Ecstasy Facts
- The Federal penalty for manufacturing or selling ecstasy can lead to fines up to four million dollars. A ringleader or head manufacturer of ecstasy could receive life in prison.
- Some pills sold as ecstasy actually contain little or no MDMA. Pills may contain other drugs such as PMA or another MDMA analogue, DXM, household chemicals such as Ajax or rat poison, or other (sometimes lethal) byproducts.
- Memory tests of people who have taken Ecstasy as compared to non-drug users have shown that the Ecstasy users had lower scores.
- Researchers at The Johns Hopkins University demonstrated that 4 days of exposure to the drug caused damage that persisted 6 to 7 years later.
Rave promoter gets prison term A Boise man convicted for holding rave parties where drugs were sold and then sharing in the profits was sentenced to seven years in federal prison Tuesday.
Lee Arthur Rice II, 49, also was fined $2,000 by U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge and placed on three years probation after he gets out of prison. Rice, 49, who once tried to run an academy for kids on South 13th Street, maintained his innocence during Tuesday�s sentencing hearing. �I cannot and will not accept responsibility for something I did not do,� said Rice. �That is where I stand.� Lodge and Assistant District U.S. Attorney Monte Stiles said Rice was �self-delusional� and didn�t bother to consider the damage the drug-filled raves were doing to kids in the community. "There is no way you could exist in that environment and not know these drug transactions were going on,� Lodge said. �So when you come in and continue to deny ... It is just incomprehensible to the court.� Rice and three other men were found guilty by a federal jury in November of conspiracy to distribute LSD and the club drug Ecstasy at rave parties. Prosecutors said Rice had an agreement with Kevin Pawlik, Tyler Nichol and Eric Shira to let them into the raves for free and allow them to sell drugs exclusively in exchange for a percentage of their profits. Rice also was found guilty of one count of maintaining a place for the purpose of distributing and/or using controlled substances. That conviction was the second time nationally the �crackhouse law� � established in the 1980s to close down homes where drugs were sold � has been used to convict someone who ran raves at which drugs were sold. Pawlik and Nichol, who in addition to the conspiracy charge also were convicted of distributing a controlled substance to persons younger than 21, also were sentenced Tuesday. Nichol was sentenced to 10 years in prison; Pawlik will serve 205 months in prison. Each man also will serve six years of probation when they are released. Ecstasy, also known as MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine), is the drug most closely associated with raves, which are all-night dance parties. The drug has hallucinogenic and stimulant qualities. |