Link: www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/22/mother-fights-against-war-on-drugs-anne-marie-cockburn-martha-fernback
From the article:
"On 17 July 1971 the US president, Richard Nixon, announced what has become known as the war on drugs, instigating an unrelenting campaign that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
On the same date, 42 years later, in north Oxford, Martha Fernback, 15, and a friend bought a plastic sachet holding a crystallised gram of MDMA for £40 from a dealer. It was no impulse buy. Martha's online history revealed she had meticulously researched the risks of the drug and opted to buy its most expensive variant, assuming the better quality it was, the safer it would be.
One of the myriad ramifications of Nixon's hardline stance has meant buying drugs is a fraught and risk-laden business: users do not know what they are taking. In Martha's case better quality meant greater purity. She had no idea that her batch was 91% pure compared with an average street level of 58%. Around lunchtime on 20 July last year Martha swallowed her 0.5 gram and within two hours was dead, the MDMA inducing cardiac failure."
It doesn't seem to me that her research was meticulous, nor that the purity of the drug was a problem.
A google search for 'mdma dosage' gives this page as the first result:
www.erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/mdma_dose.shtml and it says that for small or sensitive people the dosage is 60-90mg, and for larger people 110-150mg.
So obviously if you bought 1g of pure MDMA and split it with a friend (presumably without the aid of a proper milligram scales, so the actual dose could have been higher still perhaps 0.6g or more) and then consumed the whole lot, then there was no question that you had taken far too much, whether purity was 58% or 91% especially given that MDMA is crystalline as compared to ecstasy which comes in a tablet form (and hence cut with caking agents, etc. to turn it into a pill), and tends to be much purer anyway.
People die from overdosing on alcohol, which is perfectly legal, so I'm not sure where the war on drugs comes into this.
She bought crystal MDMA, presumably on the basis that it tends to be purer, and less likely to be cut with other things, and then consumed far too much of it.
Educating people about dosages would be helpful, not saying that the problem is the variable quality of the product, which in this case it clearly wasn't.