Feature

Nightlife '99: Clear And Present Danger

Until legislation makes GBL and GHB Schedule 1 drugs, both are legal to possess in New York and most states, but the FDA considers them "illegally marketed unapproved drugs." That means the agency can ask for an injunction against companies marketing GBL, seize their products, and file criminal charges against those responsible. Right now, though, neither GBL nor GHB is on the list of controlled substances in New York. "It takes a while for the legislature to keep up with the trends," explains Bridget Brennan, special narcotics prosecutor for New York City. "For example, both ketamine and ecstasy were only recently added to the state's list of controlled substances."

Ecstasy made clubbers love one another, and ketamine ("special k") made them zone out in the corner, but GBL and GHB are known mostly for causing blackouts -- even in experienced drug users. Many people are unafraid to mix them with alcohol because they think of them as designer drugs like ecstasy and not central-nervous-system depressants like quaaludes. Some of what's sold as GBL at clubs is actually "bathtub G" made by basement chemists who buy kits over the Internet and add paint thinner, cleaning agents, and furniture-polish remover, according to the FDA. Even in pure form, it's extremely "dose-sensitive." "The relationship between a 'coma dose' and a 'party dose' can be just two to one," says Winchel. "That's a very narrow range of error, and that's why people are passing out left and right."

Chris*, a raver who deals ecstasy and ketamine out of his West Village studio apartment, once drank a little too much GBL in a New York dance club and remembers "feeling really woozy and then trying to walk up a flight of stairs." Then he blacked out, he says, "and woke up on the floor of the club's security office."

"It's not pretty," says the Roxy's McCarthy of clubbers who overdose on GBL or GHB. "They turn purple; they stop breathing. It's a difficult thing to baby-sit." Curry agrees, noting that GBL- and GHB-overdose cases rushed into St. Vincent's have a particularly horrifying quality. "They come in blue in the face or they've been discovered facedown in vomit," she says. "Sometimes people are so out of it they have to be put on machines so they can breathe."

Still, some clubbers remain unrepentant. "Mix it with ecstasy and you're on cloud nine," says Eric*, a twentysomething gay man who frequents the circuit-party scene. He boasts that he "never passes out" from GBL, but he makes a point of measuring it into a bottle to avoid drinking too much. Morris*, another circuit-party regular who uses GBL products like Beta-Tech to enhance his ecstasy high, actually says he's happy about the FDA's recall of Blue Nitro, because "it was too weak anyway."

GHB is thought to occur naturally in the body, and both it and GBL may have legitimate medical uses. First synthesized by Dr. Henri Laborit, a French researcher studying the neurotransmitter GABA, GHB has been used in Europe as an insomnia medication and a childbirth aid. The FDA is currently investigating its use as a narcolepsy treatment.

There is also evidence that GHB helps build body mass. "It induces a longer period of unusually deep sleep called 'slow-wave sleep,' which is sleep you need to feel restored the next day and during which you produce growth hormone," says Winchel. "Deeper sleep may facilitate better exercise and better outcome from exercise."

In the eighties, "steroid queens would do a little to juice themselves up," explains Berkley. "But then they noticed that if they did a little more, they'd get a euphoric buzz." Later in the decade, clubbers caught on because it had one significant advantage over ecstasy, according to Berkley. "It's like ecstasy -- but with a hard-on."

Dr. Ward Dean, the medical editor of the newsletter for the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute, a Menlo Park, California-based organization that researches dietary supplements, argues that "GBL and GHB are the safest, most nontoxic, non-habit-forming sleep-inducing substances known to man." Dean cites studies that prove GHB can effectively treat narcolepsy and accuses the FDA of hypocrisy for experimenting with GHB as a medication while crusading against it as a drug. Dean also blames the FDA for creating the GBL and GHB problem by recalling the drugs and thus putting the trade in the hands of amateur pharmacists. "Who knows what concentration this stuff is?" he says. "When it was made by legitimate manufacturers, it was a very carefully controlled dose."

Since the FDA banned the marketing of GHB in 1990, at least 49 deaths and 5,500 overdoses nationwide have been linked to GHB and GHB-related substances like GBL, according to the DEA. Still, there wasn't a serious move to make the drugs illegal on a federal level until 1998. That bill, introduced by Michigan congressman Bart Stupak, "essentially went nowhere," according to his spokesman, until Reid died this January.

After Reid's death, her mother, Judi Clark, revived the movement to make the drugs illegal nationwide. "She was slipped GHB and/or GBL," allegedly by three boys at one of her friend's houses, Clark says tearfully. "They didn't know which." (The three now face manslaughter and felony poisoning charges.) She is currently researching grant options to start an anti-GBL-and-GHB foundation named for her daughter. "Every time I talk about it, it just breaks my heart," she says, holding back tears. "But to not fight it would be even worse."

Here in New York, despite efforts to educate clubbers, "it's still the most popular drug on the scene," according to Splash D.J. Julian Marsh. "We've run full-page ads in the local gay weekly HX warning our readers about Blue Nitro and RenewTrient," Berkley says. "I honestly don't know what else we can do."

There is at least some evidence the message is getting through -- albeit in the most painful way possible. A dealer named Greg* who sells ecstasy and cocaine says he won't sell GBL because of the trouble his customers have had with GHB. "GHB causes so many problems," he explains without a hint of irony, "that I wouldn't even think of carrying another drug like it."

*These names have been changed.