ECSTASY IS FINISHED. BUT IT WASN'T LAW AND ORDER THAT DID THE JOB

There are few things more boring than other people's drug anecdotes.
They are like other people's dreams - fascinating to the individual
involved, but opaque and largely tedious to everyone else. So it is
with some reluctance that I offer the following tale, but I think it
merits an account.

A young man who had reached his 30s without encountering narcotics
recently decided he wanted to try Ecstasy. The Ecstasy veterans he
consulted were doubtful. It would change his life, they warned. Once
he'd tried it, he'd be charging around nightclubs every weekend like
some teenage raver. He'd be tormented by all the Ecstasy clubbing
years he'd missed. It's an epiphanic experience, they cautioned. Was
he ready for all that?

Undeterred, he took a pill. He waited for something to happen. After
an hour or so, he was still waiting. So he took another, and then
another. By then he had run out of Es, and could detect only a minor
tingle in his left leg. He bought more, and at last, after the fourth
pill, could be described as mildly chemically enhanced. After
calculating the level of enhancement which A340 worth of lager would
achieve, however, he drew his Ecstasy experiment to an early and
disappointed close.

This year sees the 10th anniversary of the arrival in Britain of
Ecstasy and House music. What began as a private piece of magic for
those who knew which secret warehouse was staging the rave, soon
transformed the entire anatomy of British nightlife. Youth culture
became dance culture. DJs became household names. Everything, to quote a
truly terrible House track, really did start with an E.

Ten years on, publishers are churning out books to mark the
anniversary. Titles like Once In A Lifetime and Class of 88 chronicle
the Ecstasy revolution, and magazines have printed special celebratory
issues. The tone is at times wistful, scattered with laments that it's "not
as good as it used to be", but the general consensus holds that the
revolution stood its ground. The mainstream media is in agreement,
repeatedly reporting that at least 1,000,000 people take Ecstasy every
weekend, and that superclubs like the Ministry of Sound are the future of
the leisure industry.

Last week, a museum in Rotterdam opened an exhibition to commemorate
10 years of House. Different rooms feature club flyers, photos of
clubbers, re-creations of nightclub interiors. It is a charming
installation, and evokes the spirit of the decade - but critics have
queried the sense in a museum memorialising a trend just 10 years old, and
still going strong. What few have recognised is that a museum exhibition is
entirely appropriate. Just when everyone is agreeing that Ecstasy is here
to stay, club culture is, in fact, dying.

In cities like Manchester, the British birthplace of House, clubs are
closing because people can no longer be bothered to go to them. They
prefer to go to bars and drink bottled beer and jiggle about to a DJ
whose name they neither know nor care about. House clubs managing to
stay busy are increasingly reluctant to pay out thousands to celebrity DJs,
for the DJs no longer pull the crowds; the crowds are more preoccupied with
pulling each other. All the defining features of House clubs - asexual
friendliness, non-violence, trust - are vanished, replaced by the tensions
which typified pre-Ecstasy nightclubs.

To those who bypassed 10 years of popular culture, the state of

British clubland possibly seems neither here nor there. For the
millions who engaged with it, however - and for the authorities
attempting to control them - it merits examination.

For a few years, a generation genuinely believed it had discovered a
new existence, one of infinite social possibility unlocked by a
chemical tablet which led into a world free of prejudice.
Otherwise-conventional people were happy to break the law to get
there. In Once In A Lifetime, a clubber is quoted saying, "Before
Ecstasy, it was like there I wasn't, then there I was"; an Observer
journalist wrote: "It's as if music is translating our lives,
re-writing our genes."

You would search hard to find a clubber saying anything like that in
1998 - and even harder for one who will admit why. They usually blame
the very thing Ecstasy was originally supposed to represent:
universality. They say that if House culture is collapsing, it's
because Sharon and Kevin and their dodgy mates heard about it and came
clubbing, but don't know how to behave themselves. They are
aggressive, don't dance, and ruin the vibe.

This is a popular notion, and it's rubbish. The whole point about
Ecstasy was that Sharon, Kevin, Henrietta, Swampy and Leroy could all
take it, and consequently got along like a house on fire. Yet the same
people who, in 1988, were enthusing about Ecstasy because it "broke
down barriers" are, 10 years later, saying the problem is that any old
idiot thinks he can join in.

The House and Ecstasy scene is effectively finished, but the
post-mortem is not. There is only one reason why it is dying, and it
is because what people now describe as Ecstasy is nothing of the sort.
Successive analyses of "Ecstasy" reveal that it is a hotch potch of
glucose, caffeine and occasionally some chemicals which may, if you
are lucky, make you feel vaguely altered, but inspires none of the
emotions which created House culture. Enthusiasts may like to think
House was more than a chemical construct. A visit to any club tonight
would demonstrate that it wasn't.

Just now there are still enough older clubbers who remember real
Ecstasy - and therefore act out the memory of its impact, despite
having taken a tablet of expensive glucose - to sustain the illusion
of dance culture.

The man who took four Es was accompanied by a veteran who, until he
witnessed his friend's indifference and reassessed his own condition,
thought the E's were great. But soon clubs will be full of people with
no memory of real Ecstasy to re-enact, and the game will be up.

A colossal amount of public money and energy has been spent in the war
on Ecstasy. It had no effect whatsoever. The people destroying the
market for Ecstasy are the dealers themselves, who got greedy and
knocked out cheap imitations instead. After all the costly attempts at
control and crackdowns, what has finally killed Ecstasy is the
unregulated free market.

Checked-by: "Rich O'Grady"