Episode 1000754886967

1:02 Voiceover Listener discretion is advised. Adam Corolla and Dr. Drew Loveline, coast to coast.

1:13 Voiceover It is Loveline. I'm Adam Corolla. That is Dr. Drew over there. Phone number 1-800-LOVE-191, fax number 310-854-4455. Dr. Drew is a board certified physician, pen addiction medicine specialist and tonight we're going to have Emanuel Sferios on. He is the founder and executive director of Dance Safe. It's an organization that promotes safety and clubs and raves and scenes like that. I can tell by the way he ignores me and reads literature.

1:49 Drew I've been coaching him before I got here. I told him to nod when spoken to. Just nod.

1:54 Adam Good radio.

1:54 Drew And keep reading whatever you've been reading.

1:56 Adam Wave and high five, yes. Also we're going to take some calls tonight because we're basically dedicating tonight's show to AXISY. This is something we talk about almost nightly on this show. Some people, there's a lot of misinformation about this and we're going to try to get some answers and get to the bottoms of some of this tonight or I should say bottom of it. But first I experienced a form of male rape last night. As a male who's never been raped, I think this is the closest I've ever come to it, which was, I found out last night at midnight that I had to set the clocks up and I felt violated. And I could only imagine that's what rape would be like for a female. That's what I felt like.

2:43 Drew Stealing an hour from you.

2:45 Adam Yes, yes. Where is it? I'll never have it again. No, I had, I mourned. That's all I did today. It ruined my, the 23 hours between the time I heard it and now were ruined. They really were. And I just think, why can't we just keep going? Just keep setting the clock. Let's just keep setting it back and at the end of like, you know, 24 years, we'll lose a day. Isn't that how it works?

3:13 Drew Do you know what I'm saying?

3:14 Adam I don't want to go back and forth. I want to keep getting one. I like to work that out somehow. When I'm in charge, I'm going to put my mathematicians on that one because I felt so violated. I saw the Boston's last night and they were great. So you weren't there, Drew, but I was. That's right. Went out with Dickie, had a great time. All right, let's get into this ecstasy. Where do you... First off, I haven't talked to Emanuel about this much at all, so I don't know where he stands on any of this stuff. What do you think of, like, legalization for it?

3:47 Guest Well, I have a personal opinion, and that is that I don't know all of the solutions to the problems of drug abuse and the harm related to it. And I guess that's pretty much also Dance Safe's position. We take no stance on the issue of legalization or not. We do, though, know that the current predominant drug abuse prevention strategy, the Just Say No model or using scare tactics, is ineffective. Or let me qualify that. It works well with grade school-aged children. But Nancy Reagan tried to provide a model for grade school kids onto teenagers, and it hasn't worked. And drug use continues and abuse. And so we try to provide non-judgmental, fact-based information.

4:34 Adam And do you do testing at raves?

4:36 Guest That is a part of our program. About 10% of the raves we attend. And we have 20 volunteer chapters around the country. And I would say, given all of our chapters in every weekend that we're out there in a dozen or more cities, probably about 10% of our activities that go on at the booth are related to adulterant screening.

4:59 Drew I think Adam's asking if what he has you can test tonight.

5:02 Adam Yeah, I got some.

5:03 Guest I did bring a kit here with me. And you're more than welcome to tape keep it. Oh, really?

5:07 Adam Oh, good, yeah. I got, it's in the spare tire of my car. So it's gonna take a little while to get at, but I'd like you to test it. That's how I get it into the country.

5:15 Drew The coffee you packed it in? Can we at least use it here?

5:16 Adam No, I didn't use the coffee grounds this time. I just put it right in the spare tire.

5:19 Guest How do you stand on a legalization?

5:22 Adam Oh, how do I stand on it? How do you? You want to answer for that, Drew?

5:26 Drew Any victimless crime is a waste of the government's time.

5:29 Adam Well, listen, I really think when you start looking at statistics on how much crime is created by drug use and the expense of drugs, I want to legalize it. I'm looking out for myself. If a guy wants to kill himself on drugs, he's going to kill himself on drugs. Meanwhile, I get to keep my car stereo. I think that's basically how I'm looking at it.

5:51 Guest You're absolutely right. The reason I say I don't know if that's the best solution is because if you did decriminalize, which I think is a better term than legalize, because all these drugs need to be regulated. I think alcohol needs to be regulated more than it is. It might open up a whole host of other problems that we haven't dealt with. But it could very well be argued that the problems of prohibition seem great enough today that an alternative is worth trying.

6:16 Drew The problem with prohibition is one of the reasons we're doing this show tonight is it's hard to have a rational discussion with a young person about drugs for whom the current legal structure seems hypocritical.

6:25 Guest That's absolutely correct.

6:27 Adam Alright, so let's get back to what goes on at the raves. So let's just stick to, I want to get back to testing the ecstasy.

6:36 Guest Yeah, everyone loves the testing issue.

6:38 Adam What percentage of the stuff you test is bad or has impurities in it or is something other than ecstasy?

6:44 Guest There's a lot of questions in there. First of all, we like to say fake pills versus real pills rather than good, bad. Whether a pill is good or bad depends on whether you like it after you've taken it and there's no way to know beforehand. Then we can give you statistics from our laboratory at pill analysis program and also from our on-site pill testing. None of these are accurate gauges of the market as a whole because the people who choose to either send a pill anonymously to the lab that we contract with or the ones that come up to our booth are ones that don't know what's in their pills so it tends to self-select for the fake ones. But I would say about 40% of what comes into our lab is fake and about 10% to 20% of what we test on-site is fake.

7:32 Adam You're saying they come to you because they may have a suspicion that it may not be good in the first place.

7:37 Guest There are people that just don't know. When it's fake, what is it? The most common fake ecstasy tablet, the most common ingredient that's substituted is dextromethorphan or DXM.

7:50 Drew Is it highly concentrated? How can they give you enough in a pill to make you have any kind of experience?

7:55 Guest We did quantitative testing on the DXM pills at the lab and found the average milligram inside was about 150, which is a psychoactive dose. 30 milligrams is a cough-suppressant dose. You get up into that realm, it's a dissociative anesthetic similar to ketamine. Most people don't like it. That's why you don't know too many people who have drank bottles of cough syrup all at once.

8:19 Drew Some people call it robotripping.

8:21 Adam Yeah.

8:22 Guest Even people who like dissociatives like ketamine or PCP typically don't use DXM because it's not a very good one. But some people do. The problem is, if you get it thinking you're getting the mood elevator MDMA at a rave, it can have consequences unexpected.

8:43 Adam We call that the bad trip, Drew.

8:45 Drew In your day. It's almost famous this weekend.

8:49 Adam You wouldn't know about the bottom of the pie. Drew got around to seeing a movie that's only, what, nine months old? Wow. Wow. That's like a sneak preview for you, Drew.

9:01 Drew That and I saw The Contenders. Two films in one sitting.

9:04 Adam You must have been in an airplane.

9:05 Drew How did you know? Not in an airplane.

9:08 Adam This is the only way you can see a movie.

9:09 Guest Did you see traffic?

9:10 Drew No, not yet. I planned to.

9:12 Adam I got a bad copy of it from my grandmothers in the film academy. I only saw half of it. I'm screwed up. I don't know which way to go. Let's keep on with the XC. We need some calls tonight from people who have questions about it or who have had experiences with it. Is this drug as dangerous as Drew says it is?

9:36 Guest How dangerous do you say it is?

9:37 Drew What I say is that I, in my clinical practice, see people, I treat a lot of addicts, probably see 20 or 30 new addicts a week. I have threshold questions as it pertains to acid and ecstasy. If you've had one large exposure to either, and it's hard to know what that even means with something where they took several hits as opposed to one, or if they've had more than 20 ecstasy or more than 50 LSD, I'm putting them on antidepressants. They're going to have all sorts of mood and affect issues chronically.

10:11 Guest That's interesting that you say that because we see a lot of ecstasy users as well, and while abuse patterns tend to be short-lived, we do see compulsive users who'll do it every weekend, and it's been my suspicion that a lot of young people who use ecstasy compulsively, they take too much and they do it every weekend, may in fact be clinically depressed and not know that because there's a stigma around depression in our society, and MDMA, because it releases serotonin, will relieve those symptoms temporarily.

10:42 Adam Well, see, that's the question. Did it make them depressed or did it attract depressed people?

10:50 Drew All addicts have issues with what I call affect regulation. They're all depressed when they come for treatment. One hundred percent of them are depressed when they come for treatment, we're seeing them after years of substance use. Do they all meet criteria for depression a month later? No, about 85% don't. But the LSD and the ex-users always stay in that depressed state.

11:08 Guest It's interesting because we've suggested in our peer counseling at raves to some users that they might be depressed and suggested they seek proper diagnosis. And many of them have subsequently got onto an antidepressant and stopped using ecstasy since. And then I've asked them, so what do you think? Because when you're taking an SSRI, it prevents the effect of MDMA because it plugs the reuptake transporters that the MDMA needs to enter to release the serotonin. This is reported widely. So I'll ask, do you think you'll quit taking your Paxil, say, for two weeks every once in a while so that you could enjoy your ecstasy again? And none of them would say yes. They all valued the benefits that they received from their antidepressant more than their weekly or monthly MDMA experience.

11:54 Drew All right.

11:54 Adam Let's take some phone calls. Drew, did you get another haircut?

11:59 Drew Not since the last time I saw you.

12:01 Adam No. Seems like that hair is just getting shorter and shorter. Katie?

12:06 Hi.

12:07 Adam You're 19.

12:08 Caller Yeah.

12:08 Adam What's up?

12:09 Caller Oh, first I want to say, Adam, I'm really sorry about the hour thing. I mean, everybody's feeling it.

12:14 Adam Yeah. I really feel raped. I'm thinking of suing...

12:18 Drew Maybe actually, who are you with?

12:20 Adam I'm thinking of suing the government and the estate of Ben Franklin. Didn't he come up with that?

12:25 Drew Yeah, but I'm just trying to build a case here. You were with Dickie last night, right?

12:28 Adam Yes.

12:28 Drew Maybe you were raped.

12:29 Adam I could have. I did have some drinks. I could have possibly been raped. Maybe that was it. You may be right. All right, go ahead.

12:38 Caller Okay, in August of 2000, I went to rave and I dropped half a pill. And a month later, I went to another rave and I dropped half a pill. And then I found out that ecstasy drains your spinal fluid.

12:52 Drew I love that one. That's my favorite.

12:55 Guest Do you know where it comes from?

12:56 Drew I was told it comes from the fact that some of the original research, they did cerebral spinal fluid studies. So they did spinal taps on these people.

13:04 Guest And that got translated into It's like the telephone game when you're in grade school. You whisper around the room and by the end, it's nothing like it was in the beginning.

13:11 Drew Here's the thing, Katie, if all ecstasy does was drain the spinal fluid out of your spine, I'd tell everyone, go ahead and do it. Enjoy. Because that is an absolutely inconsequential, that the researchers did it to study the people, doesn't hurt them.

13:25 Adam So if you remove spinal fluid, your body just produces more, just like taking a pint of blood.

13:30 Drew A little headache sometimes, but that's it.

13:31 Guest But if you got spinal fluid leaking from your spine, you would have to have been in an accident and you'd be in much worse shape than you would be feeling right now.

