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House of Blues shut after three overdoses, one fatal, early this morning

Boston Police report officers called to the hall around 12:45 a.m. today found:

Three individuals, unknown to each other, had been transported to Beth Israel Hospital. The victims appeared to be suffering from an overdose from an unknown substance. One adult female victim was later pronounced deceased. Another adult female victim and adult male victim are currently listed in serious condition.

Sorry, Zedd fans: Tonight's show is canceled because the House of Blues will be shut.

Our thoughts are with the families and friends suffering now. The safety of patrons and fans is top priority and all involved continue to work closely in conjunction with local officials on this active investigation.

Homicide detectives are leading the investigation. The Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports:

That investigation is ongoing and toxicological screens will be necessary to determine whether the deceased overdosed, as investigators currently believe, and if so then on what. No one has been charged at this time.

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Comments

Molly? If so, another Myley Cyrus disgrace.

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Is PCP coming back in style? Aaron Hernandez bringing it back?

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... molly meant pure molecular MDMA. You kids today and your fancy drug cocktails.

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Molly is still MDMA but now that "bathsalts" methylone mephedrone and random research chemicals are easily available dealers are selling everything thats crystalline, euphoric and mildly hallucinogenic as "molly" and a lot of these chemicals have negative effects and some are dangerous or even lethal. Molly itself depletes serotonin permanently if it is abused but these drugs are nastier and are taken without any preparation or research... Unfortunately what happened at hob is sometimes the result. There is no way to regulate or stop these drugs from being sold so if you have kids please be honest, up front and informative when it comes to drugs. Dont try to scare them off of all drugs because it won't work, but let them know not to take poisonous RCs from piece of shit dealers they don't know.

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While it is known to occasionally cause hyponatremia, it is still far safer then alcohol.

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...badly formulated MDMA can interfere with the body's temperature regulatory system. Quite literally the person cooks themselves. There have been a number of cases on record.

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... to make it legal, taxed, and controlled.

Properly formulated MDMA is not a harmful drug, and has well-documented uses in therapy. The only reason it is highly illegal is ZOMG WAR ON DRUGS!!!!!!!

Reference.

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LSD had legitimate psychotherapeutic uses in the 1950s. Last year a study came out that suggested that it might even be an effective treatment for alcoholism. (!)

(Disclaimer: I don't use drugs other than the occasional craft-brewed beer or artisanal cocktail, but I think throwing people in jail just because they want to get high is a waste of public resources.)

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But it isn't regulated is it.
I notice that concerning drug policy and a whole bunch of other Uhub things, people like to call for society as a whole to act more responsibly and pass better laws ( a good idea); although collectively as a society we should all act more responsibly, individually that isn't the case.

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It's a paranoid response, and the cause of death is usually salt imbalances in the blood causing the heart to stop, from over consumption of water because people believe that.

Physiologically, you won't die of heat exhaustion/over heating from MDMA. That's not to say in a packed club someone using might not realize when they've over exerted themselves too much on a hot dance floor.

Bad batches are much more nasty, but they also don't cause "cooking people from the inside". They usually just poison you.

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Look up "Hyperthermia" as associated with Ecstasy.

For example, from Medscape, "While most improve with supportive treatment alone, the patient should be evaluated for signs of hyperthermia, dehydration, hyponatremia, seizures, hypertensive crises, cardiac dysrhythmias, and possible signs of serotonin syndrome."

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/821572-overview

Or, perhaps this, from the NIH - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1343106/

I have no particular axe to grind here, these are simply the medical facts.

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What a dangerously ignorant simple-minded comment. A person at a club would not die from drinking one beer. Have some respect for the victim's friends and family.

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The thing I hate most about these stories is they say overdose. This means the person did not take just one pill. They never follow up the initial news reports when the toxicology reports come out and indicate the person has marijuana, alcohol, heroin, and MDMA in their system. You can't get that all from 1 dose. These people are stupid and take 5 or 6 pills. Take ONE and see how it affects you before downing a handful. Drugs will always be around. It's the people that dont understand the rules that end up dead. You dont chug down a bottle of vodka all at once because of alcohol poisoning, right? So dont take 6 doses of a drug either. Even an aspirin bottle says take 2. I mean get real people. The news needs to do better reporting about the true story once they get the real facts, instead of creating hysteria. MDMA has been around since the 80's and was prescribed, then the FDA took it off the market then people did it recreationally. Now they call it molly and it's a "new" drug. HA HA HA. Morons.

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Uh, no.. Molly is pure MDMA - very difficult to overdose on molly. Dehydrate maybe, but not OD.

