Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High

by Power, Mike

  Like a dandelion in the wind, the seeds of Ecstasy were blown randomly out from these small pockets of enthusiastic early adoption, finding root wherever they landed. With each blooming came fresh converts who themselves became evangelists for the new drug.

  Some say the drug first crossed the Atlantic in the pockets of the sannyasin, or followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The orange-robed ascetics, whose guru drove a Rolls-Royce, were evicted from their Oregon commune in 1984. Among Rajneesh’s followers, drawn from many New Age disciplines, were psychotherapists who had encountered the drug in the therapeutic communities. A former bodyguard to the guru, Hugh Milne, has claimed rich donors were spiked with the drug – perhaps explaining their beatific view of the charlatan, and their altruistic responses to his requests for money.13

  In 1984, some of the sannyasin were involved in one of the world’s most serious bio-terror attacks, when devotees laced food in salad bars with salmonella bacteria in an attempt to incapacitate voters in the Wasco County elections, in the hope that a lower turnout for the opposition would enable them to install their own candidates. Over 700 people became sick, though none died. The sannyasin left and some of them landed on the hippy island of Ibiza, the freak-zone safety net for Francoera Spain, a blinding white Balearic haven that later attracted a ragtag gang of refugees – hippies, artists, liberals, discontents, leftists, gay men and women, and the rich at play.

  ‘Sannyasins enjoyed parties, participated heavily in the nightclub life, and introduced various New Age techniques for self-development brought from the USA, including the use of MDMA for meditation and body-therapies,’ wrote author and academic Anthony D’Andrea in the island’s Cultura magazine of summer 2001.14 The drug soon found its way onto the dance-floors, and into the mouths and serotonin receptors of the wealthy, the famous and the bohemian.

  Journalist Peter Nasmyth’s series of articles for style and fashion magazine The Face in 1986 discussed the pharmacology of the drug,15 but even at this stage, it is revealing that the interviewees included progressive British psychologist R. D. Laing and nameless pop stars rather than everyday users – for there were almost none. But from 1988 onwards, young British men and women would change that.

  The drug was already illegal in Britain at that time, added to the Misuse of Drugs Act in a Modification Order in 1977 after a clandestine chemist had been caught emulating Shulgin’s efforts. The Modification Order cleverly specified the mechanisms of ring substitution – molecular replacements of the kind that Shulgin was carrying out – that would make each related compound illegal. This banned most, but not all, of PIHKAL in the UK before it was even published.

  In the summer of 1988, the drug was discovered by a group of English clubbers while they danced to the hotch potch of Balearic sounds spun by DJ Alfredo Fiorito in the open-roofed, palm-tree strewn Amnesia nightclub in Ibiza. These suburban Londoners brought the culture, the attitude and news of the new wonderdrug to the UK. Supplies followed soon after, produced by Dutch, Belgian and American chemists, and smuggled in by organized crime gangs from Manchester, London and Liverpool.

  When Ecstasy first started to be used in significant quantities in the UK, it felt like being a member of an amusing cult. You could spot fellow members on most high streets not just by their floppy fringes and ponytails, their loose-fitting, easy-to-dance-in clothes – their dungarees and Wallabees or Timberlands – but by the unexpected urban eye contact between strangers, the flash of recognition from ten paces. Many British high streets warped into live-action Keith Haring dayglo cityscapes. For one or two brief summers before the utopianist culture was appropriated, gobbled up and spat out like flavourless gum, there was a strange magic at work, as a whole section of the nation’s youth seemed, as one, to chill out.

  Even the concept of ‘chilling out’ is an old Ecstasy meme, the phrase borrowed from jazz-era hep-talk originally, and referring to the re-entry period at home after the club with good friends, or the lounging on bean bags in the back rooms of nightclubs by E-heads overwhelmed by the drug, taking time to relax into the rush and cool down, as psychedelic jazz and other layered sample madness careened around the speakers.