13:41 Adam All right. So Katie, yeah, your spine is fine. It's your brain we worry about. About half a pill.

13:49 Caller Oh, actually my pill count is only one, you know, half and half. Right. But.

13:54 Adam Yeah, you're fine.

13:55 Guest Sounds like you're a very cautious person.

13:57 Caller And yeah, because of this, because of the so-called spinal fluid thing. I know now I know it's not true.

14:03 Adam Yeah. Now you're free to really just load up on the dose.

14:06 Guest But, you know, that's a myth. But there are other risks. Katie, have you been to the dance safe website, dance safe.org?

14:12 Caller Actually, because of the spinal fluid thing, I stopped. It scared the crap out of me. And I just.

14:17 Adam Well, maybe that's good. That.

14:19 Caller Yeah.

14:20 Drew It's so funny. It's it's however people understand damage. You know, they have to drop their own concept of what that is.

14:25 So, right.

14:27 Adam Well, all right.

14:28 Drew So you have a question?

14:30 Caller Yeah, actually I do. Ever since I stopped, I have these uncontrollable shutters throughout my body.

14:37 Drew Like shivering?

14:38 Caller Not shivering, but like my whole body just shakes.

14:43 Guest You did it two times. How far apart?

14:46 Caller A month apart.

14:47 Guest And then how long after the last time did you start experiencing the shutters?

14:53 Caller About a month later.

14:55 Adam Yeah, that's your body reacting to you thinking you lost spinal fluid and freaking yourself out. You took a pill, you broke it up into, you know, two pieces. You took one a month later.

15:08 Drew I mean, Jesus Christ, there are, there are, there are idiosyncratic reactions. I've seen people have chronic recurrent panic attacks after smoking a pot twice. I mean, there are pathways that can open up or get enhanced by the, yes, there is the lightweight factor.

15:21 Guest It's doubtful that it has anything to do with the ecstasy that you took. All right.

15:26 Caller So it's probably from inhaling bong resin, staying in the dorms, huh?

15:30 Drew Yeah, if you're smoking a pot every day, that'll give you a little trouble.

15:32 Adam Are you smoking the weed or are you doing it second hand?

15:36 Caller It's second hand. It's hard not to when you're living in the dorms.

15:39 Adam Hey, Katie?

15:40 Caller Yeah?

15:41 Adam You're 19. I don't want to see you at 59.

15:44 Drew Yeah, second hand smoke, by the way, doesn't...

15:45 Adam You can be walking around like Howard Hughes with a mask on and Kleenex boxes for shoes.

15:50 Drew But second hand smoke does not include putting your mouth on the bong.

15:53 Adam No, she's not doing that.

15:54 Drew All right.

15:54 Caller But I don't know.

15:55 It just like...

15:57 Caller even when I'm not nervous, my body shakes. Like the other day after class was over, I went to talk to my teacher and my whole body just shook.

16:04 Drew Get checked out. You know, get your thyroid levels checked. And there is certainly medical issues that can come to bear here. And between the ages of 18 and 22, it's a real common age for anxiety to become a significant issue. All right.

16:14 Adam We have Dr. Charles Grob on the line.

16:18 Drew Let's see.

16:18 Adam He said...

16:19 Drew There he is.

16:20 Adam Is he supposed to be a guest tonight?

16:21 Drew Yeah.

16:21 Adam Oh. Wasn't brought up.

16:23 Guest Hi, Charlie.

16:24 Adam Did you know about that, Drew?

16:25 Drew Yeah. Here's all this stuff here.

16:26 Adam You just want him on hold for 15 minutes?

16:29 Guest I'm just listening in here to your last... Oh, OK.

16:31 Drew They had him on hold for about two minutes.

16:32 Adam Oh, OK. That's fine. Hello there. Can we call you, Charlie?

16:37 Guest Yeah, no problem. Wow.

16:38 Adam That's kind of doctor I like.

16:40 Guest OK.

16:41 Adam All right. So, Drew, what do you know about Dr. Charles Grob?

16:45 Drew Well...

16:46 Adam Go ahead, buddy.

16:47 Drew Just the papers that I have...

16:49 Adam Well, did you read them?

16:50 Drew I did read them.

16:51 Adam I didn't even know he was on the show. All right. What do you know? I thought you read them.

16:56 Drew I did read the articles. I don't know the official title. If that's what you're asking, it could take a second.

16:59 Adam Oh, okay. What are you doing on the show, doctor?

17:01 Guest Well, I was called up the other day by, I guess, someone on your staff.

17:06 Drew Right. He does a lot of XC researches over at UCLA. He's one of the... You're at Harbor UCLA, aren't you?

17:12 Guest I'm at Harbor UCLA. I'm the head of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry there, and I have written on the topic of MDMA, and I have done some FDA-approved research in the past.

17:24 Adam All right. And what have you been listening to the show tonight, doctor?

17:29 Guest Just the end of The Last Caller.

17:31 Adam I see. I see. Can you give us a sort of little nutshell statement about ecstasy as far as what you've learned from your experience?

17:41 Guest Well, I think one of the important issues that I think young people in particular should realize about ecstasy is that because of the increasing degrees of drug substitution, there's less and less confidence that ecstasy is MDMA. There's a certain amount of substitution that are probably relatively innocuous like caffeine or aspirin or ephedra, but there are some dangerous drugs being substituted within ecstasy and Emanuel Sferios has done some of the early work there.

18:17 Drew What are they substituting?

18:20 Guest Dexamethorphan has turned up quite a bit.

18:22 Drew That's more damaging than MDMA?

18:24 Guest We've correlated most of the heat stroke emergencies in the Bay Area to pills containing dextromethorphan.

18:32 Guest These are relatively high dose dextromethorphan as opposed to the smaller amounts that might be in cough syrup. Also, paramexoxyamphetamine has apparently caused some fatalities in Florida and I believe Chicago.

18:47 Guest About 15 now around the country. PMA is by far the most toxic substance that's being sold.

18:54 Adam Is it a form of speed?

18:56 Drew Extremely potent amphetamine.

19:00 Guest It's not a drug of choice. There's one thing that everyone listening should know. PMA was only introduced on the ecstasy market because the precursors to make it were cheaper and less risky to obtain because the government's not watching them. And all of the PMA tablets that have been released on the ecstasy market are Mitsubishi tablets with the Mitsubishi logo on them, white, measuring about 7.5 millimeters across. They first surfaced in Europe about nine years ago.

19:30 Adam Do you think any of our stone listeners know what 7.5 millimeter is?

19:33 Guest Well, if they come to the Dance Safe website, we show them how they can use a pair of calipers to measure the pill to see if they're getting one that's a PMA. And it's very important that they do that if they're going to swallow that pill, they want to make sure they're not getting PMA.

19:49 Adam All right. Should we take some calls?

19:51 Drew Yes, sir.

19:52 Adam Let's keep going here. Brian? Yeah. You're 21?

19:56 Caller How you doing?

19:57 Good.

19:57 Adam What's up?

19:59 Caller I got two questions. My first one. Now, I've heard that ecstasy can be made with either heroin or cocaine.

20:10 Am I full of crap or?

20:12 Guest Well, I would know this answer because...

20:15 Adam You ran a lab for many years in the late 70s.

20:17 Guest I don't run a lab, but I contract with a lab in Sacramento with a DEA license who's legally allowed to test anonymously sent ecstasy tablets. And if you go to the Dance Safe website, dance safe.org, you can see about 700 ecstasy tablets that we've analyzed using gas chromatography over the last year and a half. One of them contained a tiny amount of cocaine. None of them have ever contained heroin.

20:42 Adam Okay.

20:43 Drew Do they put LSD in them sometimes?

20:44 Guest None of them have ever contained LSD either.

20:46 Drew So it's DXM, PMA, and plain old amphetamine.

20:50 Guest Then there's MDA.

20:52 Drew MDA.

20:52 Guest MDE.

20:54 Drew What's MDE?

20:54 Guest MDE, methylene dioxide, ethyl amphetamine. It's a shorter acting, it's a phenethylamine like MDMA. Sort of similar effect, I'm told, but shorter acting and more of a stoning. MDA, MDMA, and MDE are sort of in the ecstasy family. MDMA being real ecstasy.

21:13 Drew MDA is even more theoretically neurotoxic.

21:17 Guest Per dose level.

21:18 Adam So the idea when you're sort of counterfeiting these things for lack of a better term, is to try to come close with your high, right? I mean, is heroin or coke, well, coke, that much coke wouldn't do anything to you if you just ate it, really. I mean, the idea is you're not just selling pills and not give an A-high, you have to give them some kind of high.

21:41 Guest Because the scam will last longer if you give a pill that produces some psychoactive effect, particularly young people who may never have done ecstasy before.

21:48 Adam They have nothing to compare it to.

21:50 Guest They don't come running back to demand their money. They'll just say, Oh, I don't like this. This isn't what everyone else said ecstasy was supposed to be like.

21:56 Guest It's a rather unusual situation in that when someone tells you they've taken ecstasy, you really don't know what they've taken. That's how things have evolved in this scene.

22:06 Adam Right. And half the people, especially if you're in a rave environment, if you're just sped up, you're having a good time. I mean, there's plenty of... Listen, when I was 16, I was 26, 36. I would have enjoyed that.

22:20 Drew They've actually done some studies where they correlated the incidents of violence and aggression with the probability of ecstasy being sold actually being amphetamine instead of MDMA or MDA.

22:32 Guest Yeah.

22:32 Drew Then the people get more aggressive, more violent on a pure speed.

22:35 Guest I would certainly agree with that.

22:37 Adam All right. We're going to take ourselves a little break. Tonight is ecstasy night where, I mean, it, you know, it's something we sit here and talk about this stuff every night. And I've learned more in the last 20 minutes, although, you know, because of the drug use, I will have forgotten it before we leave the studio. But I've learned more in the last 20 minutes than I think I've learned in the last three years on this topic. And, and Drew, you're, you're right on top of this. And you probably heard a few things tonight so far that you may not have known yourself. So that's what we're covering tonight, folks. And if you've got some calls and some questions for that, we'd be glad to take them. We'll take a little break. We'll be right back. Yep, it is Loveline. I'm Adam Corolla. That is Dr. Drew over there. And tomorrow night show is going to be very different. Andy Dick will be in here. So it will be nothing like tonight's show.

24:00 Drew Could not be more different.

24:01 Jesus Christ in heaven.

24:05 Drew It's sort of an example of the effects of drugs, though, isn't it?

24:08 Adam Yes.

24:08 Drew So it's a living, breathing example.

24:11 Adam I think what happened with Andy Dick is his mom took in too much ether when she was pregnant with him.

24:18 Drew Yes.

24:19 Adam And may have poisoned him. And then I think he was dropped. Then he did drugs. Jesus Christ in heaven.

24:27 Drew Where is this bin?

24:28 Send me an ounce of this stuff.

24:30 Guest Who is that guy? Can you shut him up? That's not very professional.

24:35 Adam Emanuel Sferios is here tonight. He's the founder and executive director of Dance Safe. Also, we have on the line Dr. Charles Grob. He is the director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor, UCLA. One of Drew's very close compadres, right, Drew?

24:53 Drew Very close.

24:54 Adam All right.

24:54 Drew Dear.

