“I'll give it to you for $20 each. As a favor to Charlie,” Ghel said.
Germanowski paid $40 for two pills and said he'd be in touch if they were any good. Ghel said he could get fifteen thousand more with just five days’ notice.
Germanowski shrugged.
“Jimmy, don't worry,” Ghel said. “Nobody knows me, and I only met with you because you look and seem like a good guy.”
At 5:15 p.m., the undercover team followed Ghel to his residence at 99-32 66th Road. Fifteen minutes later Gagne bagged and tagged the two pills, marked exhibit number two, and placed them in NYFD's overnight evidence vault for analysis.
Two pills for $40. That was the fruit of their first undercover buy.
The backlog of drugs to be analyzed at the lab meant the agents would wait several weeks for results. Just to be sure they weren't still chasing after cough-syrup pushers, Gagne requested a quick field test. The pills tested positive for MDMA—just how much was subject to further analysis.
Gagne was getting tired of seeing the blank stares whenever he had to defend their new case to the other agents.
“What the hell is Ecstasy?” was a common refrain. “Guys are up on wiretaps seizing a hundred, two hundred kilos—and you guys are running around buying two pills?”
Ecstasy was a joke—”kiddie dope.” Gagne decided to keep his mouth shut and focus on keeping Germanowski interested. He read everything he could about the drug's history. DEA had banned Ecstasy a decade earlier after learning about its widespread use in clubs and bars in Texas and California. But Gagne couldn't find any major case investigations on Ecstasy in DEA records. He wondered how this drug had completely fallen off DEA radar since it was banned. Even his brother Ronnie knew about Ecstasy.
“Yeah, it's getting really big out here,” Ronnie told his brother that summer. Gagne knew if Ecstasy was a trend in small-town Paw-tucket, then it was already flourishing in New York. He was onto something new. Something bigger. He could feel it.
8 THE GODFATHER OF ECSTASY
WHEN 3, 4-METHYLENEDIOXYMETHAMPHETAMINE, or MDMA, was outlawed by the DEA in 1985 through an emergency measure of the Controlled Substances Act, it sent shock waves through a tight-knit circle of Ecstasy advocates—psychiatrists, chemists, and mental health experts who believed MDMA was a tool with unparalleled therapeutic potential.
MDMA remains one of the most hotly debated psychotropic drugs in existence. It was a chemical reaction sprung from good intentions when it was used in couples counseling sessions in the 1970s and ‘80s by therapists who juggled the acronym and renamed it “Adam.” But Adam escaped the therapist's couch for the streets. Renamed “Ecstasy” by opportunists, it was sold to the masses—with little regard for safety or chemistry—to disaffected youth and weekend escape artists, until the law caught up. Ecstasy became a permanent Schedule I drug by 1988. Since then, DEA has granted Schedule I licenses for two restricted studies of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and for terminally ill cancer patients who have less than a year to live. Those studies are still under way, their results unknown.
German pharmaceutical giant Merck first synthesized MDMA at the turn of the century. According to researchers from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Ulm, Germany, and the Department of Corporate History at Merck, the earliest mention of the chemical compound for MDMA was in patent 274350, filed by Merck on Christmas Eve 1912, and granted two years later. While the patent did not mention MDMA by name, it described a series of newly developed chemical formulas, including MDMA, that Merck hoped to use in the creation of blood-clotting agents. The formula, referred to as “methylsaframin” in Merck's 1912 annual report, reappeared fifteen years later when a Merck chemist conducted the first pharmacological tests with MDMA, calling it safryl-methylamin. Research was halted due to price increases, and the formula was never fully developed or tested by Merck.
MDMA resurfaced in the mid-1950s in controversial experiments funded by the U.S. Army Chemical Center and conducted at the University of Michigan. Researchers tested MDMA, mescaline, MDA, and other compounds on rats, mice, guinea pigs, dogs, and monkeys, examining toxicity levels and behavioral effects. MDMA was given the code name EA1475—the “EA” stood for the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, where the chemicals were synthesized. The CIA and Department of Defense admitted years later to conducting secret experiments using LSD and other psychoactive drugs on soldiers to uncover chemical weapons that could be used to incapacitate enemy soldiers. However, it doesn't appear that MDMA was ever tested on human subjects in the Edgewood Arsenal experiments or the University of Michigan studies, which were declassified in 1969.
