A new designer drug that is becoming popular with the young and famous is being blamed for killing two people at a music festival in New York City this past weekend.
20-year-old Olivia Rotondo and 23-year-old Jeffery Russ died after reportedly taking the Ecstasy-like designer drug “Molly” over Labor Day weekend at the Electric Zoo music festival on Randall’s Island. The festival was cancelled on its final day “due to serious health risks” after four additional people were sent to an intensive care unit.
The name Molly derives from the word “molecule” and is reportedly the purest form of MDNA, Ecstasy’s main ingredient.
“There is nothing pure about it at all,” Erin Mulvey, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Agency’s New York division, told AFP. The drug is based on the stimulant methylone and is ingested by either pill or powder form.
“It raises your body temperature, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, and so it does make you more prone to heat stroke,”ABC News crime analyst Brad Garrett added. “It could have other amphetamines in it, it could cause you to overdose, and that may well have been the case in these deaths in recent days.”
“People assume it is going to be a euphoric event and they end up in the emergency room. There have been overdoses throughout the entire United States,” Mulvey of the DEA adds.
The drug is no stranger to the pop music world. Miley Cyrus, Kanye West, Rick Ross and Madonna have been all been known to reference the drug.
During last year’s Ultra Music Festival in Miami, Madonna asked the audience, “How many people in this crowd have seen Molly?” After the concert, the 55-year-old singer claimed that she was not referring to the drug, but rather a friend’s song about a girl named Molly who makes you “want to dance.”
Last week, lyrics during Miley Cyrus’ performance at the MTV VMAs were censored when the pop singer sang “dancing with Molly” from her song “We Can’t Stop”. Kanye West’s song “Mercy” also talks about the drug in the lyric “she gone off that Molly.”
Rick Ross lost his endorsement deal from Reebok after using the lyrics “put Molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it. I took her home and enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it” in his song “U.O.E.N.O.”
“It is kind of like an endorsement of anything else. If Madonna and Miley know about it, I should know about it,” Robert Thompson, pop culture expert at the University of Syracuse, states.
Molly is packaged like a candy to give users the impression that it is a safe drug to take, with doses selling on the street for $15 to $50. Meanwhile, most parents have no idea that the drug exists, or what their children mean when they post Twitter messages like, “I am going to see Molly tonight.”
“Last night my mom was watching the news and asked me if I knew who Molly was hahahahaha,” one Twitter user writes.
Now, due to mainstream media coverage of the two deaths that occurred over the weekend, the secret about Molly is out.