24:55 Adam We are...

24:55 Drew Dear friends.

24:56 Adam Dear, dear, dear friends. We are talking about ecstasy tonight. We have a couple of experts with us and we'll try to get some answers to some of your questions. Angela?

25:06 Caller Hello?

25:07 Adam Year 20. What's up?

25:08 Caller Hi. I have been a long-time listener for about six years and first time I've called, so... Big times. I was wanted to relate an experience. I have had a friend, well she's kind of an ex-friend now, who's been doing ecstasy probably for about six years and Drew's really right about the effects that it has on your personality and your depression level because she used to be fun, she used to be jovial, now it just doesn't happen anymore. She does ecstasy at least once a week, maybe every two or three days. So there are some terrible effects and I wish that people wouldn't rely so much on the scare tactics of trying telling people they're gonna die because that's not the worst thing that can happen.

25:57 Adam No, there's far worse than death.

25:59 Caller Yeah, so there, I mean it's just very sad.

26:03 Adam I was just kidding actually, there's really nothing worse than death.

26:06 Drew They are sad when you see those cases.

26:08 Caller Well no, there's nothing exactly worse than death.

26:11 Drew Dr. Grob, have you seen other ecstasy compulsive users or maybe addiction to that?

26:15 Guest Yeah, I mean years ago it was thought to be very unusual that someone would use the drug at that frequency. However, in the last few years we are seeing more cases of individuals with chronic use patterns developing. One question though I would have about a situation like this is, you know, again, as we were talking about before, we really don't know what's in those ecstasy tabs. Now, some people, a small number of people, do have a compulsive need to take MDMA, if that's the drug that's in ecstasy, on a regular, you know, a relatively frequent basis. But some of these people may be taking ecstasy, which turns out to be amphetamine, which is a far more addictive drug. The problem in this area is that there's just a lot of, there's a lack of clarity as to very often what these people are taking.

27:11 Adam How difficult is it to test for yourself?

27:16 Guest Oh, what, to test the pills? Well, there are a couple of labs around. Emanuel's been working with one of them that are licensed to do assays. However, they're generally speaking, clinicians are not provided with sample tablets.

27:36 Adam But couldn't one do it oneself?

27:38 Drew But these guys, not just on your own.

27:41 Guest We do offer a testing kit on our website that provides a limited but useful screen against a large majority of the pills that contain other than MDMA.

27:53 Adam How much is the kit?

27:55 Guest We ask for a donation of $25 or more and it tests about 200 times.

28:02 Drew I've seen a few of these cases of chronic users of ecstasy and there is a distinct syndrome and Angela's Friend is sort of a characteristic example of that. They are definitely doing something other than amphetamine because there are also many amphetamine users that use a hell of a lot of MDMA and that's a predominant amphetamine addiction syndrome. These people are psychotic. It looks like a bipolar manic state except their cognition is extremely impaired. They are incredibly paranoid, disorganized, and it's like to me, it's like trying to deal with somebody who's been using massive amounts of LSD and amphetamine.

28:36 Adam But listen, for the young stone teenagers listening to the show because we're talking a lot of numbers and letters and we're getting into a lot of real specific stuff that people are having difficulty following. But to me, here's the bottom line which is you're going to need your brain down the road. You just do, you underestimate it early in life. You don't really think too much about it, ironically.

29:00 Drew They don't believe that them and their brain are related. Right.

29:03 Adam And when you screw that up, man, it is, I mean, you can essentially do damage in a very short period of your life, just a few months and you're screwed for the rest of your days.

29:15 Guest You're underestimating the concern that young people have. The predominant question that we get on our website and in our booth is about the long-term damage they're doing to themselves. So I think young people know that they're in a party stage of their life and that when they get older and graduate college, get a job, have kids, they want to be okay. And they are very concerned. And that's why we have thousands of emails asking us what's going to happen later on. Is there brain damage? Am I going to be depressed permanently or have memory impairments or be a zombie?

29:45 Adam And I do agree there's awareness of it. But is that strong enough to get most people to stop? And I guess it depends what your personal situation is. We talked a lot of people who that all that can be damn. They're moving ahead.

30:01 Guest I don't think I get people to stop taking ecstasy even if some how later down the line, there are mild cognitive impairments because anecdotally young people don't see that now. The Valedictorian is doing ecstasy.

30:16 Adam But it may not be mild.

30:18 Drew The cognitive issue I don't think has been shown at all. That's when somebody is chronically using it and trying to deal with them when they're under the influence of the drug. They seem cognitively impaired. But the affect issues and the chronic depression, anxiety, this sort of stuff.

30:31 Guest Clearly these people need to get off the drug and try to maintain some sobriety for a while. But I think it also raises an interesting historical issue which is when the drug was first examined some 20 years ago and was first looked at as a possible treatment modality, it was felt to be a drug that could be only used very, very sparingly because the positive effects were perceived to lessen over time and the side effects would accentuate.

31:00 Adam Interesting.

31:01 Guest That's why therapists thought it might be a viable therapeutic drug and that individuals would not want to take it.

31:07 Adam For depression?

31:08 Guest In a repetitive way. However, lately we're seeing because of the whole recreational scene and because the average age of use is dropping rapidly, we're seeing all sorts of patterns, I think, that were not expected by the early explorers.

31:23 Guest Truthfully, Dr. Grob, I would like to meet the people that Dr. Drew is meeting who have problems with ecstasy long-term because the abuse patterns that I've seen and our chapters have seen around the country tend to be short-lived and do reflect the early experience of the psychiatrists.

31:44 Drew Those aren't abuse, those are addicts. Those are what I'm talking about. These are people who have a biological disorder.

31:49 Guest To get addicted to a drug, it has to produce that reward again. No, no, no.

31:52 Drew You have to have a genetic issue to begin with. I mean, theoretically, you have to have a genetic potential for alcohol.

31:58 Guest You know, probably it's a small percentage of the overall number of people who are involved with the drug. But when you're seeing such high numbers of people taking it, even that small percentage can be, you know, an appreciable amount of people seeking out treatment.

32:14 Adam Okay, let's talk to our next caller here. This is Adam, he's 21.

32:19 Guest Adam?

32:20 Hi guys, I just wanted to thank you for doing the show first off because this is going to help a lot of people who normally don't listen because there's a lot of people who really want to know about this information.

32:28 Adam Thanks.

32:29 Caller Okay, and my question is, it's my understanding that XC is classified as a level 3 drug or whatever, the same thing as heroin, and the government cannot do any testing on it. Is there anything we can do to encourage to get it tested to see if there's medical uses for it?

32:44 Drew No, I think the marijuana frontier is where that battle is being fought.

32:48 Guest Well, you know, what's interesting is that Adam, right? That's your name too, huh?

32:53 Drew Yeah.

32:53 Guest Introduced tonight.

32:54 Adam You've done your homework. Yes, I do.

32:56 Guest Introduced the show tonight with a joke about rape. Kind of ironically, MDMA-

33:01 Adam I do a lot of rape humor, you'll find, if you listen to the show.

33:04 Guest But there are a lot of people who are suffering now post-traumatic stress disorder because they're rape survivors. And there is a current study going on in Spain, and perhaps Dr. Grob knows more, double-blind placebo-controlled using MDMA therapeutically in group therapy sessions to assess its effectiveness in helping recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder.

33:26 Adam People have been traumatized? Why only rape victims, for instance?

33:29 Guest Well, these happen to be rape survivors, non-victims that are-

33:35 Drew You want to control the population?

33:36 Guest They select it.

33:38 Guest They are resistant to other forms of therapy and they want to see if MDMA helps them.

33:41 Adam What's the difference between a rape survivor and a rape victim?

33:44 Guest It's the language chosen to help recovery-

33:46 Caller Alright, alright, alright.

33:49 Guest MDMA is currently-

33:50 Adam Alright, I don't want to piss them off. I'm just saying, it gets confusing when you go around.

33:55 Guest I'm just trying to educate you, that's all.

33:57 Adam I know all that crap, though. I don't like any of that junk.

34:01 Guest Well, if you're serious about drug abuse prevention as well as healing, one of the issues is not to disempower the person who needs to heal by your statements. And saying a victim or calling an addict perpetually always will be an addict, it kind of removes the power from them.

34:19 Adam Well, but you can't use victim, can you use victim for anything then? You know, what about car crashes? Can you be a victim of a car crash? Of course. You can? How?

34:32 Drew No victims.

34:32 Adam No victims? I mean, I gotta drive again. That's, that's all my only point. All right. Liz, I feel bad for everyone. Don't get me wrong, including myself. Okay.

34:42 Drew Or no one.

34:43 Adam Or no one. Whatever it is, I feel, I feel the same.

34:47 Guest There are therapeutic studies going on in other countries and there are a number of psychiatrists working for it.

34:51 Adam And what happened with that? I mean, did it...

34:53 Guest It's going on currently.

34:54 Adam Did they find anything? Are they, nothing conclusive yet?

34:57 Guest It's been very difficult to get approval in this country. It's, approval has not been achieved as of yet, although there are some hopeful signs. Approval was achieved in a couple of European countries. However, progress there is fairly slow. You have to recognize there's a great deal of resistance around examining substances like this within a treatment context.

35:20 Drew Are you familiar, Dr. Grob, with Alan Schor's work over UCLA?

35:25 Guest Oh, which specifically?

35:27 Drew The attachment theory, the biology of attachment. Yeah, yeah. And I'm just wondering, that's the theory they have about MDME that will enhance attachment or some sort of connectiveness.

35:36 Guest It's meant to induce empathic experience.

35:38 Drew I understand, I understand. And I wonder if he had an opinion. He's really sort of the leading expert on the biology of attachment. I wonder if...

35:44 Guest I don't know. That would be a good question to ask him.

35:47 Guest I can tell you the sociology of attachment. A lot of people will take ecstasy for the first time at a rave and have taken it a hundred times since and have only ever taken it at a rave and have only ever gone to a rave taking it. That's a clear sign of associating the event with the drug. And...

36:09 Adam And you mean... and so you're in a positive... I mean, you're in...

36:14 Guest It reinforces the bonding. The things you're doing when you're on it.

36:19 Adam That's why kids love cotton candy because they only get it at Disneyland and Magic Mountain. I think if you gave them cotton candy like at school... Or a church or something, they'd hate it. Is it that kind of thing? I mean, they're in an environment they want to be in, having a good time when they're experiencing the drugs, so they have a positive association with it.

36:38 Guest One of the harm reduction issues that we deal with, isn't really talked about too much, is helping young people integrate these experiences into their lives in a healthy way because it's such a positive force, experience for them. They do things like they tell their parents that they took it and now they're grounded, or they want their friends to do it and now their friends think they're druggies. And they become ravers who only hang out with other ecstasy using ravers. And that can be disruptive to a growing, developing teenager. And so counseling around these things is important harm reduction too.

37:10 Adam Is one hit the standard dose for these raves or are people doing multi-hits?

37:16 Guest Well, one of the problems is the dose levels, if in fact it is even real MDMA in the pill, the dose levels vary greatly. Anywhere between 30, 40, 50, up to 150 is the most we've seen. That would be considered a high-end therapeutic slash recreational dose level. It averages probably around 80. So a lot of young people get used to taking two, three pills. Next thing you know, a PMA tablet comes along. It's not ecstasy at all. They take two or three tablets of PMA and that is a significant overdose. And a lot of people have died from it.