  For the uninitiated to understand the singular love felt by some British drug users for MDMA, or Ecstasy, there’s not a lot they can do except take it. Preferably, they would dose just as they jumped out of a time machine into late-1980s Britain where the nation’s youth self-medicated, rejecting the strictures of a drab, individualist puritanism, Thatcherism’s dreary, market-obsessed world view, unemployment, heroin, nuclear paranoia, a dirge-like indie-rock alternative scene, and a pop chart dominated by trite, brilliantly bubblegum pop, choosing instead the intense collective euphoria of Acid House.

  The emergence of a global dance and drug culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s has left us with what could be argued to be the principal model of illegal youth culture in most of the world. Every town now has a nightclub where you’ll find people taking Ecstasy and dancing, from Reykjavik to Buenos Aires, and Bangkok to Moscow. True, its popularity has waxed and waned along with the quality of the product on offer, but MDMA is now undeniably an integral element of all late-night entertainment venues playing music to dance to, at festivals, parties, pubs or prison cells.

  Use increased on a hockey-stick graph from 1988 onwards, partly because the prurient and sexualized reporting about the drug delivered a clear and concise message to most young readers: there was a new drug in town, a new scene, and a new beat, and there was tremendous fun to be had. But it also increased because of the drug’s convenient routes of administration: orally, via branded tablets stamped with trustworthy logos, making them look much like regulated pharmaceuticals, which took away the fear associated with the needles and powders of heroin and cocaine, the dangers of disease and addiction.

  Crucially, Ecstasy did not cause hallucinations of the kind associated with classical psychedelics, such as LSD and mushrooms. The fear many people associated with psychedelics – of losing control or being unaware of their surroundings – dissipated the first time they felt the benign psychic slam delivered by a dose of Ecstasy. The main thing they wanted to do was dance and hug people. This made the experience accessible and popular with many who would never have considered taking drugs, and guaranteed its proliferation.

  Most information about Ecstasy at this time was mediated by newspapers censorious about the new drug. Before the net gained mass appeal in the mid-1990s, one of the earliest and most level-headed sources of information on the chemistry and action of MDMA was Nicholas Saunders’s book E For Ecstasy, published in 1993. The book offered a calm and information-rich analysis of the history and use of the drug, and opened with the author’s account of the first and subsequent times he took the chemical. Saunders was a member of London’s squatting counterculture through the 1970s and 1980s, and his self-published 1970 guide to living in Britain’s capital at minimal or zero cost, Alternative London, was essential reading for the British hippy underground. An alternative entrepreneur, he opened Neal’s Yard in Covent Garden, turning derelict warehouses into one of central London’s first whole-food shops.

  In E For Ecstasy, Saunders described his first experiences with the drug in 1988 with the rhapsodic tone that was so commonplace at the time:

  When we got off the train I took deep breaths and the air felt wonderful. It was good to be alive. But the intellectual part of myself asked ‘What is different to normal? Why isn’t life always like this?’ I deduced that I was simply allowing myself to enjoy what had always been there. I realized that I had got into the habit of restraining myself. It was not this drug-induced state that was distorted – it was what I had come to accept as my normal state that was perverse. I then realized that over the past few years I had been mildly depressed. And, what’s more, I could see why: some years before I had felt cheated in a business deal, and had carried a resentment like a burden ever since: instead of hurting the person involved, I had been grimly taking it out on
myself. This realization and the experience of a few hours ‘freedom’ was just the tonic I needed; I let go of the resentment and started afresh with new enthusiasm.16

  After his experience, this driven man gathered every scrap of research he could find on the drug and dedicated the years until his death in a car accident in South Africa a decade later to preaching a message of harm reduction, and telling people how to use drugs more safely.