By the late 1960s, MDMA's chemical cousin, MDA, hit the Haight-Ashbury scene as a popular love drug. When the 1970 Controlled Substances Act made MDA illegal, MDMA quickly filled the void, and a gray-haired University of California at Berkeley professor named Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin championed its experimentation.
Shulgin, nicknamed “the Godfather of Ecstasy,” is a former DEA consultant and the author of Controlled Substances: A Chemical and Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws, which was a law enforcement reference desk mainstay for years. Alexander Shulgin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1925 to strict high school teacher parents. (Shulgin's father once left the boy's dead dog on the front porch to rot in the sun so little Sasha could observe the decay of flesh and bone.) Shulgin went to Harvard on a full scholarship at sixteen but dropped out to join the Navy during World War II. He worked at Dow Chemical while earning his Ph.D. in biochemistry at UC Berkeley.
Shulgin wasn't a hippie, but he was a believer in better living through chemistry. Inspired by such self-experimenters as Aldous Huxley, Shulgin took a massive 400-milligram dose of peyote in 1960. It was a religious experience, as he later wrote: “I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.”
Soon after, he made Dow a fortune with his invention of Zectran, one of the world's first biodegradable insecticides. In return, Dow gave its eccentric chemist free rein to pursue his own interests—which included developing psychedelic compounds and publishing his findings in Nature and the Journal of Organic Chemistry.
By 1967, the chemist and the corporation had parted ways. Shulgin worked from his home lab, making new drugs and consulting to research labs and hospitals.
While Shulgin and his counterculture contemporaries extolled the virtues of drug-induced mind expansion, many others were drowning in addiction. “Heroin Hits the Young,” the cover of Time magazine declared on March 16, 1970—and not a moment too soon. A week before Christmas, Harlem had mourned the heroin overdose death of Walter Vandermeer. He was just one of roughly eight hundred people who died from heroin in New York City that year—but Walter was only twelve years old, the youngest victim on record. When his eighty-pound body—with scar tissue on his arms—was found on the bathroom floor of a rooming house, he was wearing a Snoopy sweatshirt.
In 1970, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), which established five schedules, classifying drugs in decreasing order of danger. Heroin, LSD, and marijuana were classified as Schedule I, deemed to have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. On the opposite end, Schedule V drugs—such as cough medicines with small amounts of codeine—were deemed to have accepted medical use and to exhibit a low potential for abuse. (Although federal law applies to all states, the majority of drug prosecutions occur in state courts, and some states have reclassified certain substances, such as marijuana, to create autonomy in how they handle drug offenses.)
DEA was formed three years later to enforce the Controlled Substances Act, and Alexander Shulgin initially enjoyed a good relationship with DEA. He held a Schedule I license, allowing him to synthesize and analyze illegal substances in order to offer expert test
imony in criminal trials on the effects of such drugs as amphetamine and cocaine—substances he has characterized as “false” and “a complete waste of time.” Shulgin's testimony was based on personal experience, as he typically tested his chemical creations on himself. He would start by ingesting an amount well below the active dose of a chemical's closest analog and then road-test the dosages upward. If he liked it, he'd give it to his wife, Ann. If Ann liked it, he'd give it to his research group of a dozen or so chairs of university departments, scientists, writers, and M.D.s. As classical music played softly in the background they would take a chemically induced trip, holding glasses of juice and notebooks to record their experiences.
In 1976, at the suggestion of a student, Shulgin synthesized and road-tested 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. He likened it to a “low-calorie martini.” His research group soon nicknamed it “empathy” and “penicillin for the soul.” They shared it with colleagues. Many of them would become witnesses at DEA's administrative hearings on the scheduling of MDMA, defending the drug's potential to help patients get in touch with feelings and repressed memories. MDMA induced a hand-to-God empathic effect on its early experimenters. Therapists who administered the drug to couples in counseling reported that their patients were able to drop their superfluous shields of fear and self-doubt, allowing for more open lines of communication.