37:50 Adam And you could be doing some mixing because you get the real stuff or the pure stuff. I'm getting freaked out on my semantics now and then you get the speed.

38:00 Guest It's important to keep in mind that there's very poor quality control with the illicit drug market and it becomes more so all the time.

38:10 Guest And ecstasy is the most highly adulterated illicit drug market out there. Adulterated is not quite appropriate because it's not that we're seeing MDMA plus other stuff together in the same pill. That happens sometimes but it's usually completely fake pills that have completely different drugs.

38:29 Adam Right. So it's a very high percentage of people that are doing it that don't even know what they're doing. All right. We're going to take ourselves a little break. We'll come back more with ecstasy after this.

38:53 You're listening to Loveline on Outrageous Talk Radio. 100.7 The Buzz.

39:08 Caller Hi, this is David Alan Greer, and you are listening to Love Buying with Adam Corolla and the one and only Dr. Drew.

39:16 Adam Yes, you is, and he will be in here Tuesday night, David Alan Greer, our good friend, also our good friend Andy Dick will be in here Monday night, tomorrow night, so we'll talk to them during the week. Brian Herter, the race car driver, will be in here, so I can explain to him how many cc's his engine is, like I did last time, and he can explain to me why I can't race in the Toyota Grand Prix of Endurance or whatever the hell is going on up there in Long Beach this weekend. Emanuel Sferios is our guest tonight. He is the founder and executive director of Dance Safe. It's an organization that has a... Give the website out, Emanuel, by the way.

39:59 Guest www.dancesafe.org, Dance Safe is an safety one word, dancesafe.org.

40:04 Adam And also we have on the phone Dr. Charles Grob. He is the director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor UCLA. Alrighty, we're talking about ecstasy. Let's talk to Sarah. Sarah?

40:18 Caller Hello?

40:19 Adam You're 19.

40:20 Caller Hi, a caller had said earlier that he heard that heroin was put in ecstasy and the tester said that he had never seen that before, but I heard that the more brown spots, that that was heroin. Does he know what else that could be?

40:33 Guest This is a very common question. It's a rumor that's going around. You can tell nothing about the pill by looking at it. The speckles that you might see in it are simply variations in binder material that they're choosing to put in. Not only have we never seen it at our lab, but we talked to laboratories who test ecstasy tablets around the world, and they've never found heroin in an ecstasy tablet. Some people have felt heroin-like effects, particularly if they get a pill containing dextromethorphin. That helped spur these rumors along. DXM.

41:11 Adam Obviously, there's a method to this. If you're going to try to duplicate this, you're not all over the map with it.

41:18 Drew There's something that works. They want to make money, these people, that sell these pills.

41:22 Adam Yeah, and I'm saying, like any business, they're the tricks of the trade, and these guys do follow consistent pattern, at least semi-consistent, it sounds like. John? John? Caller goes by the name of John's 25, Washington, DC.? I can't do more than that.

41:39 Drew No.

41:40 Adam What do you think his sign might be?

41:42 Drew Libra.

41:42 Adam Libra, John? Okay. Well, maybe he's high now.

41:48 Hold on.

41:49 Adam Andre?

41:51 Hey.

41:52 Adam Hey, you're 14. What's up?

41:53 Caller Yeah. Actually, I wanted to say thank you, Dance Safe, for all of your help, for just really being there for everybody. Because I go to Raze a lot and one of my friends has been taken ecstasy and she has given a pill to you guys, and it turned out bad and she hasn't taken it. And I just want to say thank you for that.

42:12 Guest Well, I'll say you're welcome on behalf of all of our volunteers out there around the country.

42:16 Adam How long does it take for you to get back to somebody if they send you a pill to be tested?

42:20 Guest Well, there's two things we're talking about. If they send a pill to the laboratory, not to us, but directly to the lab anonymously, we'll have the result up on our website usually within two weeks. And if they come to the booth, we have the result immediately. On the spot?

42:35 Adam Okay. Is there a long line?

42:37 Guest Sometimes. It just depends on, you know, I've been...

42:41 Adam You know, it would suck if you thought you were in the beer line, and you turn out you're in the ecstasy testing line. That would suck. All right, go ahead. I'm sorry.

42:49 Guest Yeah, I've actually had to tell people, single file, please, because there have been hands with pills coming at me.

42:53 Caller Oh, really?

42:55 Adam That's like Drew in college.

42:58 Drew I was handing them out, though.

42:59 Adam Oh, I see.

43:00 Guest Yeah, you're handing them out. You haven't brought it up yet. There's always a question, you know, how can we do this? There's a public display of a controlled substance, right? Don't the police shut us down? And so I'll ask the question for you.

43:09 Adam So I can say we're all for it, by the way. That's why we're not busting your chops on it.

43:14 Guest But go ahead. We have negotiated amnesty arrangements with the police and in about half a dozen cities around the country where we test pills.

43:21 Adam Who can you do that?

43:22 Drew Interesting.

43:23 Guest They agree not to.

43:24 Drew Don't give him any ideas.

43:24 Adam I'd like to do have the goddamn Culver City PD about these arrows.

43:28 They are driving driving that out.

43:30 Adam Yes, I'm driving amnesty.

43:32 Guest They agree not to arrest the users approaching our booth because they recognize it's a vital health and safety service similar to needle exchange programs or the unwritten policy that the police give to emergency rooms often, not always, but often that they won't pursue inquiries into people with overdoses showing up. It's harm reduction even though it's not called that.

43:52 Adam And it's nice that we're sort of progressing that way because it wasn't that long ago. I mean, I remember when the clean, you know, needle exchange program was brought up sometime in, I don't know, 87, 88 or something. It got shot right down.

44:07 Drew It's still, it's very good.

44:08 Adam Still having, still having trouble? Yeah, genius. Good.

44:11 Guest You know, the Connecticut Supreme Court just legalized it using the exact terminology of the needle exchangers themselves. So that's the highest court now.

44:22 Drew It's catching on a little.

44:24 Guest I mentioned in Europe, the public health agencies provide for pill testing at some of these rave events. In this country, it's only private groups like Emanuel's group, but in Europe, the government has taken a more proactive stance to try to address production issues.

44:43 Adam Europe seems to be better in almost every category that we count as a society, except for we still kick their ass about every 40 or 50 years, and gas is six bucks a gallon. Those are the two reasons I still don't trust the Europeans. All right, Andre? Andre? Call her Andre?

45:04 Caller Yeah.

45:04 Adam There you go, buddy.

45:05 Caller All right. I have advice for anybody that has been thinking of taking ecstasy.

45:10 Adam Yes.

45:10 Caller At raves or not. Well, I go to raves a lot. I've been about 10 or 12 raves, and really, when I feel influenced, I would look at the pill and just be like, this is my life in my hand. You do not know what's in this pill. You do not know what it's going to do to you. You do not know how your body is going to react to it. So really, just tell, like, I'm just saying this to anybody who would feel influenced. Just tell that to yourself. It really does help.

45:34 Adam Okay.

45:35 Caller Good, good.

45:35 Adam And Andre, you're 14. Why don't you stay home? Well, I'd like to kick your dad right in the nuts. Horrible job he's doing with her. 14, hanging out at raves all night.

45:46 Guest Andre is not the person that Dance Safe is that concerned about, because he obviously is a very risk-averse person.

45:52 Drew At 14, at 16, it may be a different story.

45:54 Guest Well, you never know. People tend to be the same. You know, if they're risk-averse.

45:57 Adam Wait till his scrotum drops.

45:59 Guest But the advice he gave is probably not going to be heated to by novelty-seeking individuals.

46:04 Adam No, and I think we're all, I mean, we're doing this show, and you're doing Dance Safe, and Dr. Charles Grob is doing his thing, and we're all here basically saying there's no way we're going to get anyone to stop doing things. Let's see if we can, if they can do it a more informed way and a safer way.

46:22 Guest And the thing that's most interesting to me about ecstasy is that this is the one drug where there's absolutely no internalized stigma. Users will admit that they use, they'll want their friends and their families to use it, too. They'll talk about the benefits. If our government cannot get rid of Speed, of heroin drugs, where if people use them, they don't even tell their friends, how can they ever think they're going to get rid of ecstasy?

46:48 Adam I had to start doing Coke in the bathroom here, because Drew and Ann were coming down on me.

46:54 Drew I tried to get you to go over to MDMA.

46:56 Adam Yeah, that's right. I remember he brought some once by a little sample kit.

47:00 Guest Oh, I brought some fake ecstasy pills.

47:02 Adam Oh, did you?

47:02 Guest Yeah. These are pills. I got a vial here. These are pills from the laboratory that did not contain any illicit substance.

47:09 Drew Look at all the different kinds of pills.

47:10 Adam You guys at the mansion are going to be so happy.

47:11 Guest No, go right ahead. Wow. A lot of those.

47:14 Drew Would you put one of those things in your mouth?

47:16 Adam Yeah.

47:16 Drew Look at that.

47:17 Guest A lot of those contain dextromethorphane.

47:18 Adam I mean, no.

47:19 Guest Ephedrine, caffeine. Ephedrine, by the way, Dr. Grob said relatively harmless. We've seen a lot of adverse reactions in people taking Ephedrine. It can be a very, very harsh stimulant for a lot of people.

47:31 Adam All right. We have to take ourselves another break. Of course, ecstasy is the topic tonight. And tonight's the night to ask your questions. We'll be right back.

47:42 Love Line, Love Line, 1-800-LOVE-191.

47:49 Adam Yep, Love Line. I'm Adam Corolla. That is Dr. Drew over there. We're talking about ecstasy tonight. We have some experts amongst us.

47:56 Guest Oh, I have a question. Yeah. With the name Love Line, it sounds like this show was designed to talk about ecstasy.

48:02 Adam Where did that name come from? Drew was high in 1984 and this just came to him. Or maybe it was a peyote vision. I don't remember what you were into back then.

48:12 Drew It's beyond started as that. Do we have that on tape in fact?

48:17 Adam It's a good question, but no. No, although it does seem to work for us tonight. Andy Dick tomorrow night to talk about residual effects of drug use. And David Alan Greer in here, who really doesn't need drugs tuesday night to be insane?

48:33 Drew He's going to be talking about bipolar mania.

48:35 Adam That's right. Emanuel Sferios is our guest tonight. He's founder and executive director of Dance Safe. Also on the line, we have Dr. Charles Grob. He's director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor UCLA. So a couple of experts. And then of course, Dr. Drew, of course. Let's take some more calls, Carol.

48:58 Caller Hi. How are you guys doing tonight?

48:59 Adam Good.

49:00 Caller Okay. I'm glad. Well, my question is, well, let me tell you my story about it. I've been going to raise since I was 16, I'm 21 right now and I've done acid, I've done ecstasy way back before anybody really knew what it was about, really before I was published, besides everything. And I started noticing and my friends started noticing, even my family, that when I talk, sometimes if I'm talking to you or whatever and all of a sudden someone interrupts me, I'll lose focus and I'll be like, what was I talking about? And they'll be like, oh, you were talking about this.

49:34 Drew Are you getting depressed also?

