The fight against ecstasy: as the drug spreads beyond raves, everyone from teen users to Congress is trying to undercut the high.

• Author: Nagourney, Eric
• Position: National

BROWN COUNTY, S.D., IS A PLACE OF rolling hills and farmland. Many of the kids come from families that make their money raising corn, soybeans, and cattle. The nearest big city, Sioux Falls, is a couple of hours away, although many local people will tell you that Aberdeen, the county seat, where most people in the county live, is a big city. Its population: about 25,000.

But Brown County is not idyllic. There are plenty of ways for kids to get into trouble, smoking pot and drinking among them. So last spring, when a bunch of teens got together for an outdoor dance at the county fairgrounds, parents were happy to see that there appeared to be no marijuana and no drinking.

Well, except for the water. The kids did seem to be going through a lot of water from the bottles they carried as they danced into the night, candy necklaces swinging and glowsticks carving colored arcs out of the darkness.

With the hindsight of half a year, things look different to Brown County now. "Our intelligence tells us that that was one of our first raves," says Kim Dorsett, the deputy state's attorney who handles juvenile crime in the county. And it took place, she says, "pretty much right under law-enforcement's nose."

A rave--as teens know, but many parents across the country still do not--is a dance fueled by a synthetic ingredient: Ecstasy. Once largely limited to the clubs of big cities, the drug has spread nationwide to towns and suburbs, to various ethnicities, and to younger kids. The leading survey of teen drug use, done by the University of Michigan, shows Ecstasy is booming as other drug use holds steady (see graph, page 11). The survey found that 8.2 percent of high school seniors used Ecstasy in 2000, a rate that more than doubled in just two years. The director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Alan Leshner, has called Ecstasy use "truly a national public health crisis."

Now medical evidence suggests that the mildly hallucinogenic stimulant may be far less safe than many proponents believe. Spurred by the news, government officials and anti-drug groups are preparing a counterattack.

In congressional hearings earlier this year, former teen users testified that Ecstasy had wrecked their lives. The Ecstasy Prevention Act of 2001 is now making its way through both the House and Senate. It would provide $23.5 million for Ecstasy research, prevention, and teen education efforts next year, while establishing a special task force. A new federal guideline put in place this year calls for a five-year prison sentence for a...