  For his book, Saunders interviewed a wide range of figures about their experiences of taking the drug, including a rabbi, a Rinzai Zen monk, a Soto Zen monk and a Benedictine monk who said the drug gave him similar effects to some of his most profound religious experiences. Saunders also detailed the drug’s darker, more negative sides in an honest appraisal that was sorely lacking in mainstream coverage. As you expect with a prohibited drug, supplies at that time were not always pure or safe, but Saunders spread the news of contaminated pills as fast as he could, in the era when words and information were bound by the gravity and solidity of printed matter.

  In 1992, a huge batch of pills known as Snowballs came into mass circulation in Europe. They had been synthesized in Latvia, an Eastern European country emerging from communism, in a bid to generate some foreign currency. But instead of MDMA, the pills contained a similar, equally illegal outpost in the methylenedioxyamphetamine family tree, MDA. That year, the music mutated away from the hypnotic house sounds that had characterized the previous years and sped up, becoming darker and more fractured, the clattering breakbeats of hardcore tumbling across cartoony vocals, as sub bass boomed through ever more improbably huge sound systems. Europe was awash with these strange pills that made the atmosphere and users edgier. The once-peaceful rituals of the E-generation started to vibrate uneasily with an outlaw, renegade menace that was reflected in harsher policing.

  The lab that synthesized the Snowballs also unleashed a wave of extraordinary hallucinations across the UK and Europe that year, since the chemists had inaccurately dosed the pills with almost 200 mg of the active substance, which is generally enjoyed at 100 mg or below. Many clubbers at that time reported hitherto unseen phenomena on the dancefloor, such as the sudden invasion of thousands of masked, bearded or bespectacled dancers; ornate baroque sofas disappearing into puffs of dried ice and glitterball trails; ancient hieroglyphics swarming across the walls and faces all around them; indecipherable Mayan technological artefacts materializing for an all-too-brief instant before reconstituting themselves as cigarette machines; antic, merrie maypole scenes; dancing Madonnas beckoning seductively with laserbeam hands as the room exploded in rhythm – plus an awful lot of projectile vomiting.

  Saunders unpicked this story, and others, in his book:

  Snowballs, a notorious brand of Ecstasy, consisted of very strong pure MDA which came from a government laboratory in Latvia … Latvia needed western currency and had the advantage of no drug laws, so they joined up with a German businessman to produce MDA for export as Ecstasy. This went well for a couple of years until a consignment of 10 million tablets was intercepted in Frankfurt airport, since when MDA has been rare.

  Saunders’ book was published a full year after the Snowballs first appeared. In the intervening period users had no idea that they were taking a drug other than MDMA, and even in the immediate years after publication the news was shared only among those who had read Saunders’ book. Rumours often circulated when strong new batches of pills came on to the market that they were cut with ketamine or even heroin, the latter a particularly bizarre and unlikely choice considering its high price. Even the basic action of MDMA was widely unknown; the drug can be overwhelmingly sedative during onset if dosed incorrectly high, or if purity is greater than that to which users have been accustomed.

  One commonplace belief among Ecstasy users at this time was that the drug caused the spinal fluid to drain away, leading to mass paranoia on comedowns when users were suffering from nothing more than a stiff back caused by hours of hectic dancing. The drug caused Parkinson’s, it was rumoured, and left gaping holes in the brain: both untrue. Misinformation was rife, with Ecstasy users having, in the pre-web era, no simple way to research the drug or share any information they had. Such a situation would not and does not happen today. At the same time, pill manufacturers started to cash in by copying previously popular and clean logos and selling fake or tainted products, making the market even more dangerous.

  Nevertheless, a new, hedonistic hegemony took root irresistibly in Britain, the US, Europe, Australia and Asia. The Face magazine in 1990 dedicated a twelve-page feature to clubbing in Europe, as the whole continent fell in thrall to the new groove.17 From the shrink’s sofa to the dancefloors of Dallas, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Ibiza, Manchester, Blackburn, Liverpool, Nottingham and London, and then the whole world, Ecstasy became the drug of choice for millions of people who had never got high in their lives before.