49:36 Caller Yeah. Sometimes I'm doing my homework and I'll be like, I'm so stupid, I'm not getting it. I've never been like that. And I never used to fight with my family or whatever.

49:46 Drew A couple, you sort of illustrate one of the problems with studying ecstasy is that people that do ecstasy also do a number of other drugs, including LSD. And it's hard to separate out sometimes the effect from LSD. Do you still see trailers after fast moving objects? No. You don't see trailers? No. For me, that's sort of again, a threshold sign of LSD.

50:04 Guest Have you ever seen trailers at fast moving objects?

50:11 Caller When I used to do acid, I don't do it anymore because I had a really bad trip, so I stopped.

50:14 Drew But you don't see the trailers anymore?

50:17 Caller No, not really. I've never really...

50:19 Adam Well, she saw them when she was high.

50:21 Drew A threshold, again, a clinical phenomenon that I've observed over and again is the people that have chronic depressions from LSD use are the people that still see trailers for years and years after their last exposure, potentially lifetime.

50:33 Adam Well, are you still doing drugs, Carol?

50:37 Caller The only thing I do is I do ecstasy. Like I'll go to Raze. Right.

50:40 Guest How often?

50:42 Caller Like about maybe... There's a really good one coming up. Well, like maybe once or twice a month.

50:47 Guest Once or twice a month.

50:48 Caller I started noticing also that sometimes I'll do more than one because I don't feel anything, like I don't feel the effect. I'll be standing by the speakers or something. I'm like, it's not hitting me and I'll buy another one and I'll take it.

51:00 Adam Hey, Carol, but you've been talking firsthand about some of the difficulty and some of the effects that these drugs may have caused on you and your ability to concentrate and things like that. Why are you still going with it?

51:15 Caller I like the way it makes me feel, you know? I love...

51:17 Drew Is there alcoholism in your family, Carol?

51:19 Caller Is there what?

51:20 Drew Alcoholism in your family?

51:21 Caller No, none at all.

51:23 Drew Dr. Grob, are you familiar with Alan Leshner and his sort of characterization of presumably the kind of syndrome that Carol is talking about? Because he, at least his PET scanning studies show that the same exact damage that we've seen from heavy amphetamine exposure and that indeed memory and affect are the primary centers being affected.

51:43 Guest Well, I think some of that research is quite preliminary. There needs to be more before we know definitively what the effects are on the brain. However, I think your young lady's story brings up another issue, though, which is one of the confounding factors in trying to understand what the effects of the drug are is that in addition that individuals are taking a number of different drugs, one of the reasons why people might take drugs on a frequent basis is that they're trying to self-medicate an underlying psychiatric disorder, particularly a depression, so that might be entering into it as well.

52:22 Guest I'm hearing a completely different thing when Carol speaks here. I'm hearing an intelligent, articulate, concerned young woman who enjoys…

52:29 Adam Junior college, right, Carol?

52:31 Guest Who enjoys her ex…

52:32 Adam Junior college?

52:33 Caller Right.

52:34 Adam Yeah. Well, let's not go too far with the intelligent.

52:36 Guest Who enjoys her ex…

52:37 Caller I mean, I'm doing good in school. It's not like I'm…

52:39 Adam No, you're doing good in junior college. It's like doing good in T-ball.

52:41 Guest Here's my point.

52:43 Guest She's articulate. She's doing well in school. She enjoys her ecstasy experiences. She's concerned about side effects that are happening right now, and she has to make a choice of balancing. What does she like more and what's causing it? And that does not have to be perceived as an illness or an addiction. I've talked to a lot of people who use ecstasy on a regular basis, once a month, something like that, and who say, yeah, get a hangover for a few days after, but they continue to do it. And who am I to say that they have a problem from doing it? They're enjoying it.

53:16 Adam But you brought up earlier that she was saying she was having a problem.

53:19 Guest She is, and she's grappling with the issues, and she has a choice to make now.

53:23 Drew Hopefully it's not too late.

53:24 Caller It's not like I want to stop, but I mean, every time that me and my friend go, it's like I'll just bump into someone and they'll be like, oh, we're selling eggs or something, and it's really hard for me to say no.

53:34 Guest So you do want to, I heard you just say you do want to stop?

53:38 Caller I do, like I do want to because it's like I don't like I don't even know how to take, you know, medicine and stuff like that. They don't know how far, you know, what will really happen to you, what's going to really happen to you in the future and stuff. I don't want to pass this on to my kids.

53:50 Drew You know, that won't happen.

53:51 Caller My kids will be tweakers, you know.

53:53 Drew No, no, that you don't have to worry about. Not unless you use while you're pregnant.

53:56 Adam Carol, if you want to stop, why don't you just not attend the raves?

53:59 Caller All my friends go.

54:01 Adam Oh, well, what are you gonna do?

54:02 Drew I think the idea of getting yourself evaluated for possible depression is appropriate because that may be what's adding to your compulsion to use. You feel crummy. Right. And then the next thing is making you feel worse, ultimately, you know, at least after the fact, and get an evaluation. You earlier about the fact that you have a number of people who are on Paxil, on Prozac, whatever.

54:21 Adam What's the average, I just have a quick question. What's the average age at the raves that you've been at, if you could approximate that?

54:27 Guest It totally depends on the event. What's the rave? Sometimes they don't use the word rave.

54:33 Adam What we traditionally call a rave, or what people picture when the word rave is brought up. I'm not talking about the club, per se.

54:41 Guest The range is between 17 and 30, probably closer to the 21, 22.

54:47 Drew Early college.

54:48 Guest Early college.

54:49 Adam I would have thought it was more even like 17, 18, or something like that.

54:53 Guest The commercial massives, as they're called, the large ones at the fairgrounds and whatnot, they tend to advertise around the suburbs, and they draw a younger crowd. Right. And you do get high school age.

55:04 Adam But you do see a fair amount of... You ever see a guy like 41, 42 over there?

55:08 Guest Oh yeah, of course.

55:09 Adam Really? Yeah. You know what he's trying to do? He's trying to nail 19-year-old chicks. That's what he's doing there. At least that's why I'd be there.

55:17 Drew No argument.

55:18 Adam Yeah.

55:18 Drew But that is fair. There's an accuracy.

55:20 Adam Yeah. You see these vultures floating around. I bet guys, you know, the 37 years old, they're sober is the days along and they're looking to score.

55:31 Guest There was an interesting study done by a sociologist in England who kind of compared the alcohol in my club scene to the ecstasy using rave culture, interviewing young women and found that young women who attend raves feel a much greater sense of independence and freedom precisely because most of the men at raves are not just trying to get laid, whereas at alcohol clubs, that's a big expectation.

55:54 Adam Well, that's probably true. Yeah.

55:56 Guest And I believe that's an effect of the MDMA. The acute action of MDMA reduces the sexual compulsion. And I think we need to research the psychological effects the widespread use of MDMA is having on younger generation. I've seen young people, well, both pro and con, I've seen young people make great friends and be much more open and emotional. I've seen men who are typically, you know, me when I was 16, right? Not talking about my emotions, you know? So it allows more self-reflection. The same time I've seen young people make best friends at a rave, when they think that they're going to be lifelong friends, and then like, you know, or get into a relationship while they're on ecstasy, and then realize a couple days later, well, we don't really have much in common. So there's a lot of this generation now who's using ecstasy. I think is experiencing an adolescence that is much different from that that you and I experienced.

56:56 Adam I mean, staying home, masturbating, and waiting for Starsky and Hutch to come on is not what's going on today. Frank?

57:03 Caller Yeah.

57:04 Adam Year 17?

57:05 Caller Yeah.

57:05 Adam What's up?

57:07 Caller Um, I've been listening to you guys all night talking about this, and one thing I haven't heard come up is that people die from this.

57:14 Adam We did discuss it earlier.

57:15 Drew Early on, yeah. You have some friends? Something happened to somebody?

57:19 Caller Yeah, I've seen three of my friends die from this stuff. I mean, not knowing how much their body can take and OD on it the first time.

57:25 Drew What were the syndromes they got into?

57:28 Caller The syndromes were?

57:29 Drew What did you see?

57:30 Caller Well, we're at raves, you know, and pop one, and then they just start going into convulsions, passing out, you know, coming in and out, and then just...

57:41 Drew So it wasn't like they were up dancing for a long period of time after they took it or even before they took it. They took it and then immediately went down with seizures?

57:49 Caller Yeah.

57:50 Adam At three different raves?

57:53 Guest Yeah.

57:55 Guest That sounds rather unusual. Yeah. The estimates of the number of deaths in this country are not altogether clear because of how we keep statistics, but in England, their national registry there indicates that every year approximately 15 people die of malignant hypothermia, and that's in the face of perhaps a half million taking the drug every weekend. So when deaths do occur, obviously, they're always tragic, but they are relatively rare, so it's hard to believe that.

58:26 Guest Well, I would disagree with that right now. I think they were up until this year, but I tend to get called when someone dies at a rave now because of the exposure Dance Safe has gotten, and there have already been seven rave deaths so far this year. That's 2.33 per month, and that's way too many. The thing about this is...

58:44 Guest What does the tox screen show?

58:46 Guest Well, some of them haven't come back yet. Some, you know, one of them we know was hyponitremia, somebody who drank too much water, but the vast majority of these...

58:53 Drew Hyponitremia, a young, healthy adult can't get, no matter how much water you drink.

58:56 Adam Drank too much water, really?

58:57 Guest That was the coroner's report.

58:59 Drew But that's a medication effect.

59:00 Guest A usual sign, there have been a few water intoxication deaths reported.

59:05 Drew In, not on somebody else?

59:06 Guest Young women, apparently it's only been reported in young women. John Henry, a British medical researcher, had a study where he administered low dose MDMA to human volunteers and found that in women, but not in men, the vasopressin level increased.

59:27 Guest And the deaths were women, were young women.

59:29 Guest But that's the point is that it's maybe an association.

59:32 Drew A healthy young woman cannot drink enough water, get hyponatremic without the help of medication. Your kidneys will handle it, period.

59:37 Guest Well, this young woman was throwing up, re-drinking water, throwing up, re-drinking, and her friend said she drank three gallons.

59:44 Adam Why would she do that if she wasn't high?

59:47 Guest This is a lesson that the harm reduction groups in England learned the hard way. The predominant cause of death after ecstasy was heat stroke, dehydration, and hypothermia. So all the literature said, drink water, drink water, drink water. Well, now there's a culture where ecstasy users tell their friends, make sure you drink water, make sure you drink enough water because that's the predominant understanding. And some people misinterpret that if they're having a bad experience, they think that if they drink water, they'll come down. So you're panicking and you just keep on drinking. So now the harm reductionists say, drink water, drink water, drink water, but don't drink too much water. Two to four cups an hour is all you need.

1:00:22 Caller Right. All right.

1:00:23 Adam So, but she did take the ecstasy before she then essentially killed herself with the water.

1:00:28 Guest Yeah, I was talking about the deaths.

1:00:29 Guest That's one of them. But most of them involve these settings. Promoters who are irresponsible and pack them in like sardines and it gets to be 105 degrees on the dance floor. And then they turn the cold water taps off in the bathroom and sell bottled water at six dollars for eight ounces. And it becomes difficult to obtain, to replenish your body fluids. And you can't escape the heat sometimes.

