A brief note on #bobchickenshit

HAHAHHA. HAHAHAHAAH.
I am amused.

Guess what? It was the MDMA that killed her.

I am grateful to occasional reader and commenter Klem for putting me on the track of an older story. Klem was trying to argue that the authorities in Canada have long been issuing warning about non-MDMA content of “Ecstasy” and about the methamphetamine in particular. This is not news to me, of course. I am not unaware of the problem of non-MDMA psychoactive content of putative “Ecstasy” obtained on the illicit market. What I attempt to address, of course, is the seeming default assumption in the news reporting and subsequent reader comments that every case of Ecstasy fatality must have been caused by something (anything) other than 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine.
Klem cites some 2005 reporting out of Vancouver and I was struck by this comment in the story.

A 13-year-old girl died in September when she took what she and friends believed was ecstasy they bought from a street dealer in Victoria.
Richard Stanwick, chief medical health officer for Vancouver Island, said an amphetamine overdose was suspected in Mercedes-Rae Clarke’s death.