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Ecstasy Testing Kits Prove Unreliable
16:25 25 February 03
NewScientist.com news service
Ecstasy testing kits, used by clubbers
to screen out dud pills are unreliable, according to a "blind" test of pills
with known ingredients.
Testing kits based on reagents that
change colour in the presence of chemicals in the ecstasy family are available
around the world, mainly via the internet. They typically consist of one to
three small chemical bottles and are designed to be portable, so that the user
can carry out a test in the toilet of a nightclub for example.
The kits, which can test up to 150
pills, do not claim to measure the dosage or purity of a pill, but simply the
presence or absence of MDMA - the chemical name for ecstasy - or very similar
compounds. Clubbers use them to screen out pills that are likely to contain
other, potentially more dangerous, substances. PMA, for example, is sometimes
sold as ecstasy but has been associated with several deaths in the US, Europe
and Australia.
The experiments revealing the
unreliability of the tests were carried out by Rebecca Murray and colleagues at
the University of Florida in Gainesville. "This is going to create a false sense
of security," she told New Scientist. Murray believes the kits performed badly
because the colour charts provided do not match well with the colours actually
observed. Also, assessing the changes is very subjective and especially
challenging if lighting conditions vary.
Better than nothing
"We'll be the first to admit that
ecstasy testing kits are not terribly accurate," says Ian Baker, of DanceSafe,
the San Francisco charity that supplied the test kits. "The instructions for the
kit very explicitly state its limitations."
But while ecstasy remains illegal, he
says, a fallible test is better than no test at all. "We try very hard to avoid
giving users a false sense of security." The group sell a few hundred kits a
month in the US.
Murray's team gave eight pills each to
two testers who had never used the kits before. The experiments were "blind" -
the researchers knew what was in the pills but the testers did not. Two of the
tablets contained MDMA, while the rest were composed of other compounds
sometimes found in pills such as ketamine, morphine, caffeine and d-norpropoxyphene.
The first tester rated seven of the
pills, including both the MDMA tablets, as not containing the drug, the
researchers told the American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference in Chicago
last week. The one pill the tester believed had tested positive in fact
contained morphine.
Pushing purity
In contrast, the second tester thought
six samples contained MDMA, rating the ketamine and d-norpropoxyphene tablets as
negative. One of the testers, University of Florida toxicologist Bruce
Goldberger, says: "I failed miserably."
However, testing kits have had a
noticeable effect on pill purity, says Matthew Atha, director of the Independent
Drug Monitoring Unit, based in Wigan, UK. "The number of duds has dropped," he
says.
Amsterdam based company EZ Test were
the first to start marketing the kits and have sold about 300,000 tests
worldwide in the past six years. "There are no 'good' pills," says Ewoud
Vijfwinkel of EZ Test. "All we can give is an indication as to what is inside,
that's a lot more reliable than a dealer's word on quality."
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