1:00:55 Adam Those types of promoters are going to have a special corner in hell next to the publicist corner.

1:01:01 Drew Actually, that's just the P, the P section.

1:01:04 Adam Well, the promoters and publicists will be under P in hell.

1:01:08 Guest Dance Safe is about to launch a safe settings campaign where we actually are going to shift our emphasis from educating users to educating promoters and club owners, the venue owners, to make sure that they take into account the health and safety of their patrons and put people before profits.

1:01:24 Adam James?

1:01:25 Guest Yes, sir.

1:01:26 Adam You're 27.

1:01:27 Guest Yes, I am, sir. Am I speaking with Drew?

1:01:31 No.

1:01:31 Adam You're speaking with everybody.

1:01:33 Guest Wonderful. Adam, Drew, hello.

1:01:35 Adam Hello.

1:01:36 Good morning.

1:01:36 Guest I'm calling from Michigan, which is the birthplace of Techno, which is what is played normally at raves. I must say, well, this is an informative show and you guys are doing a wonderful job with it. You're looking at it analytically and scientifically and you are not, it's kind of like tunnel vision. You aren't taking into the fact that there is a subculture based around this. I've been involved in it since 1992. It was the first rave I went to personally. I am a cross-addicted individual recovering and...

1:02:07 Adam What addicted?

1:02:08 Drew Cross-addicted.

1:02:09 Adam What is cross-addicted? Religious nut?

1:02:11 Drew One drug to the next.

1:02:12 Adam Oh, I see.

1:02:13 Guest However, what I'm trying to say is that you have to understand the culture and what these kids, as you like to call them, however, it spans a much broader region than that, are looking for, is the endorphin and dopamine high that they can get through methodical dancing. It's like running on a treadmill. If you ever go to a rave and watch people dance, it's like running on a treadmill. And with that type of exposure, they're just trying to get the dopamine and then morphins into their body, just like you'd run. But they don't want to put on the running suit and sell out, as it were, supposedly. So it's not just the E at the raves they're looking for. They're looking for the nitrous, they're looking for the cocaine, they're looking for the marijuana. They're looking for a vast myriad of drugs.

1:02:58 Drew James, what is the sort of social benefit, do you think, at raves? Why under that setting? If they don't, you know, we heard earlier that men aren't seemingly looking for sexual partners, women aren't feeling more empowered because men aren't all over them. What is somebody going there for?

1:03:14 Guest The best I could put it on point on all fours for you guys is to say it's more like the hippie generation, if you will, that it's kind of a commune of, yes, we are the generation Xers and yes, this is how we choose to express ourselves and no, we aren't the hippies, we're something different, we're a little more aggressive. That's kind of the socio-political economic atmosphere that goes on there because, I mean, if you have, if you've got $25 or $50 or $75, which is usually the going rate for one pill to spend on this sort of thing, you... What?

1:03:47 Adam Oh, going rate?

1:03:49 Guest That's by going rate.

1:03:50 Guest I've never heard $75. I've heard it up to $35 in the Midwest sometimes.

1:03:55 Guest Yeah. And that's usually the going rate. And if you've got that kind of money to spend, it's, you're not really concerned about, about expenditures or, or what the substance is going to do to you. It's just getting that up, pumped up level high that you can only get from exercise really physically.

1:04:17 Drew So it's all about arousal, all about thrill.

1:04:19 Guest That's exactly right.

1:04:21 Adam James, James made a couple of good points and then let us down a couple of dead ends. So it's, you got 75 bucks to spend on drugs, then you are ready for the ending there. And it didn't make sense, but yeah, I, he's doing good.

1:04:34 Drew That's good.

1:04:34 Adam He's, he's doing good. Even with the, with the cross addiction.

1:04:38 Drew Yeah.

1:04:39 Adam We don't talk about that too much on this show.

1:04:41 Drew I do.

1:04:42 Adam You just call them addicts, basically.

1:04:43 Drew Yeah. I, I, the marijuana is, you know, when I talk about the marijuana syndrome and going over to speed, it's cross addiction.

1:04:48 Adam Nice. All right. Let's talk to Craig now. Craig is 19. Craig.

1:04:54 How's it going, fellas? Good, Craig. Um, I just have an opinion, a voice about the Dance Safe organization. I just don't feel they're doing a service to adolescents. They're taking these pills from these children, young adults that these raise and testing it.

1:05:09 Guest And then they had it right back to the people.

1:05:11 Guest That's actually not what we do. It's a common mistake for people to think that we test the pill and hand it back. Like we actually scrape the pill and hand it back to them before we test it.

1:05:20 Guest Now, is your organization Dance Safe the same one I think I saw on like Dateline or 60 Minutes a few months ago?

1:05:26 Guest We've been on a number of those TV magazine shows, yeah.

1:05:29 Guest Okay, I saw one of these on TV and they showed the two people there at the rave. They scraped the pill and tested it. And the news organization made the point that the, I think it was a razor blade they were using to scrape was not cleansed and it was not sterilized between each testing so it's very likely.

1:05:48 Yeah, that was the contamination using these pills.

1:05:50 Guest That was the 2020 episode and.

1:05:53 Adam Hold on, let him respond Craig, go ahead.

1:05:57 Guest That was the 2020 episode who did absolutely the worst hit piece on us that anyone's ever done. And.

1:06:06 Adam I think I may have seen that by the way.

1:06:08 Guest And you know, all the media has been great, very supportive of harm reduction except for the 2020 show. And if you look at their website afterwards, they got thousands, tens of thousands of people criticizing them. And we got thousands of people emailing us afterwards, saying that they think what we're doing is great. The whole was great. Washing the razor blade issues, just a red herring. They were looking for reasons to make us look unprofessional. We're a peer based drug abuse prevention program. And there simply is no cross contamination between tablets.

1:06:36 Drew Hey, Craig, if you can believe that all of us have an interest in just helping young people be healthier, how do you think it ought to be approached? If we assume that's your goal too.

1:06:48 Guest I don't know. It seems that they're not doing a service to these people at all.

1:06:53 Adam But Craig, I hear what you're saying. I hate the kids too. Don't get me wrong. But here's what it is. I agree with Drew. It's like if not this, then what? What are we going to do? I mean, chain every kid to the radiator that's in their entry hall. What are we going to do? They're going to go out. They're going to do the drugs. They're going to get into trouble.

1:07:15 Guest Craig, every single person that has come up to a Dance Safe booth to have their pill tested was going to swallow that pill anyway. We've never enabled someone to find ecstasy they didn't already have, but we've successfully prevented thousands of people from consuming what they thought was ecstasy, but may have been something far more dangerous like PMA.

1:07:34 Guest You prevent them from taking something which could be far more dangerous, but the ecstasy itself is still very dangerous.

1:07:40 Caller Dr. Drew and the others...

1:07:41 Guest And this is why we always tell them......testify that ecstasy is not a good thing.

1:07:45 Guest Maybe it's not the worst, but it's not a good thing.

1:07:48 Guest Yep. I brought with me here in the studio the sign that we have posted on our table that we make every person read if their pill test is positive.

1:07:57 Adam I got it. It says, show us your ***, I said.

1:07:59 Guest And...

1:08:00 Adam Adam, you're awesome, man.

1:08:01 Caller I love you.

1:08:03 Adam Hi, Anderson. Don't cut that out. Come on, buddy.

1:08:05 Guest Can I read that? Do you want to read that, Drew, or? There we go.

1:08:08 Drew Hit the mic.

1:08:08 Caller Good.

1:08:09 Drew This test produced a neural reaction. It does not mean the pill is pure. It does not mean the pill is safe. It does not tell you how much is in the pill. There you go.

1:08:17 Guest Pretty much. All drug use contains inherent risks and we always inform users of that. And in fact, we give them literature on the risks of ecstasy, which talk about the deaths that have resulted in neurotoxicity.

1:08:27 Drew Here's the science about scaring young people. I'm sure Dr. Grob would back me up on this. Because whenever they've studied giving kids scare information about sex or about drugs, they do cut back on their behaviors for about three months. And then at six months, they rebound and go further than they would have had you just done nothing.

1:08:45 Guest That's because they realized that they were being lied to or at least the exaggerations and then they don't believe any of the risks.

1:08:52 Drew Dr. Grob, do you agree with that?

1:08:54 Guest Well, yeah, I think kids will ultimately respond better when what they hear, they perceive to be the truth. If they realize at some later point that they were not provided with the straight facts, they then might reject even the information that was accurate.

1:09:13 Drew I think we're still living under the veil of reefer madness. That's why we can't have a rational discussion about it.

1:09:19 Adam Well, yeah, and you know, the thing is, too, is young people, we'll stop calling them kids because next thing you know, they're going to start calling us pops and then we're screwed. But they don't really work in shades of gray and neither does the government. And so the government says this is going to kill you or you're going to have a psychotic episode. And then they do it. And because it wasn't bad, it must be either good or not bad for you. They don't realize that there are things in between not killing you and being good for you. And that's almost everything. And that all drugs have some effect that is basically a shade of gray, somewhere in between the black and the white. We'll take ourselves a little break. We'll come back and we'll talk more about this topic.

1:10:08 Hello? Is this Loveline? Call 1-800-LOVE-191. Adam and Dr. Drew will be right back. You're listening to Loveline on Outrageous Talk Radio.

1:10:37 Caller 100.7 The Buzz.

1:10:52 Caller Hi, this is Charlene Steve from Garbage, and you're listening to Loveline with Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew.

1:10:57 Adam Wow, hey.

1:10:59 Drew I heard from those guys in a long time.

1:11:00 Adam Garbage, yeah. Garbage. Garbage. That's Adam Carolla. Good band. Kind of miss those guys. Yeah. Well, maybe she got like pregnant or something and hung up her pick.

1:11:12 I don't know where she is.

1:11:14 Adam Oh, we'll have more next week. Andy Dick is going to be in here tomorrow night, David Allen Grier. By the way, these two guys are two of the just sort of flat out hang out funniest guys you'll ever want to put behind the mic.

1:11:29 Yeah.

1:11:30 Adam There are plenty of funny guys who come in here and aren't that funny, but not these two.

1:11:33 Drew These are classic Loveline guests.

1:11:35 Adam Yes. And then the funniest race car driver in the world, Brian Herda is going to be in here a little bit later this week. Tonight we're talking about XC Emanuel Sferios as our guest tonight. He's the founder and executive director of Dance Safe. Also on the phone we have Dr. Charles Grob, who's the director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor, UCLA. And let's get back to the phones. And Drew, I've not seen you go potty once tonight.

1:12:06 Drew Yeah, you're right.

1:12:07 Adam You are so stimulated.

1:12:09 Drew I'm into this.

1:12:10 Adam That you've shut your kidneys down.

1:12:12 Yeah.

1:12:13 Adam I mean, Drew usually is catheterized during the show and urinates every 10 minutes. Tonight, he has sat here and chewed on Emanuel's ear the entire time and back and forth.

1:12:25 Caller Yeah.

1:12:26 Adam There's a real love affair blooming here between these two. And a possible relationship down the road. And Drew, maybe make some guest ex-testing appearance or something. That's a good idea. Celebrity tester. I don't know if they have that. Get Adam West in there one week and Dr. Drew the next. Tara?

1:12:47 Drew That's interesting.

1:12:48 Adam Yeah. You're 18. What's up?