According to Ecstasy historians, two early MDMA groups emerged: the proselytizers and the elitists. The proselytizers believed MDMA should be spread to the masses, as the drug held the power to make the world a better place. The elitists believed MDMA would be muddied by casual recreational use and that educated use in the context of a therapeutic setting would preserve its integrity. In the end, market forces would set the drug's course. By 1981, recreational use of MDMA had expanded from California to Texas. According to MDMA historian Bruce Eisner, a dealer in the early 1980s renamed it “Ecstasy” because he knew it would sell better than something called “empathy.” “Empathy” might better describe the drug's effects, the dealer told Eisner, but how many clubgoers knew what the word meant?
From 1983 to 1985, an aggressive network of Ecstasy dealers and distributors known as the “Texas Group” devised a pyramid referral scheme that rivaled Amway The drug was mass-produced and sold openly in bars and discos in Austin and Dallas, where it could be purchased with credit cards, and bar owners paid sales tax. Its users were often yuppies, college students, and gay men, who would go out “X-ing” on the weekends.
A therapeutic-level dose of MDMA was about 100 milligrams, but in San Francisco, drug abuse clinics began to see teenagers stumbling in to detox after using ten to fifteen 100-milligram hits a day of the powder. Ecstasy seemed to follow a law of diminishing returns, whereby more was less, and users kept taking excessive dosages and bingeing in an attempt to return to the intensity of their first time.
How does the first time feel? Barring any adverse physiological reactions, tainted chemicals, and unexpected crises, the user may sense a gentle warmth flowing through his body as the drug begins to take effect and the mind slowly glides into a peaceful alertness, with feelings of happiness, security, and empathy. There is a heightened physical sensitivity. Simple cues—the touch of velvet, the sound of David Bowie's voice, the smell of freshly shampooed hair—flood the senses in richer depth and texture. There is often an afterglow and a desire to recall the feelings of self-esteem and forgiveness that permeated the experience.
But for some, Ecstasy is not so forgiving. MDMA was associated with only eight emergency room admissions between 1977 and 1984. It represented just .03 percent of the total number of drug mentions from 1986 to 1988. But by 1995, when Gagne and Germanowski were chasing after Ecstasy dealers, there were 421 emergency room mentions of Ecstasy, and the numbers would only rise, reaching 5,542 by 2001. Adverse reactions reported prior to the drug's outlaw status included involuntary teeth clenching, anxiety, delirium and hallucinations, partial leg paralysis, muscle tension, chills and sweats, increased susceptibility to various ailments including sore throats, colds, flu, herpes outbreaks and bladder infections, burnout and depression, and in rare cases, paranoid psychosis.
In the years since it was outlawed and its use became rampant in rave culture, further studies cited evidence of hyperthermia, seizures, stroke, kidney and cardiovascular system failure, possible permanent damage to sections of the brain critical to thought and memory, and in some extremely rare cases death after a single dose.
A study by researchers at Boston University in 2006 found that four doses over eight hours affected the blood-brain barrier in rats, leaving their brains susceptible to potential invasion by viruses and other pathogens. A study in 2003 by the Food and Drug Administration's National Center for Toxicological Research found that rats exposed to a single dose of MDMA suffered neuronal degeneration, and concerns were raised by researchers that human users who take doses high enough to produce hyperthermia may suffer from irreversible neuron loss. In 1999, researchers from Johns Hopkins and the National Institute of Mental Health reported persistent memory impairment in the brain of heavy Ecstasy users and damage to serotonin reuptake sites. Serotonin affects memory, impulse control, sleep patterns, and mood, and some Ecstasy users described a “suicide Tuesday” syndrome—a depressive period that hits several days after the initial high as a result of serotonin depletion. Long-term physical effects of MDMA point to recurring depression and anxiety in some users.
