GUARDIAN OBITUARY

NICHOLAS SAUNDERS, who died in a car accident in South Africa, aged 60, was
an alternative entrepreneur of genius, who wrote the first Alternative
London guides, transformed Neal's Yard in Covent Garden into an oasis of
greenery and alternative businesses and became renowned in the media as the
guru for the drug Ecstasy, running the www.ecstasy.org research site on the
Internet which receives about 3 million accesses a year.

Saunders - whose father Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders was director of the LSE
- - was always himself a rebel. He tried to blow up his school chapel at
Ampleforth - although he was quite relieved when the bomb failed to go off;
and he dropped out from his engineering course at Imperial College - his
insistence on working everything out from first principles did not fit the
system.

He was a squatter before the 70s fashion for this. For three years in the
60s he squatted a disused house in Chelsea, hidden behind hoardings, along
with five geese and a fairyland garden, part of which he flooded. His
mother gave him money for a mortgage to encourage him away from this
lifestyle, but he stayed put and used the money to start developing and
selling a series of flats.

This provided the capital, in 1970, for printing 50,000 copies of his first
and very successful Alternative London guidebook, which he distributed
himself, for instance using sellers in the park buying carrier bags of
books from him at half price. Saunders believed that he was the first to
use the phrase 'alternative society' and the book distilled his tips on
everything from drain repair in squats to hitching to the East.

His new home in World's End, where ducks would come under the living room
window to eat from the pool around the table, and giant bubbles floated out
to passers-by, burnt down in 1976 when a Danish girlfriend, meditating in
the papier mache igloo, overturned a candle and did not know the number for
the fire brigade.

He moved into an old warehouse in the very derelict Neal's Yard in Covent
Garden and opened downstairs the first wholefood warehouse in London that
sold medium bulk to the public. He was proud that their turnover per square
foot exceeded Sainsbury's. The most popular items sold there led him to
found a series of other shops in the Yard, ranging from the Neal's Yard
Coffee House and Neal's Yard Bakery to the Neal's Yard Dairy and the Neal's
Yard Apothecary. He created over 100 jobs without government aid of any
kind and without any of the businesses failing. He had a belief derived
from a Gurdjieff group he once belonged to, that fulfillment comes from
work which is demanding, so long as it gives opportunity for variety,
learning and responsibility. So rather than have a machine hoist, workers
hoisted bags of grains and beans up to the first floor packing room by
jumping out of the window holding the pulley rope. There was only one minor
accident in 10,000 jumps.

With the computer revolution Saunders went high tech, opening the first
'laundrette' for desktop publishing, the Neals Yard DTP Studio, where you
could bring your work in to do yourself on an Apple Mac, or have a 'service
wash', someone to do it for you.

At the time of his death, Saunders was attempting to launch a public
campaign against Camden Council's plan to gentrify Neal's Yard and to get
rid of the trees in tubs to make way for the new very commercial cafes and
their insistence on filling the whole yard with their tables.

Taking the drug MDMA (Ecstasy) in 1988 made Saunders realise that he had
been mildly depressed for ten years, and he set about uncovering every
piece of research on this drug, believing that adults, if sufficiently
informed, should be free to make their own decisions about drugtaking -
whilst hoping that ravers would realise through his work that the drug was
more than a dance drug and had potential as a tool in therapy, marriage
guidance, painting and spiritual exploration.

He organised group experiments, such as one where artists drew portraits in
a group without the drug and then again under the influence of MDMA - with
the drug drawings gaining in emotional intensity at the expense of
disciplined polish. He self-published his findings in the book E for
Ecstasy (1993),which sold 20,000 copies a year, and followed this up with
Ecstasy Reconsidered (1997), for which he commissioned a survey of the
research on the drug's potential neurotoxicity. On his website
www.ecstasy.org he published regular photos of the various Ecstasy pills on
the market, with warnings as to their actual constituents.

At the time of his death, he was finalising research for a book on drugs
and spirituality, having visited a number of tribes around the world who
use natural drugs ranging from ibogaine to ayahuasca as their communion
ritual. He leaves behind not only his co-researcher and partner, Anja
Dashwood, and Kristoffer, his 19 year old son, but a host of grieving
friends around the world who have set up a web site for stories of his life
at www.stain.org/nicholas/

Nicholas Saunders, alternative entrepreneur, born January 25th 1938; died
February 3rd 1998.