1:12:50 Caller Hi. First of all, I want to say that I volunteer for the Sacramento chapter called Sac Haven. Interesting.

1:12:58 Adam Sac Haven sounds like a gay porn.

1:13:01 Guest That's the Sacramento dance safe chapter.

1:13:04 Adam I see.

1:13:05 Caller And I was always interested in volunteers.

1:13:08 Adam I have a great sense of humor. What is that?

1:13:13 Caller What got me volunteering was my own personal experience. I was at a party and a friend had given me two pills and they weren't ecstasy and they sent one in to dance safe and it turned out to be ephedrine. And usually you wouldn't think it was that bad, but with me I had a pre-existing condition of hypoglycemia. And ever since then I've been getting very shaky if I don't eat on time, eat the right foods. And ever since then I've had my problems been getting or has gotten worse.

1:13:49 Drew So what was your question?

1:13:50 Caller And my question was, I've been taking ecstasy for two years now, maybe once every two months. And sometimes I'll get midweek depressions, like maybe around Wednesday or something. I'll just like start crying or I'll feel really depressed. And these last couple of times I've taken it, I've taken Prozac when I'm coming down and I haven't been depressed and it seems to help me. And I was wondering if that was a good thing and I should be telling my friends about it.

1:14:19 Adam How long after you take it do you take the Prozac? I know you said when you're coming down, but is it four hours or is it 20 hours?

1:14:28 Caller I take the pill and I'll be high for about three or four hours. And then around the fifth or sixth hour I'll take it.

1:14:39 Adam Help cushion the fall a little bit?

1:14:41 Caller Yeah.

1:14:43 Guest Users are taking SSRIs at the come down in order to prevent neurotoxicity because...

1:14:49 Adam Serotonin reuptake inhibitor drugs?

1:14:52 Guest That's exactly right, like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. Because animal studies have shown that the administration of SSRIs subsequent to MDMA has prevented the neurotoxic damage that they've seen.

1:15:05 Adam You say damage, not... I mean, when you say damage, you mean physiological damage? It was done to the brain? Or just sort of emotional, psychological damage?

1:15:17 Guest They're looking at the brains of rats and they're seeing reductions in markers of serotonin functioning spinal metabolites in the spinal fluid, reuptake transporter activity with a radioactively labeled ligand and things like that that don't necessarily mean damage but most researchers think that there's some degeneration of the tips, fine fiber non-myelinated serotonin axon terminals, if you could follow that one.

1:15:42 Adam Dr. Grob, what do you think of that?

1:15:44 Guest Well, it's a controversial area and, you know, certainly there are changes, some of these long standing in the brains of these experimental animals, although whether or not they are signs of damage is still an open question. After the degeneration, you get some regeneration. It's not yet clear how normative this pattern is, but the practice of taking Prozac along with the MDMA, it's on the basis, it's reading into the animal data and trying to block and affect the significance of which we're not concerned. There's one other problem, though. When you take Prozac on board with MDMA.

1:16:26 Drew Serotonin excess.

1:16:27 Guest Is the issue, yeah, you could get perhaps some excess of serotonin syndrome, but also, they're both metabolized through the P450. P450, 2D6. Will the Prozac impair the metabolism of the MDMA? You wouldn't want to run into that, so I caution people about.

1:16:45 Drew You're not gonna upregulate that system or downregulate it in a single dose of Prozac, though, right?

1:16:50 Guest No, one wouldn't.

1:16:52 Drew The other thing I have a problem with is that although they're trying to extrapolate about the serotonin physiology, neurotoxicity is not mediated through the serotonin system.

1:17:01 Adam I've said that many times.

1:17:02 Drew It damages the serotonin system, but it's not a serotonin phenomenon.

1:17:06 Guest No, what's happening is that...

1:17:07 Drew Is that right, Dr. Grob?

1:17:08 Guest Well, one of the hypotheses is that dopamine is released, and it's the reuptake of dopamine into the serotonin terminals, which cause a degenerative phenomenon.

1:17:20 Drew It's not serotonin.

1:17:21 Adam But let me put Dr. Grob on the spot here. If you had or have a son or daughter who was to do ecstasy, and they had the choice between taking Prozac five, six hours later after they took the ecstasy, would you want them to do that or not?

1:17:39 Guest Well, first of all, I'd have to... Really, the whole issue of devising anyone to take ecstasy, I wouldn't because what is ecstasy? We have no idea.

1:17:48 Adam I know, but just hypothetically...

1:17:50 Drew Let's say you could give them MDMA, you knew it was MDMA.

1:17:53 Adam Right. Hypothetically, would you want them to take the Prozac five to six hours later or not?

1:17:59 Guest Well, I would never advise a minor to take any kind of...

1:18:02 Adam I know, I know, but let's...

1:18:03 Guest I can see what Dance Safe says.

1:18:05 Adam Hold on, stop dancing for a second.

1:18:06 Guest What I recommend to anyone is that they should take Prozac to block the so-called neurotoxicity effect, which may or may not be a phenomena of real clinical...

1:18:19 Drew Oh, it is. I got to tell you.

1:18:21 Guest I don't recommend that they take Prozac.

1:18:22 Adam You don't. You don't.

1:18:24 Guest I've spoken to a lot of other researchers, and many of whom are listed on our website as consultants, and most of them say, well, they're just like Dr. Grob. They don't want to come across like they're advising any type of drug use, but they all have said to me, the answer to your question personally, that animal studies seem to indicate that it has a neuroprotective effect and it reduces all of the acute effects of MDMA, so you're not more likely to have an acute adverse reaction if you do so. And so that it can't hurt unless you have...

1:19:04 Guest The question of impairing metabolism hasn't been answered. There are some unanswered questions. There's so much unknown about this, I'd be reluctant to make any recommendations.

1:19:16 Adam Okay, so we'll disagree that the jury is at least partially out on this.

1:19:22 Guest Well, and Dance Safe doesn't recommend either. We read our website. We simply put the studies up there and let the user make their own choice.

1:19:32 Adam Eddie?

1:19:33 Yes.

1:19:34 Adam You're 21.

1:19:35 Caller How are you guys doing tonight?

1:19:36 Guest Good.

1:19:37 Caller Basically, I just wanted to comment that I'm basically a retired rave or so-called. I used to like going to raves when it was not so mainstream, when not a lot of people knew about it.

1:19:48 Adam Sherry, you're no poser.

1:19:49 Drew You're 11. I'm sorry? Nothing.

1:19:52 Adam You're 21 now. Yeah. What were you, a zygote when you first started hitting the raves?

1:19:57 Guest No, actually, it was about 18 years old.

1:20:00 Caller And I really liked it because everybody was more natural at that stage.

1:20:04 Caller Nobody really looked at each other like, Oh, could you be like, could this person harm me or not?

1:20:09 Guest Basically, when it started getting mainstream, that's what happened.

1:20:12 Caller Like, you know, the club scene right now, you always have that in the back of your head. I might get into a fight with this person.

1:20:19 Adam Really? I haven't heard that much about violence at those raves.

1:20:23 Caller Actually, at the Master Dome, San Bernardino, I know of three different incidents where someone's been stabbed there.

1:20:28 Guest There's not as much violence.

1:20:31 Guest What drugs are they taking would be the question. It's becoming more of a poly drug scene.

1:20:35 Guest Well, and I'll tell you, having been working at raves now for the last couple of years, halfway through that about a year ago is when NIDA launched their anti-club drugs campaign. And we got all these TV shows and newspaper articles demonizing raves and painting them as drug parties. And since that happened, the culture has changed. More people have started coming to raves just based on what they've seen on TV, looking for drugs. And the original community spirit has somewhat diminished. And things have gotten worse now because of that.

1:21:15 Adam It's funny. They do a few specials on one of these TV magazines thinking they're going to alert everyone to the danger involved with it. And all they really do is, I think they alert the parents and attract the kids.

1:21:31 Drew It's the law of unintended effect.

1:21:33 Guest Well, they manifest exactly what they put out. And that's something that the current prevention strategy of scare tactics doesn't quite realize. That if we provide a model, whatever model that the authority figures in your society are going to be providing young people is the model that they're going to use. And if all you're telling them is that, you know, if you use ecstasy, you're ill and it's bad for you and you must be rebellious and you must hate yourself. And this is a, you know, something that no reasonable person would ever do. It's abnormal. You're going to create abnormal use patterns in people.

1:22:10 Drew Chris, did we talk to Chris?

1:22:12 Adam Did we talk to Chris? No.

1:22:14 Drew What's up Chris?

1:22:14 Adam Year 20, what's going on?

1:22:16 Guest I'm 12 weeks sober. And for some reason, since I've been sober, I've had a real, like a snappy attitude towards people.

1:22:25 Drew Irritable, you're irritable. Very, very irritable. What do you mean you're sober?

1:22:29 Guest I used to smoke pot heavily.

1:22:32 Drew Right, people when they stop smoking pot, up to six months will have rather profound depressions. And irritability and suicidality are two of the most common features of that.

1:22:42 Guest Oh, I'm the kind of guy, I don't like going, I don't do anything the easy way.

1:22:46 Drew I understand, but just, I understand, but this is, and the suicidality that I've observed in people who come off marijuana has been, it's sort of a bizarre suicide where the, like you don't sound that depressed, Chris, and the people with the marijuana depressions don't appear sad, they don't have psychomotor retardation, they don't look terribly depressed, but they have prominent suicidal thinking. It's very, very particular syndrome.

1:23:09 Guest I used to, I used to do, when I was 16, I did acid once, I didn't like that. I did shrooms, I didn't like that. I did ecstasy once and I chased five guys with a baseball bat.

1:23:18 Adam Yeah, well, it could have been speed.

1:23:20 Drew Yeah, that's probably true.

1:23:21 Guest How long were you smoking marijuana for?

1:23:24 Guest Since I was about nine.

1:23:25 Guest Why did you quit?

1:23:29 Guest I'm getting older, I need to stay clean so I can work, get a good job.

1:23:33 Guest You mean you're afraid of drug tests?

1:23:35 Guest Well, not only drug tests.

1:23:36 Drew No, no, listen, marijuana addiction is the most common addiction I treat today. It is profoundly addictive. And Chris, are you in a program right now?

1:23:43 Caller No, I'm not, I'm doing this all on my own.

1:23:45 Drew Part of the irritability, listen, the only thing I'm more troubled with right now is heroin.

1:23:50 Adam You personally, or are you talking about the patients?

1:23:52 Drew It's my patients. It's extremely important you get involved with the program because it's not likely you're going to do this without some form of treatment. It's even with treatment, a very difficult drug to stop. Get, call MA, go to some meetings, get a sponsor, and some of that affect problem and some of those irritability, some of these things you're complaining of will diminish, rather wrap, and you'll be involved with the program.

1:24:12 Guest Now, Drew, I would have to disagree with your advice there, not that I would give it any advice, but you're telling a person who seems to have chosen and is doing well except being irritable, that they don't have control over themselves.

1:24:26 Drew That's right, and addiction is when you don't have control. But you don't... Addictive to stop, if you can stop, you're not an addict.

1:24:32 Guest He never said he was addicted, he just said he stopped using.

1:24:35 Drew He's an addict. He's having depression from... Well, hold on.

1:24:40 Caller All right. Yes.