  In comparison to binge-drinking and street-fighting, Ecstasy seemed to be an almost healthy and active lifestyle choice, with ravers turning away from alcohol as they sipped on energy drinks and dressed in leisurewear. The sensations those chemicals elicited in users, too, along with the glorious rush of unified, rhythmic euphoria, seemed less than harmless; they actually felt beneficial. Excessive use of the drug, as well as the adulterants that unscrupulous or unskilled chemists used to pack out the tablets, offered less of a tonic, and an extremely small percentage of users of the drug died from it each year. There were five deaths in the UK in 2011 from MDMA, according to the Office for National Statistics.18

  But the drug has been used by many millions of people for decades now, and no long-term damage has been noted. Indeed, if a pure, dose-measured supply were freely available, many of the problems associated with excessive use would be wiped out instantly.

  The market has behaved in ways predictable under classical economic theories. In 1988, when the number of consumers was relatively small, a tablet of Ecstasy cost fifteen to twenty pounds, and quality was generally high, with few ‘brands’ of tablets available. Chemical nostalgists will smile at the mention of Yellow Calis, New Yorkers, White Burgers, White Doves or Disco Biscuits (so named for their huge size and muddy, digestive-like colour). These drugs were expensive, but they worked: one or two pills kept users dancing for a whole night. Taking into account inflation over the last twenty years, the same pills today would cost around fifty pounds. But in the latter half of the last decade, around 2005, by which time the market had grown enormously, reasonably good-quality Ecstasy pills could be bought for as little as two pounds each, even in small quantities. The laws of supply and demand elegantly brought the price down, as quality dropped only slightly.

  The arrival of Ecstasy in British drug culture has had a series of long-lasting and wide-ranging effects, but some of these are only really being felt today. Some revolutions occur in slow motion. In his social history of post-punk music, Rip it Up and Start Again, writer Simon Reynolds details the long-term impact of punk on the American and British musical scenes:

  Revolutionary movements in pop culture have their widest impact after the ‘moment’ has allegedly passed, when ideas spread from the metropolitan bohemian elites that originally ‘own’ them and reach the suburbs and the regions. For instance, the counterculture and radical ideas of the sixties had far more currency in the mainstream during the first half of the seventies, when long hair and drug-taking became more common, when feminism filtered through to popular culture with ‘independent women’ movies and TV shows.19

  The parallels with the way Ecstasy has infiltrated mass culture are striking. Initially the drug was the preserve of a well-connected metropolitan clique of pop stars, photographers and other creative people. After 1988, Ecstasy, an extraordinarily powerful drug, for all its hugged-up frivolity, colonized the leisure culture like a bacterial bloom in a petri dish. Ecstasy ushered in a completely new era of drug use in the UK, the US and Europe. Normal people with regular jobs were now routinely taking the most extraordinary
chemical concoctions at weekends. More than ever before, the counterculture became the culture. In the UK an estimated 500,000 people use MDMA – when they can get it – every week. And when they can’t, they’ll just take something else. The aftershocks of the MDMA cultural invasion can now be witnessed in the contemporary rise of new and largely untested drugs such as those mentioned in the post by Clapham Boy in the introduction to this book.

  Ecstasy was not the only thing to produce a dramatic cultural shift in the nineties and noughties. Just as Ecstasy use developed from the niche interest of an illicit underworld to become the dominant culture, so too did the internet. And the drug culture and the technology not only nodded across the dancefloor at each other, they shook hands and embraced.

  Notes

  1. Werner Herzog’s 1974 documentary Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner) details the life and times of a champion ski-jumper who has so perfected his art he continually out-jumps the landing ramp; www.imdb.com/title/tt0070136/

  2. Roland W. Freudenmann, Florian Öxler and Sabine Bernschneider-Reif, ‘The Origin of MDMA (Ecstasy) Revisited: The True Story Reconstructed from the Original Documents’, Addiction, Vol. 101, Issue 9, pp. 1241–1245; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/

  j.1360-0443.2006.01511.x/abstract

  3. www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/magazine/

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