Is ecstasy a dangerous drug?
Certainly a lot of people say it is. Are they giving us the “straight dope” on that issue? One way to decide this question is to look at the numbers. When former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman called for new mandatory minimum sentences for the drug in summer 2000, I took a look at the statistics, and was stunned to find that only eight deaths had been attributed to it by the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) during 1998, the latest year for which the statistics were yet available. That was a national statistic, not New Jersey, and it was not clear in every case that ecstasy was the cause as opposed to just being present in the situation. Compared this with the well over a hundred thousand dying each year from alcohol and the hundreds of thousands from nicotine — well, I’m not sure what to say about it. Any preventable death is a tragedy. But is such a relatively miniscule number enough to justify calling ecstasy is a dangerous drug in the grand scheme of things? A study in
