Late on Sunday morning, students at Wesleyan University received an e-mail from a university official: Three students had been taken to hospitals for an apparent drug overdose, and one was in critical condition.
However, that was not the end of it. With one ambulance after another arriving on campus, the official sent out a second e-mail just two hours later, saying three more students had been hospitalized and fearing there could be more.
“First, and most importantly, please check in with your friends immediately to make sure that they are okay,” said the e-mail from Michael Whaley, the vice president for student affairs. “Do this right now.”
By the time the ambulances were through, 10 Wesleyan students and two guests had been admitted to hospitals for possible overdoses on Molly, a powdered club drug also known, sometimes in different forms, as MDMA or ecstasy, and which has been linked to a number of overdoses and deaths in recent years.
Some of the students were in critical or serious condition on Monday, but college officials declined to give more specific details. By evening, five students were still hospitalized at Hartford and Middlesex hospitals, with one expected to be discharged on Monday night, college officials said.
Students described an anxious few hours, as the tone of administrators and the mood on campus shifted. As at many universities, recreational drug use at Wesleyan is officially not condoned and also not uncommon. However, an e-mail on Monday from college president Michael Roth dispatched with the gentle dissuasive voice that some administrators prefer when speaking about drugs, instead resorting to a collar-grabbing warning.
“Please, please stay away from illegal substances, the use of which can put you in extreme danger,” he said. “One mistake can change your life forever.”
“If you are aware of people distributing these substances, please let someone know before more people are hurt,” Roth added.
Between 7:30am and 1:32pm on Sunday, the Middletown Fire Department responded to calls from three locations: the Butterfield and Foss Hill dorms and 200 High Street, which is home to the Eclectic Society, an organization that regularly hosts parties.
College and police officials did not say whether they knew where the drugs had come from. There have been no arrests.
However, it seems quite likely that many of the students had taken Molly from a “bad batch” of the drug, Middletown police chief William McKenna said.
Mark Neavyn, a toxicologist at Hartford Hospital, cautioned that there is effectively no such thing as a good batch of Molly, which is sometimes described as a “pure form of MDMA,” but is often adulterated.
MDMA can cause hyperthermia, or overheating, that leads to organ damage and sometimes death, and other substances often mixed with MDMA can exacerbate the effects, according to the US National Institute on Drug Abuse.
“More often than not, the drug these kids have taken is not the drug they were looking for, and if they knew what was in it, they wouldn’t want to buy it,” Neavyn said.
He added that his department has seen a significant increase in the number of young people, generally between ages 15 and 20, who are treated for symptoms related to a bad reaction to the drug, or an overdose, especially in the summer, when there are more parties and music festivals.
According to the US National Institutes of Health, 12.8 percent of 18 to 25-year-olds have used MDMA, ecstasy or Molly at some point in their lives.
The Drug Abuse Warning Network, a US federal health program, estimated that emergency room visits involving the drugs in patients younger than 21 more than doubled between 2005 and 2011.
In 2013, two people died of overdoses of Molly at the Electric Zoo music festival in New York. Their deaths came after a string of similar overdoses that year at dance festivals in Boston, Seattle, Miami and Washington.
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