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Prescription pain killers

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I want to correct folks, because I don't believe having miss information out there about drugs. While I agree it is to easy to 'cut' something else, its seldom done. Back in the day (when I was a raver in a former life) we used to think methamphetamine was put into our MDMA pills because we would get a 'speedy' effect and wouldn't notice the decreased amount of MDMA in the pill. This was 100% untrue. Why? Methamphetamine is just too expensive to put enough in a pill mixed with MDMA so you'd notice it (Methamphetamine effects decrease when taken orally due to it not liking stomach acids). The speedy effect was just a side effect of MDMA, nothing more, nothing less.

As far as today's "Molly" being mixed with other chemicals... Now outside of a stupid drug user who doesn't know what real molly looks like and/or what other drugs look like, it would be unlikely that mixed with someone else. Real MDMA crystals are typically large chunks that have to be crushed into a powder to be administered. If it was 'mixed' into the crystals, you'd know just by looking at it. And to get the other drugs into into the hard crystals, you would need to 'cook it' together with MDMA and that is just not possible because the added substance would be an impurity and may not allow the crystals to be formed (taking a wild guess here)

Let's clarify something.. Bath Salts are NOT Methylone or Mephadrone. Bath Salts in the US, chemically, are known as MDPV. MDPV by description, yes it's powder, but lacks the hard white crystals like true MDMA/Molly.

Methylone is bk-MDMA chemically. Which essentially means its an analogue of MDMA. Almost same effects, but not quite. Methylone by description is actually a brown/tan substance that is more powder than it is crystals.

Mephedrone is something totally different. Effect wise, it may feel like a 'softer' MDMA, but chemically its totally different. And like its cousin Methylone, it also is a tan/brown powder substance, like Methylone.

Users often get Methylone and Mephedrone mixed it because they look so similar. But most users say the effects are very similar to each other and to MDMA, except it's very short lived (about an hour and a half) and has "more-ish" properties (aka The feeling to keep doing more of it)

People also confuse Mephedrone, Methylone, and now MDPV because if you Google "Bath Salts" not only do you get the crazy stories from last year (i.e. the guy in Florida who ripped off someone's face while on MDPV) to stories from the mid 2000s in Europe where people talk about "meow meow" or "bath salts" which really isn't MDPV but is Methylone and Mephedrone. So the term "Bath Salts" can be erogenous sometimes depending on where your information is coming from. Keep that in mind when calling something "Bath Salts".

Now of course this whole thing goes out the window when "Molly" is put into capsules (Clear or not clear). Because frankly, most drug users I knew who bought their drugs at a club aren't going to go into the bathroom to look at their capsule in the light to see if it looks like Molly. No, they are going to just take it.

Even still if the capsule had bk-MDMA or Mephedrone mixed with MDMA (or by itself sans MDMA), it wouldn't hurt you. Erowid has many stories about people mixing the two and achieving quite desired effects. Taking these seperate wouldn't hurt you either.

Now having it mixed with MDPV might cause this, but you'd have to take a lot to achieve this, however since most street drugs aren't know for their purity, and in some cases a small dose of MDPV can be 'too much' because the purity can vary from batch to batch.

We honestly don't know and won't know until the tox screen comes back to find out exactly what the people had in their system. And considering that they did not know each other, I'd take a gander it might have been other factors rather than some rouge drug dealer at the HoB selling bunk Molly.

The other thing to keep in mind is that many people take SSRI/SNRI's these days, along with amphetamine salts (legal ones like Adderall and Ritalin) and you CANNOT take these with MDMA, bk-MDMA, and Mephedrone because they all attack the same receptors in the brain, and frankly too much of a 'good' thing isn't good for the brain at all. Typically if you're taking a prescription SSRI/SNRI, you should not take ANYTHING that attacks these same receptors, as they will just cancel each other out or achive undesirable effects, including death. Think about it, SSRI/SNRI/Legal Amphetamines's regulate the same receptors. The SSRI is controlling the flow of serotonin, the other is telling it "let it flow". Combine that with impurities in the street drug and it makes for a bad combination.

There's also one drug that I want to bring up here that hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet that could cause the same outcome. There's a relatively new psychedelic out there called (as told to me) "I Bone 25" or "25i" or "iLSD" or some other new name. Chemically it's apart of the 2C-? class of phenethylamine, and chemically is known as 25i-NBOMe or 2C-I-NBOMe. While the effects are similar to LSD, it's not even chemically close and it lasts far longer, and unlike LSD, can cause death, much like the woman at the HOB. It's also legal still in the US and can be bought online, as it has not been classified by the DEA (but many states have already banned it).

And yes, I've known many folks who take psychedelics and go out to night clubs (I have no idea why, back in the day, I didn't wanna be near anyone while tripping). 25i is just too potent and people tend to take too much on their first dose because they don't know that you only need a small amount.

It will be interesting to see if the BPD releases how or what this girl was on when she died. (Sorry, I'm weird like that). I'm pretty sure it was either a mix of booze and MDMA, Bunk MDMA (i.e. Mixed with something else) or an entirely different drug like 25i.

