It may be a new year, but that hasn’t stopped U.S. drug czar John Walters from pulling out his bag of old tricks in order to stir up a frenzy over the alleged emergence of a new and deadly drug. According to crazy old coot Walters, the efforts of national narcos to abate the illicit market for the drug Ecstasy are being hampered by the spread of a new and supposedly deadly form of the drug that is laced with methamphetamine – a drug that Walters’ camp at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy has dubbed “Extreme Ecstasy.”
Walters claims organized crime groups in Canada are now lacing Ecstasy with “less expensive methamphetamine” in order to “boost profits for Canadian Ecstasy producers.” This new development, he said, “likely increases the addictive potential of their product and effectively gives a dangerous ‘face lift’ to a designer drug that had fallen out of fashion with young American drug users.” The laced drug has been pouring across the border from Canada through border communities like Windsor, Ontario, Walter said – and more than 55% of the Ecstasy seized by U.S. narcos last year contained meth, he said.
While that may sound scary (even when you learn that Ecstasy is often cut with some sort of speed), it isn’t clear that it’s at all true – at least not according to Canadian law enforcers, who said it appears Walters and his gang wove the story out of whole cloth. “I shook my head when I read the release that [the ONDCP] put out,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superintendent Paul Nadeau told the Canadian Press. “That term is unknown to us, certainly in Canada, and I can tell you that I’ve spoken to law enforcement people in the U.S. and they’ve never heard of it either, so it would appear it’s a term that somebody came up with in a boardroom in Washington, D.C.” Moreover, Nadeau said that according to stats kept by Canadian narcos, the practice of lacing Ecstasy with amphetamine is on the wane – tests by the RCMP indicate about 35% of all Ecstasy is laced with speed, down from 75% just a few years ago.
Reefer Madness isn’t sure what Walters has been ingesting, but it certainly isn’t the first time he’s gotten some bad shit. In 2002, he embarked on a newly reinvigorated anti-pot campaign by claiming today’s marijuana is nearly 30 times more potent than it was in the Sixties and Seventies. Unfortunately, there was no clear evidence that was the case, and in April, the ONDCP as much as conceded the point, announcing that according to the University of Mississippi‘s pot Potency Monitoring Project, the average amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (or THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient) found in samples of seized marijuana has now reached a whopping 8.5% – at least half the amount Walters claimed some five years ago.
This article appears in February 1 • 2008.