THE ECSTASY USERS

Ecstasy is not hard to get. A phone call on Wednesday puts a handful
of pills in the hand by Friday night - $50 a pop or 10 for $400.

Pick it up, turn it over, look at it under the light. What color is
it, what shape? A speckled pill is what they look for. And there is
brand loyalty based on experience and word of mouth. Euro Dollars,
Crownies, Mitsubishis - "they rock", say the regulars. The Snoopy was
a disappointment. "Bloody Panadol," snorts one.

They roll a few joints before leaving home, bite off half a pill or
swallow it whole in the car on the way, ready to hit the dance floor.
Tonight it's the Centri Phugal nightclub in the basement of the Mercat
Cross Hotel, near the Victoria Market.

Centri Phugal is dark, even dingy. It doesn't attract the party crowd.
The wallpaper consists of collaged paper clippings or nothing at
all.Some pillars are topped with black-and-white sequences of drawings
taken from the children's book Where the Wild Things Are. It probably
holds 150 people maximum, 100 comfortably.

The speed dealer is here tonight, constantly moving around. He's
skinny and has peroxide-blond dreadlocks.

The emphasis is on the music: rolling bass beats layered with harder,
high-pitched sounds that move along with the drug. The dancefloor
crowd ebbs and flows, the couches are full, the bar busy, but many are
drinking water.

Some people massage each other. A bottle of amyl nitrate is passed
around.

The smell of Johnson's baby powder is in the air. It is sprinkled on
the floor for lubrication. About 2am, plates of fresh pineapple are
put on the bar. A staff member offers lychees from a supermarket bag.
Sometimes Chupa Chups oricy-poles are passed around.

By 4am, there is generally a group sitting on the kerb outside, maybe
smoking a joint, having a chat and getting some fresh air.

Chris, 25, first tried ecstasy four years ago. "I just wanted to have
fun," he says. "I was sort of curious. A couple of my friends were
doing it and were having the best nights on it. That's all I heard. So
I tried it with some friends.

"I was a bit hesitant at first. I didn't think I'd ever get into that
sort of thing. I didn't go into it blindly. I knew the distinction
between hard and soft drugs."

At the time, he was working as a waiter until 1am most nights, then
going out until daylight. He took pills every weekend for at least a
year.

"Your whole body just feels amazing. So confident. Loving to move and
dance, and listening to some really good tunes with just a constant
smile on your face," he said. That changed. "I could feel my immunity
building up, my expectations of a good night weren't being reached. I
decided I was starting to waste a bit of money (on ecstasy) it was
time to have a break."

Chris still takes ecstasy, but these days it is only every few
months.

Sarah, now 22, first took ecstasy one Wednesday night at The Lounge in
Swanston Street four years ago. She was hooked on the feeling.

"It was just like you had no inhibitions, nothing, and you could just
talk to anyone, you could do anything. I guess, for me, it was just a
total release. I can be anything, do anything, without having that
anxiety there."

Sarah's ecstasy use quickly became a lifestyle. Monday and Tuesday
were the weekends, Wednesday to Sunday was spent "living in a club".

"At the start, we didn't have much money, so everything was scraped
together. We didn't care if we didn't eat for a week as long as we
went out and got E," she says.

For Sarah, the music went with the drug. "A bit of trance techno, a
bit of hard-core industrial stuff that really kind of suited the mood.
Very gritty, very clanky ... everything was boom, boom, boom, and I
guess that was what was going on in my life."

Sarah and her boyfriend started hanging out with a group of
stockbrokers from Sydney they met out clubbing -older people with lots
of disposable cash. They paid for trips to Sydney, clothes,
accommodation in the best hotels ... and a smorgasbord of drugs. There
were always pills but they combined them with marijuana, acid,
cocaine, ketamine, anything.

"We thought it was awesome. They're giving us pills to go out, paying
for everything. It all looked so glamorous, all this fun and all these
parties. I thought it was fantastic ... until I started realising that
nothing's for free," she says.

"The more you had, the harder you wanted to go. It became like a game,
who could go the hardest, who was the hardest, until it wasn't fun any
more. It became like a job, a process. You have to go out, have to
take pills, have to have fun, have to do this ..."

For two years, Sarah and her boyfriend lived the club scene. Everyone
knew them; they could walk through any door, free drink cards were
standard. It seemed that everybody loved them, they loved everybody.

But the club life took its toll. "I had no idea what was going on. I
was down to nearly 49 kilos, my skin was all eczema and f----- up. I
had bruises all over my body because I kept falling over. And I
thought I was fine, but it (ecstasy) affects you for a long time
afterwards. You've got all that comes along with it. You've got the
down, the depression, the anxiety. You've got the paranoia. I couldn't
relate to people any more. I was despondent. (I felt) no one
understands, no one knows where I'm at, you're all just against me. I
had no relationship with my family. They saw no life in me, no
personality. I was like a walking zombie."

And then came the night she took 13 pills in one frenzied session. It
was two months before she got out of hospital.

Of her long "morning after", she says: "I felt like a cat in a cage. I
lost it. I thought, `I just want to die, I can't cope with this'. I
was just some f----- mad mental case. I needed help."

So do a lot of other people, she says. "You've got to look at the
reasons why they're (young people) taking the drugs," she says. "They
don't have a sense of way, they don't have anything to identify
themselves with, so they delve into a certain lifestyle to give them
some sense of identity and to escape from the fact that they don't
know where they are at, they don't know where they belong in the
world. These were the things that I was struggling with.

"It's a lot younger these days. Now you get your 14, 15, 16-year-olds
going out, going hard-core drug taking. I think it's a real worry ...
I just see thousands of them now, as opposed to a couple of hundred,
and it scares me. There's a real loss of innocence. They're straight
into it, the dirt and the grit of life, the younger and younger they
get.

"When you're living in a club, that becomes your reality and it's a
very dark culture. All I wanted to do was run around and have fun and
dance and meet people but, at the end of it, it was all fantasy.

"I never made any real friends. I remember that most of the
conversations I had would be about "I'm so off my face'. `Yeah, me
too, I'm so off my head'. And that's all you'd say to them. It was
just a false and facile world ... All the problems I had before were
just being Band-Aided over by drugs."