1:24:41 Drew How many days... Did you smoke every day?

1:24:44 Guest About an eighth to two-eighths.

1:24:46 Drew A day. For how many years?

1:24:48 Guest That was probably for about two, three years, and then I...

1:24:50 Drew That's the marijuana.

1:24:52 Adam You smoked an eighth a day? Holy Christ.

1:24:55 Drew The marijuana addiction syndrome is absolutely reproducible in all cases. It happens, pal, and they can't stop. They do not stop without treatment. All right.

1:25:03 Adam All right, Drew, get off the high horse for just one second. Yeah, you're bumming my high. We are gonna take ourselves a little break. One... There it goes. Out of the barn. Drew's high horse. We'll speak to Aaron. Aaron is a 24. He's got a positive story to relate to us about ecstasy. So we'll hear his end of it after this.

1:25:30 Caller Loveline, I'll be right back.

1:25:54 Adam Yeah. I love this riff. It's the Loveline. I'm Adam Corolla. This is Dr. Drew, Andy Dick, in here tomorrow night. No doubt to discuss his new MTV show, which is very funny. Our own Dr. Drew was on that show on, I think, more than one occasion, by the way. Was that right? That's what I'm under the impression of. I saw you on it once. You look stiff as ever, but that's what they were looking for. That's the direction that Drew needs to take. So be it. Done and done. That's right. David Alan Greer in here on Tuesday. Always good to see him.

1:26:32 Caller Anything can cause addiction, Adam. Did you know that?

1:26:36 Adam That's him doing his version of Dr. Drew. Brian Herda, who's really one of the nicest race car, un-race car driver-esque race car drivers you've ever seen. I don't even know what that means, but he's just a really good guy and a really good race car driver, so he'll be in here. Emanuel Sferios is our guest tonight. He's founder and executive director of Dance Safe. Also hanging on the line for quite a long time is Dr. Charles Grob. Dr. Charles Grob is the director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor, UCLA. Thanks for hanging out, by the way, Charles. And let's see if we can get a few more calls in before we wind the show up. Aaron?

1:27:19 Caller Yeah, you got me.

1:27:20 Adam You're 24.

1:27:22 Caller That's right. Hey, Adam, I just got to say right off the bat, man, I see you at Supercross every year. I think that's awesome. I don't know if you go because you like motorcycles or because they pay you to be there, but I see you there every year and you're always hammered drunk.

1:27:32 Adam So well, thank you.

1:27:33 Caller No problem.

1:27:35 Adam No, I'm I'm there every year. In this year, they said and said, hey, they want to pay you 500 bucks to go out to the Supercross. And I said, well, good, I'm already going.

1:27:45 Caller Beer money.

1:27:46 Adam Yeah. What's up?

1:27:47 Caller Also to the guy from Dance Safe, yo, pat yourself on the back, man. You guys are doing the justice. You're doing a service. And I'm sure you're saving a lot of kids from having bad trips. But I just want to start out with my story because I always hear these shows like with MTV, 2020, all the shows on Ecstasy are always about the negativity. And I just want people out there to hear my side of the story, you know, how I went through it. I'll try to make it real quick for you guys. I started out at 18, started going to alcohol style clubs and just got real bad vibes from all the people there. It was all competition. Went to my first rave and it was a total different scene. Everybody was there because they were having their own fun. They weren't so concerned with other people were doing. And it was a lot easier to meet people at these parties. Everybody was a lot more pleasant and friendly and not, I'm not even going to say the hippie part, but you know what I mean?

1:28:38 Adam Yeah, had that attitude.

1:28:39 Caller Right.

1:28:40 Guest So anyways, I was in like a mood elevator to make people nice to each other, right?

1:28:45 Caller It just kind of lets down your guard. You know, you're not at a club with alcohol. It's competition at a rave. You're just there and everybody's there. Everybody's on the same level and it's all good. So anyways.

1:28:56 Adam No, I mean, listen, anybody who's been around the block a few times with drugs and alcohol can tell you the time they got into a bunch of fights when they were drunk in the time where they dry humped their beanbag chair when they were on, you know, axe or mushrooms or whatever other kind of groovy substance they'd ingested. So obviously, if you got a whole room full of those people, there's going to be a groovy vibe.

1:29:21 Caller You got it. I'll tell you what, I was using probably every weekend for about a year and a half and then kind of broke it off, wasn't doing it as much, kind of became more of a casual thing every once in a while. And you know, I hear Dr. talking about all the negativity and all the, you know, how everybody gets depressed. Man, I got no depression. I got none of that. I'm perfectly normal. I hold down a good job. I'm a hard worker. You know, what, am I like one in a million?

1:29:48 Guest You're in the vast majority of XTC users actually. Most people have patterns just like yourself. They use it once a week for a while. They'll slow down. Then maybe they'll do it once a year for the rest of their life or something and they don't get depressed. But there's enough people who do get midweek depression, extended periods of depression after using a lot. There's probably something to do with the pharmacology of MDMA that in some people does cause.

1:30:10 Drew The other thing I've seen is that often, not often times, but sometimes that depression doesn't come on till far later, like five years, ten years. I saw this a lot with LSD. Are you guys studying any of that at all? Anybody? Dr. Grob?

1:30:26 Guest Well, I would question that what would be the cause of the depression? How would you have it? I imagine there might be all sorts of additional factors.

1:30:41 Drew The kinds of syndromes where I want to blame it on the drugs are people who are addicts, who are going along and all of a sudden in recovery, well into recovery, develop profound depressions that need like ECT and things.

1:30:54 Guest They need it five years down the line.

1:30:55 Drew Way down the line.

1:30:56 Guest Well, but then I even would want to go back further in time and ask why did these individuals develop problems with compulsive drug use to begin with? Were they self-medicating, underlying depression?

1:31:09 Drew How much pre-morbid vulnerability did they have? Of course they had some, but again, these are people who were doing well in recovery, stable affect and all of a sudden fall off a cliff and are resistant to pharmacology and need ECT and other things.

1:31:23 Guest We're not talking about Aaron here, Aaron seems to be...

1:31:25 Drew No, no, I understand. No, no, no, no, I understand that.

1:31:27 Adam But that's basically what you're talking about with everything in life.

1:31:32 Drew You don't have it till you have it?

1:31:34 Adam Well, no, what I mean is, yes, I agree with that, but what I'm saying is let's just take plaque in your arteries. I mean, there are some people that have a sort of genetic predisposition to these things where cheeseburgers are going to take them down, and then there's others that don't.

1:31:52 Drew Oh, I see what you mean. You mean like the brain vulnerability may be there.

1:31:56 Adam And obviously the cheeseburgers weren't good for them, but without this sort of predisposition for it, we wouldn't be talking about that. So I have always thought it was a sort of a combination of both.

1:32:10 Drew You call it lightweight.

1:32:11 Adam Yeah, I call it being a lightweight, yeah. Well, if you're depressed and you're taking this, then this ain't helping your depression. But if you weren't, then those are guys like Aaron that we're hearing about. And we don't know what the future holds for them. Sean?

1:32:28 Guest Yeah, how's it going?

1:32:29 Adam Good. What's up?

1:32:31 Guest Well, I've got a question about my buddy. He's kind of been using Ace for like two years now. And for whatever reason, he started taking steroids, like to beef up or why, whatever.

1:32:41 Caller And like I was wondering with the E and the steroids, would that do anything really, really negative to him?

1:32:48 Drew Not the combo that I know of, although the steroids have their own obviously problems. Here's the syndromes that I've seen is that steroid addicts, steroid abusers usually are stimulant addicts also. So I would be more concerned about a more global addictive process here for your friend Sean. And I wouldn't so focus on the E as much as the fact that he may have a progressive illness and he's just picking a couple of interesting drugs here.

1:33:11 Adam All right.

1:33:13 Caller Parker?

1:33:14 Caller Yes.

1:33:14 Adam You're 18.

1:33:15 Caller Yes, I am.

1:33:17 Adam Go right ahead with your question, please.

1:33:19 Caller Okay. I had a question about preloading and postloading. I guess that's a practice which I've heard of, which involves taking some supplements. One of them is called a 5-HTP, which is supposedly a serotonin precursor, about the week before you go to the party and you drop an E. And then I guess taking Prozac afterwards after you come down. I heard about that earlier, but I just want to know about how the 5-HTP affects it. And also I had a question about how many times you have to do it before there's at least some injuries experienced, like a major functional change.

1:33:47 Drew Again, I use 20. I get 20 exposures when I start worrying.

1:33:52 Guest Where do you get that number from?

1:33:52 Drew It's just my clinical experience.

1:33:54 Adam Out of his ass.

1:33:55 Drew These are addicts coming to treatment. And 20, actually 50.

1:33:59 Adam The good news is with this, all this drug use, is everyone's really becoming like a pharmacist. I mean, people, one good thing about drugs is people learn the metric system. I've learned that with, you know, cocaine and marijuana. The other, the other good thing is that these guys, I mean, these people, think how much more informed the average call we're getting tonight about what they're ingesting is.

1:34:23 Guest I think that is a phenomenon that we can credit the internet to entirely. I know that when I was a teenager, I had no idea about drugs. Where could I go to find out the truthful information about marijuana, for example?

1:34:36 Drew Part of the problem I have with that is that the institutes of higher learning, Caltech, Harvard, the more selective the institution, the higher the probability of this kind of drug use. And so kids use some of this information sometimes as a way of defending against believing that they could harm themselves with it.

1:34:52 Adam Okay. We got to take a break before we launch in a debate. What about quickly preloading?

1:34:57 Drew What about the 5-HT?

1:34:58 Guest Well, we have some information about 5-HTP on our site. It is a precursor to serotonin, and a lot of users report that it makes the recovery time shorter, and that if they take it beforehand, it will increase the intensity of the MDMA. My concern would be that if someone needs to take 5-HTP to feel the effects of MDMA, they might be using too often, and they're not giving their brain enough time to replenish their serotonin naturally. At the same time, I think postloading with 5-HTP really can hurt. It will help the brain replenish serotonin from what we know about it, and if you experience depression afterwards, that is a mental health issue. Just don't use 5-HTP as a replacement for moderation. Less is more, always, when it comes to ecstasy.

1:35:46 Adam We'll take a break. All right, well, there it is. I hope you know more about Ecstasy than you did two hours ago. I want to thank Dr. Charles Grob for staying with us all night. We do appreciate that. Emanuel Sferios. I know it's gonna screw up his last name eventually. You can't articulate yourself any better than that. Oh, I'm gonna strangle Anderson. And give the website out one more time, please.

1:36:30 Guest Dance Safe's website is simple, www.dancesafe.org. And there you can find non-judgmental, fact-based information on different drugs as well as other issues relating to health and safety for late night dance enthusiasts.

1:36:46 Adam Thank you for coming in here tonight. Thank you, Dr. Grob. Thank you again, Dr. Grob. So until next time, this is Adam Carolla for Dr. Drew saying Mahala.

1:36:55 Caller I have to leave at this point. Tasty.

1:36:59 Caller This has been Loveline. The opinions expressed on the show are not necessarily those of the staff management sponsors for this station. The producer for Loveline is Ann Wilkins Engel. Loveline is a presentation of Westwood One Entertainment.

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Sunday, April 1, 2001