In the early 1980s, law enforcement estimated that thirty thousand doses of Ecstasy were being distributed in one Texas city each month. Sensing that a drug epidemic was under way, DEA proposed in a July 27, 1984, Federal Register notice its intentions to place MDMA into Schedule I. The administrative hearings lasted two years, with affidavits and testimony from dozens of witnesses.
DEA witnesses included a pharmacologist who took part in the secret University of Michigan studies in the 1950s. He testified that during his studies in animals, he found MDMA less toxic than MDA but up to six times more toxic than mescaline. Medical researchers testified that MDA and MDMA affected the brain in a similar manner, and since it was shown that MDA could cause brain damage, MDMA was likely to do the same.
On the opposite side were MDMA advocates, mostly therapists, who claimed that the drug had helped their patients to overcome traumatic experiences, such as rape and incest, and had helped some terminally ill patients to reconcile themselves to the idea that they were dying. They lobbied to have MDMA placed under Schedule III, where drugs such as hydrocodone and ketamine now sit, available by prescription.
DEA took a stopgap measure while hearings were in full swing, temporarily outlawing the drug on July 1, 1985, to curb abuse until the administrative process was completed. It was the second time in history that DEA used its temporary emergency scheduling authority. (The first was in March 1985 against a form of synthetic heroin.)
When the hearings concluded, DEA's chief administrative judge, Francis Young, recommended a Schedule III placement, agreeing that MDMA had potential medical use and finding minimal evidence of significant abuse. But DEA administrator John Lawn rejected the judge's recommendation and ordered MDMA's permanent placement into Schedule I.
Many therapists who found their licenses and careers at stake grudgingly abandoned the clinical use of MDMA. However, Sasha Shulgin determined to make his chemical children available to the masses. In 1991, the Shulgins self-published PiHKAL, short for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved.” PiHKAL was divided into two sections. The first is a love story, describing a vaguely fictional account of Sasha and Ann's lives, their courtship, and their drug experiences. The second part is the chemical story, with recipes and descriptions of 179 phenethylamines that Shulgin has synthesized and imbibed, including Number 109, MDMA.
Two years later, DEA agents raided Shulgin's lab looking for illicit substances, fined him $25,000 for violating the terms of his Schedule I license, and eventually rescinded his license.
On Septe
mber 5, 1995, as Gagne and Germanowski were starting to build a case against the Israeli Ecstasy dealers, and on the same day that Germanowski had his second undercover meeting with Ghel, the Los Angeles Times published an interview with seventy-year-old Sasha Shulgin.
“A lot of the materials in Schedule I are my invention,” Shulgin said. “I'm not sure if it's a point of pride or a point of shame.”
9 SEPTEMBER 1995: GAGNE
MEETS THE DEALERS
GHEL WAS AN ATTENTIVE salesman. He gave “Jimmy” (Ger-manowski) his pager number and told him to use the code 018 so they could quickly identify each other. He called periodically to see how his new client was enjoying the pills. And he promised to procure china (heroin) at a better price than the $87,000 per kilo Ger-manowski claimed to be paying his supplier.
Ghel believed that Germanowski was a Pittsburgh nightclub owner, and every extra flourish the agent could finesse made his undercover story that much more palatable. Sometimes Germanowski would return Ghel's calls from a pay phone near the airport. He would sit and watch the planes, and figure the intervals between landings and take offs—about thirty to forty seconds apart. Then he'd dial Ghel and leave a message:
“Hey, I just landed at the airport, I got your message and … sorry, hold on a second.” Jets roared overhead. “Sorry about that. So, I gotta take care of some things, but I'll call you this afternoon.”
Germanowski quickly built up confidence with Ghel. It was time for Gagne to join the story.
On September 12, Charlie pulled up at the corner of 99th Street and Queens Boulevard. Germanowski sat in the front; Gagne was in the back. Ghel walked up to greet them with a small black bag over his left shoulder. He seemed nervous. He wanted to exchange the pills and cash in the car, but who was the new guy?
Chemical Cowboys Page 5