Ecstasy Bust

So, the cops are all happy about busting a big multinational ecstasy ring. Soon we will hear the corpulent Fantino crow about the success of his forces and how proud he is... and how guns are taking over Toronto and will continue to do so until the Police Brotherhood gets a donation of a few million dollars.

Ecstasy, the happy rave drug, scourge of our society. Presumably, if people enjoy themselves too much, they might cause society to implode. At least, that's the only reason I can think of that ecstasy gets banned.

Ah, but wait, ecstasy is dangerous, it can kill you!

"The biggest danger of Ecstasy is it can kill you," said Dr. Paul Fischer, the medical director of the emergency department at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center

Of course, water could also kill you if ingested the bad way, and we haven't started tossing the purveyors of liquid refreshment into jail yet. Lets sidle over to the drug hippies and see what they have to say:

The risk of death from Ecstasy use is extremely low. Between 1988 and 1997 some 50-100 UK deaths have been connected to Ecstasy use. The current rate is 7 deaths per million users per year. More people die fishing or eating peanuts.

Of course, those hippies are quoting stats, and stats can be used to prove anything that is even remotely true. The anti-ecstasy cabal has anecdotes, and many of them! When it comes to solid arguments, you simply can't beat an anecdote.

Is this one of those classic controversies where there are two sides to the arguments and everyone has their own appropriate view?

No. It is not.

Drug use in general is not something that should be controlled or curtailed by the government. If you want to fry your brain, then that is your problem. However, repression in the case of Ecstasy is especially egregious simply due to the benign nature of the drug. Big Macs almost certainly kill people on an scale many orders of magnitude higher than ecstasy ever does.

I do not applaud the latest drug "bust". It simply saddens me that we spend millions of dollars pursuing these pseudo-criminals when the money could be better spent on well... anything.