Drug mix gives party boys a risky high

SUMMARY: Looking for a new and improved high, gay club-goers across the country are combining ecstasy with potent substances like cocaine, ketamine and methamphetamine.

Looking for a new and improved high, gay club-goers across the country are combining ecstasy with potent substances like cocaine, ketamine and methamphetamine.

It's not clear if the concoctions -- often known as "trail mix" -- are anything more than an isolated problem in the drug-saturated club scene. But health researchers have received reports about ecstasy mixtures from New York City, Boston, Los Angeles and Miami.

"Not too many people do this, but it's a phenomenon that has popped up. My concern is that people might inadvertently overdose because they don't know what they're taking," said Patricia Case, a Harvard Medical School urban health expert who's supervising a study into drug use at clubs.

Researchers interviewed 100 club-goers in New York and Boston. The reports for Miami and Los Angeles come from other researchers.

"Trail mix" is only one of several names for powdered mixtures of crushed Ecstasy pills and one or more other drugs, she said. The drugs are combined in "bumpers" - small containers - and then inhaled to get a high that lasts for hours longer than usual, she said.

"They're making these mixtures to their own taste. It's a way of having a lower-level experience over a longer period of time," Case said.

Ketamine -- a mind-blurring sedative that's mainly used by veterinarians -- is perhaps the most popular element of "trail mix" other than ecstasy itself, Case said. The drug is also known as "K" and "Special K."

People who take too much ecstasy with ketamine become overly sedated, in a glassy-eyed state known as the "K-hole," Case said.

In some cases, she said, the impotency drug Viagra is added to the mixture to return sexual function that may be lost due to drug use.

Case cautioned that "trail mix" shouldn't be seen as a specifically gay problem. "I don't think it's an exceptional thing that gay men do," she said. "If we were looking at equally sophisticated heterosexual drug users, we'd see similar things."

In New York City, officials at the Gay Men's Health Crisis organization are aware that some men are combining ecstasy with other drugs, but it doesn't seem to be a major problem yet, said spokesman Marty Algaze.

Regardless of who mixes ecstasy with other drugs, any combination can increase the risk of health problems. For one thing, Case said, it's not clear how the drugs interact with AIDS medications. (San Francisco's Haight Ashbury Free Clinics provide advice on the possible risks of recreational drug use by people with HIV.)

Also, mixing stimulants with ecstasy -- which is also a form of stimulant -- could dangerously speed up the body, said Dr. Charles Moore, medial director of Kaiser Permanente Health Plan's Chemical Dependency Recovery Program in Sacramento, Calif.

"The major problem is that we often don't know what we're dealing with," he added. "Because they're illegal or hard to get a hold of, you don't have the same kind of safeguards you do even with something like alcohol."