Some of Canada's top public health officials are proposing a rethinking of the country's illegal-drug policies that may be contributing to a global problem involving tainted ecstasy from B.C.

British Columbia's Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, and some of his colleagues across the country are arguing the proliferation of ecstasy mixed with other substances and ecstasy overdoses are a direct consequence of criminalization and prohibition.

They want a public conversation about ecstasy, similar to the ongoing marijuana debate.

"We need to involve multiple viewpoints," Kendall told The Canadian Press this week.

"And then we need, in an ideal world, to come up with a regulatory regime which would minimize many of the harmful impacts which I see in the current regulatory regime."

Police say street ecstasy is killing an average of 20 British Columbians each year.

Ecstasy penalties upped

In mid-March, the class of drugs that includes the substance MDMA — considered the pure and original form of ecstasy — was bumped up to a Schedule I drug under Bill C-10, giving it heightened status alongside heroin and cocaine.

The federal Conservatives' rescheduling of amphetamines such as MDMA generally means dealers now face one-year mandatory minimum sentences, producers face two years and harsher punishment will be meted out in instances of possession for trafficking or exporting.

The boost has the health officers and other advocates of change warning the tough-on-crime approach will not curb street ecstasy's use or its associated dangers, but instead will further play into the hands of organized crime.

"These drugs are harmful to users and society and contribute significantly to violent crime," Julie Di Mambro, the spokeswoman for Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, said in an email in May.

"Our government has no interest in seeing any of these drugs legalized or made more easily available to youth."

But health experts say it's already in teens' hands, and the government's move will keep it that way.

The pills on the street market — candy-coloured tablets of pressed powder stamped with logos such as the Olympic rings — are much cheaper than those available a decade ago.

Rave love-drug turns ugly

This year in Western Canada, 16 people died in the space of nine months after consuming ecstasy batches laced with PMMA, a chemical authorities say was not previously seen in B.C. or Alberta.

Arrests of two alleged small-time traffickers were made in February, though as recently as early May, RCMP in Penticton, B.C., were warning the toxic batch had surfaced there.

RCMP have targeted the domestic ecstasy inventory by raiding synthetic production houses and by cracking down on the supply channels of the chemicals that go into it. Investigators say those strategies have made some dents.

Kendall and colleagues argue the proliferation of dirty street ecstasy and ecstasy overdoses are a direct consequence of criminalization and prohibition.

They want a public conversation around combating its scourge, similar to the ongoing pot debate.

"We need to involve multiple viewpoints," Kendall told The Canadian Press this week. "And then we need, in an ideal world, to come up with a regulatory regime which would minimize many of the harmful impacts which I see in the current regulatory regime."

B.C. gangs control trade

The same province stirring the pot on drug policy reform also happens to be North America's ecstasy kitchen.

B.C. has been named by the United Nations, the White House, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the RCMP as a global manufacturing hub, where mainly Chinese gangs cook up the substance for wholesale distribution across international borders.

The gangs source the precursor chemicals — like MDP2P which comes from the sassafras plant — from connections in China, smuggling it through Vancouver ports, according to an 80-page report in January from U.S. President Barack Obama's drug czar.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy calls marijuana and ecstasy "the most significant Canadian drug threats to the United States" in the report, and fingers Vietnamese, Indian, Eastern European and outlaw motorcycle gangs as the likeliest traffickers.

The report said that ecstasy tablets are no longer just MDMA, but rather a "cocktail of chemicals," as Canadian organized crime groups "demonstrate a willingness to utilize whichever chemicals are readily available to them."

Pills that mimic MDMA, resembling candy or children's vitamins and seized around U.S. schools, were traced back to Canadian sources, states the report.

Dave Rodriguez, director of the Seattle-based Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, said the port of entry at Blaine, Washington, adjacent to B.C.'s Metro Vancouver region, has led the country in ecstasy border seizures for the past five years.

He said it's only within the past four years or so that Canada's organized crime groups began pumping out the drug in massive quantities, bypassing a former supply route through the Netherlands.

"They set up labs in British Columbia, they got in the tools and the dies and the formula and the expertise, so that they didn't have to export any longer, they just made it there," he said.

Pills traded for cocaine

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Jeffrey Scott said four million ecstasy tablets were seized at the Canada-U.S. border in 2010, up from two million in 2006.

But Scott doesn't believe regulating the drug will reduce gang activity.

"If you take one substance away from them it's not likely that they're suddenly going to go run MacDonald's or go open a retail store," he said. "They're just going to shift to another illicit substance."

The border seizure number has dropped again in recent years, although a report from Rodriguez's organization stated there is "no evidence" that MDMA production in B.C. has decreased.

Rodriguez said that ecstasy that does make its way down the West Coast mostly ends up in Southern California, where the pills and B.C. marijuana are traded for Mexican cocaine that is then trucked back up north.

Harm reduction proposed

Kendall has co-authored an open paper urging an evidence-based re-evaluation of federal illegal-drug policies with the provincial health officers of Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia. He also joined scores of B.C.'s physicians in signing a discussion paper in late 2011 that recommends all levels of government "review, evaluate and update their psychoactive substances related laws."

He and the host of doctors argue that implementing public health-oriented regulations would decrease usage rates, as has occurred in Portugal and the Netherlands. They say that just like ending the alcohol prohibition took booze out of the Mafia's hands, it would gut the gangs.

Nova Scotia's chief medical health officer, Dr. Robert Strang, said a revised framework could vastly reduce the harm done by reducing sales to minors and preventing deaths: Even if teens did use, they would more likely be getting a cleaner product.

"It means getting away from ideologically-based approaches," Strang said.

"I'm challenging the government to say we have to do things differently, because our current approach is clearly not working."