillich
WASHINGTON, Mar 21 (Reuters Health) - Use of the club drug Ecstasy appears to be moving out of its traditional home in dance clubs and spreading to a wider variety of places frequented by adolescents and young adults, a White House drug official is scheduled to tell Senators on Wednesday.
Increasing popularity of Ecstasy among teens and adolescents also seems to have driven use of the drug beyond whites to African Americans and Hispanics.
"The sale and use of club drugs has expanded from nightclubs and raves to high schools, the streets, neighborhoods and open venues," Dr. Donald Vereen, deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), will testify before a Senate committee on Capitol Hill.
A biannual survey released by ONDCP on Wednesday shows that Ecstasy, known to researchers as MDMA, is becoming more prevalent in nearly every region of the country. Ninety percent of communities in the survey reported that Ecstasy and other club drugs like ketamine were somewhat available or highly available. Eighty percent reported that club drugs were more available in 2000 than in 1999.
The survey was conducted among drug treatment providers, health researchers and law enforcement officials in 20 US cities. It is designed to give policy makers a current 'snapshot' of drug use patterns across the country, and authors warned that the survey is not scientifically controlled or translatable to the nation as a whole.
Ecstasy remains most popular among whites, though reports from El Paso, Texas, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and New York City suggest that the drug has recently gained popularity in other ethnic groups as well.
The spread of Ecstasy largely reflects a sharp rises in use among teenagers in the last couple of years. A government survey released earlier this year documented a 46% rise in past-year Ecstasy use among high school seniors.
Taking the drug causes profound changes in the brain's levels of serotonin, accounting for its euphoric effects. Researchers suspect that repeated use of Ecstasy can lead to depression, learning deficits and memory loss.
"It's not surprising that Ecstasy is moving out of the rave clubs into broader social use," Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), a member of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control told Reuters Health in an interview. Seven deaths were attributed to the drug in Florida last year, "a harbinger of what we can expect as this becomes a national drug of choice," he said.
The rising popularity of the drug caused lawmakers to pass legislation last year calling for stricter sentencing for Ecstasy trafficking and giving $10 million in federal money to aid in Ecstasy educational and media campaigns aimed at young people and health professionals.
The legislation calls for prison sentences for dealing Ecstasy that are on par with those for selling equal amounts of heroin. In response, the US Sentencing Commission voted on Tuesday to increase the minimum federal penalty for possession of 8,000 Ecstasy pills from 40 months to 120 months. Some experts oppose this because Ecstasy is less dangerous than heroin or cocaine.
The government's latest survey also suggests that heroin may be increasing in popularity among suburban youth, who prefer to snort the drug rather than shoot it. Treatment officials in Boston, New York, El Paso, Chicago and other cities reported that the narcotic is beginning to move out of urban centers in their communities. The purity of heroin available on the street also increased between 1999 and 2000 in several cities, according to the survey.
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