And yeah incase anyone was wondering... Since I no longer use street drugs, I still like to read about them and the effects of them. Friends call me a walking street drug encyclopedia. I'm not for or against drug use, I am, however, a fan of harm reduction, because it's silly to think you'll be able to eradicate drug use in society. It will just never happen.

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...of a damn good post. Yes, exactly. Well said.

I am surprised at the response *I* got for simply posting some easily found medical knowledge. One person said, "this is PURE, etc." Well, now, how in the hell do you actually know that? It's not as if this shit was produced by Pfizer or something. You just plain don't know, you're hoping, wishful thinking on your part.

Be aware, people. We are going to recreate, sure, but at least try to be aware and safe. You don't want your Epitath to read, "went out to have a good time, dropped dead."

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Yes I know some of it was babbling.. was trying to get it all written before I left for work. :) I didn't have time to re-org it into a better reply.

I should also state that 25i comes in blotter form much like LSD. (It's one of the few drugs that can be administered this way). With that said, since it is so powerful you have ZERO way of knowing the purity and dosage in that tab. It's VERY easy to overdose on. Unlike LSD, which you cannot over dose on (but probably would be frightened to death from), 25i you can easily.

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People who are young have this "it's all OK" attitude, they don't scrutinize these things well enough. That's not a perjorative, it's just how you are when you are young. But Dudes (and Dudettes), it's a cost/benefit analysis. What are you taking and where does it come from? You assume, all of the time, but you really don't know. It could be made by Walter White in a trailer in Arizona, which means absolutely nothing. Dartree get's his payout, and you die.

Dying because you want to get fun and Twerk is no way of living.

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That was a really useful precis of the players. I'm in the same camp--if you give people (esp. kids) a bunch of scary BS about drugs, they'll eventually discover they've been lied to and they won't believe any of it. Give people the straight dope (heh) and they'll be much safer.

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Great post. Sadly, prohibition optimizes to make dealers and cops maximum stacks of cash, not keep the users safe. If we were smart, we'd do a complete 180 on policy and regulate this stuff.

People will do it either way, we just reinforce violence and the incredibly bad knowledge about what people are getting and the respect they need to treat these very serious chemicals with.

I hope one day it won't be taboo to talk about these chemicals, because they can be both medically useful as well as done safely recreationally - it's just we as a society set ourselves up for the worst kind of fail possible yet somehow all these policies are put into place "to protect the keeeeedz" and be "tough on crime".

As someone who loves the electronic music scene, it hurts everyone for these tragedies to keep happening and be so closely associated with the scene itself.

We need to start treating adults like adults, and properly inform our children about what is out there so they aren't going into things blind.

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I don't take drugs and I think that taking them is a very bad decision but, that said, it is rediculous that we have chosen prohibition rather than regulation of these substances. This is a perfect example. From everyone's comments here, who seem to have more experience with drugs than me, it sounds like this was likely (although no one can be certain) a tainted batch of Molly that killed a 19 year old girl. In my mind, it was a bad choice for her to take the drug to begin with. However, had the drug at least been manufatured, distributed, and advertised under the eye of the state (pick the DEA, the FDA, or any new agency you choose) the chances are much lower that she (a) would have gotten the drug in the first place,(b) chosen to take it or (c) died from it if she had chosen to take it because it would at least not have been tainted. In addition to the vast ocean of money spent fruitlessly trying to enforce our prohibition on drugs and the underworld economy our prohibition has created and fostered, it is utterly irresponsible not to allow distribution of these substances through regulated channels. Anyone who feels reservations about legalizing and regulating drugs should watch the documentary "Prohibition" by Ken Burns and see what amazing folly that excercize was and how it mirrors exactly what we are doing today. They also have to accept, of course, that people are using drugs today despite their illegality. I think that the biggest opposition to legalization comes from the fact that many, if not most, people fail or refuse to recognize the fact that lots of people are using drugs today despite the prohibition. Once you acknowledge that drugs are being manufactuered, distributed and advertised every day without any oversight (other than by criminals) despite all our efforts at enforcing prohibition, the only logical conclusion is that prohibition has failed and we need regulation.

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OK The article on boston.com was updated.

Now BPD says it was MDMA. Sorry still don't buy that it was this drug alone. We will now wait for the tox screen. I'm thinking dollars to donuts that she had something else in her system besides MDMA or it wasn't MDMA at all.

Its extremely rare for someone to drop dead from MDMA, however, it does happen. It is very very very rare tho. And usually its a combination of other drugs (street or prescription), and/or the person has an underlying medical condition (i.e Heart Problems or Allergies to additives/other the street drugs)

So we shall see what the tox screen says.

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