12 at Wesleyan University Are Hospitalized for Drug Overdoses

Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Some of the students involved were still in critical condition on Monday, officials said. Credit

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

MIDDLETOWN, Conn. — Late on Sunday morning, students at Wesleyan Universityreceived an email from a university official: Three students had been taken to hospitals, apparently for drug overdoses, and one was in critical condition.

But that was not the end of it. With one ambulance after another arriving on campus, the official sent out a second email just two hours later, saying three more students had been hospitalized and fearing there could be more.

“First, and most importantly, please check in with your friends immediately to make sure that they are okay,” said the email from Michael J. Whaley, the vice president for student affairs. “Do this right now!”

By the time the ambulances were through, 10Wesleyan students and two guests had been admitted to hospitals for possible overdoses on Molly, a club drug also known, sometimes in different forms, as MDMA or Ecstasy, and which has been linked to a number of overdoses and deaths in recent years.

Some of the students were in critical or serious condition on Monday, but college officials declined to give more specific details. By evening, five students were still hospitalized at Hartford and Middlesex Hospitals, with one expected to be discharged on Monday night, college officials said.

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Mark Neavyn, a toxicologist at Hartford Hospital, cautioned that there is effectively no such thing as a good batch of Molly, which is sometimes described as a “pure form of MDMA,” but is often adulterated.

MDMA can cause hyperthermia, or overheating, that leads to organ damage and sometimes death, and other substances often mixed with MDMA can exacerbate the effects, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“More often than not, the drug these kids have taken is not the drug they were looking for, and if they knew what was in it, they wouldn’t want to buy it,” Dr. Neavyn said.

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According to the National Institutes of Health, 12.8 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds have used MDMA, Ecstasy or Molly at some point in their lives. The Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal health program, estimated that emergency room visits involving the drugs in patients younger than 21 more than doubled between 2005 and 2011.

In 2013, two people died of overdoses of Molly at the Electric Zoo music festival on Randalls Island in New York City. Their deaths came after a string of similar overdoses that year at dance festivals in Boston, Seattle, Miami and Washington.

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