The War on Information

It's a balmy Saturday evening on Randall's Island, where 8,000 people are attending the Sixth Element Electronic Music Festival, a rave-style event showcasing DJs from around the world.

In a back corner of the grounds is a small folding table behind a banner that says "DanceSafe." Several young people are peering intently into a small cardboard box, where Soren Roinick, a 23-year-old DanceSafe volunteer, is testing ravers' pills for MDMA, the only ingredient in pure ecstasy.

Three of the 68 pills DanceSafe will test this day contain DXM, a drug sometimes sold as ecstasy that has been responsible for some recent injuries to ravers. Roinick tells the pill holders at the table that DXM is not ecstasy, and, when mixed with MDMA, can lead to severe overheating. Two people say they would not take the DXM because they are already on E. Another guy says he will take it later, after his ecstasy wears off. On a humid 95-degree day, that bit of advice may have saved a couple of trips to the hospital.

In an attempt to stem the growing popularity of a drug taken mainly by young, affluent, white people, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., recently introduced the "Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act of 2000." The bill would stiffen legal penalties for ecstasy dealers. But much of the language is aimed at controlling information about the drug. An aide to Graham said the main targets are Web sites that extol its virtues and announce the raves where people can buy it.

But the bill goes beyond even this questionable assault on free speech. It would ban the teaching, demonstration or distribution of information about ecstasy or any other drug defined as illicit -- marijuana, cocaine, LSD, even Valium used without a prescription -- if the people distributing that information know that someone will commit a crime based on what he has learned. Naturally, this alarms DanceSafe founder Emanuel Sferios, whose organization does exactly that.

"Banning lifesaving information is going to jeopardize the health and lives of young people," he says. "Politicians want to appear tough on drugs, so they come up with this bill. But it's only going to exacerbate the problem. It should be called the Club-Drug Harm Maximization Act."

At a press conference in May to announce the bill, Graham said, "Ecstasy is a proven killer -- and it is on the loose. We need to shatter the dangerous myth that this risky designer drug is safe for consumption." The bill would provide funding to "educate young people on the negative effects of ecstasy," and would order the head of every federal agency to post "anti-drug messages" on their Web sites.

A nearly identical bill will be discussed in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime on Thursday. Perfect timing: On Wednesday, the U.S. Customs Service announced that it had busted an international ring that allegedly smuggled roughly 9 million tablets of ecstasy to the United States -- the largest trafficking syndicate Customs claims to have cracked. Since April, 25 people have been arrested in connection with the group. The House bill is sponsored by Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill. In a press release, Biggert says she was moved to introduce the bill after a high school student from her district "died after ingesting what she thought was ecstasy, but was actually PMA." (Paramethoxyamphetamine is another, more toxic amphetamine.)

Of course, this is the sort of tragedy that pill testing tries to prevent, but the bill shows no recognition of this. A spokesman for Biggert says a legal analysis by the Congressional Research Service concluded that DanceSafe would only be "tangentially targeted under this law because what they are doing probably already constitutes a felony offense."

But Eric Sterling, who served eight years as the counsel to the House Judiciary Subcomittee on Crime and is now the president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, which advocates drug law reform, has a different view. "This bill is designed to chill any discussion of drugs that is contrary to the government line," he says. "Fear of felony prosecution in the drug arena is an enormously heavy blanket. Small programs like DanceSafe run the risk of being destroyed."