BUILT FOR SPEED

In The Rave Scene, Ecstasy Is No Longer The Drug Of Choice. Which Is Not
Good News.

It's 4 a.m. on a Sunday, and I'm in the bathroom of a rave at an
after-hours club in Montreal. The metal toilet stalls are rattling
along with the bass, and I'm wishing that whoever is sniffing and
snorting in there would get on with it. Instead what I get is a
pass-the-time conversation with a fellow waiter-in-line. She is
saucer-eyed. She is wearing a silvery pink halter top and white vinyl
trousers. She looks, oh, about sixteen.

"Hey. What are you on?" she burbles, grinning between methodical
chomps of her inner lip.

Me? Twenty-seven years old? A cocktail of stress, an imminent hangover
from the four shots I drank two hours ago, Chiclets, NicoDerm. And
you? Ecstasy?

"Eww. No way, man!"

Why, no way?

"Ecstasy is gross. I hate the way it feels. I'm on Speed. Nobody I
know does Ecstasy. We all do Speed."

I knew that for the past few years, Speed had been challenging
Ecstasy's dominance of the North American rave scene. What I didn't
know was that any teen at any rave could find Ecstasy "gross." This
was news. I should have known it, though: after all, when I was
sixteen, I thought cocaine was for old farty media people in black
leather trousers, and so my thing was Ecstasy. Now the kids think
Ecstasy is for old farty new-media people who read Wallpaper magazine,
so they do Speed.

You wouldn't know this from the newspaper, magazine, and TV reports on
raves. These days, alarmist headlines like "The Agony and Ecstasy!"
are everywhere. But talk to drug outreach workers and rave-scene drug
dealers in Montreal and they'll tell you that Speed has already
overtaken ecstasy as the raver's drug of choice. They say this is the
case not just in Montreal - one of the first Canadian dancescapes to
catch on to Ecstasy in the early 1990s - but in other rave centres
across North America as well.

In Montreal, the changing of the chemical guard was, in part,
engineered by the drug dealers themselves. In the mid-1990s, the
quality of Ecstasy peddled by the Quebec biker gangs had degenerated
to such an extent - pills were often nothing more than an
indeterminate chemical cocktail stamped with an "E" and sold for a
whopping forty dollars - that users' trust began to wane. So the
bikers began selling something they called "Strawberries": one drop of
mdma (Ecstasy) in a huge pink snowball of amphetamine.

The first generation of ravers to encounter Strawberries saw them
simply as bad Ecstasy. The second generation saw them as a cheaper,
effective surrogate when good Ecstasy was hard to find. The third
generation - the kids today - actually prefer Strawberries, which, at
last check, no longer contain any mdma at all.

And this is good news for dealers, because Speed is a preferable
potion to peddle. Amphetamine is, after all, addictive in those
classic, keep-'em-coming ways that Ecstasy is not. Speed is also
cheaper than Ecstasy, so it's easier to sell to the cash-strapped
youngsters who go to raves and want to do drugs.

That said, there's a larger shift taking place as well. People often
forget that new substances come into vogue for reasons other than
marketing or evil pushers looking to corrupt the world. More often
than not, a specific drug becomes popular at a specific time because
the substance fills some sort of social niche or addresses some
particular want or need. Ecstasy - and the rave scene the drug helped
create - first became popular on a grand scale in Britain in 1988.
After ten years of steely Tory rule, Britain's working-class youth
felt trapped, spiritually exhausted, and impotent. Ecstasy served as a
kind of Viagra for the psyche. The drug induced feelings of warmth,
empathy, and love, love, love, making the future seem bright again, if
only for one night.

The sixteen-year-old ravers I talk to today don't need that kind of
escape. They are not depressive, they are not weak. They are robust.
They are thrilled-to-the-gills. They are very, very carefree. Their
teenagehood is happening in double-wow prosperous times, in a new
economy that they understand better than any of us - and they know it.
They recreate in happily consumerist pleasure domes, tailor-made for
them. The thing they want on weekends is not a soft-focus vacation in
which they make friends with themselves and peace with the world; the
world is theirs already. (Besides, as one private-school boy and
seasoned raver, aged seventeen, told me, "We have Prozac for all that
other stuff.") What they want when the weekend rolls around is a
pressure valve. After all, they have been sitting in front of blinking
screens at home, school, and at play, clicking away, all week.

So Speed, amphetamine, "Whizz," it is. An unromantic drug. Not a drug
of self-surrender. Not a drug of "inner travel." A utilitarian
stimulant. A drug that induces productivity. What the hippies called a
"straight" drug, a capitalist drug. A drug that can keep you dancing
all night, without any of that wishy-washy, love-thy-brother, utopian
baloney getting in the way.

In the late 1960s, the Hells Angels brought amphetamine, and its more
potent cousin, methamphetamine, to the hippiefied Haight-Ashbury
district of San Francisco. Some say the substances are what
effectively killed the hippies' extended Summer of Love. I can't,
however, see the same death for the rave scene anytime soon, even with
the impending ascension of methamphetamine - a truly perverse and
traditionally "evil" drug (insanely addictive, insanely destructive;
one hit can last eight hours) that makes plain ol' Speed seem like
baby Aspirin.

I actually believe the rave scene will continue to grow, fuelled by
the aggressive vibe of Speed, while the dusky dream of Ecstasy grows
dimmer and dimmer in the background. Which - practical discussion
about drugs or health or related risks aside - I think is rather sad.
Because while there's nothing natural about Ecstasy, it is natural for
kids to escape once in a while. Or at least for kids to want to.