Club drugs sending more youths to hospitals

By Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY

Club drugs, including Ecstasy and GHB, are sending increasing numbers of young people to the hospital with toxic reactions and overdoses, emergency-room data released Tuesday shows.

Emergency rooms in 21 metropolitan areas tracked by the Drug Abuse Warning Network reported 4,511 emergency visits involving Ecstasy in 2000, a 58% increase over the 2,850 cases in 1999.

They also reported 4,969 visits involving the "date-rape drug" GHB, a 56% increase over the previous year's 3,178 cases.

Club drugs still account for only a fraction of emergency-room visits. However, the numbers indicate the drugs are becoming more widespread.

Club-drug users began arriving at emergency rooms in 1994. The drugs, including Ecstasy, GHB, an anesthetic called Ketamine and another so-called date-rape drug, Rohypnol, had grown popular at all-night rave parties and in dance clubs. That year, emergency rooms reported 56 visits for GHB and 253 visits for Ecstasy.

People ages 25 and under account for almost a third of drug emergencies, the data show. Their share is much higher for club-drug emergencies: People 25 and under make up 80% of Ecstasy emergencies and 60% of those involving GHB.

"We are concerned about the continued increase of club drugs among young people, which seems to be contributing to the overall increase of young people ending up in emergency rooms," says Mark Weber, spokesman for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Rockville, Md., which collects the data from 466 hospitals. The patients may mention using more than one drug, so drug mentions exceed drug visits. In 2000, the hospitals recorded 601,776 emergency-room visits in 2000.

Emergency-room visits for other drugs also increased. Heroin and morphine visits increased 15% to 97,287 in 2000. Emergency-room mentions of prescription drugs containing oxycodone, such as OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan, increased 68% to 10,825.

Although drug-related visits to emergency rooms stayed the same or decreased in 14 of 21 cities, seven metro areas reported overall increases: Seattle (32%), Boston (28%), Los Angeles (22%), Miami (20%), Chicago (16%), Minneapolis (12%) and Phoenix (9%). Emergency room visits decreased 12% in San Francisco and 19% in Baltimore. The other metro areas — Atlanta, Buffalo, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, Newark, N.J., Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Diego and Washington — reported no overall change.