ONLY SOMEONE ON DRUGS COULD THINK 'JUST SAY NO' WOULD WORK

There was a solid thump as the back of the hippie's head hit the
wooden floor. The hippie was lying on his back, confused. His mouth
was open and his eyes were staring glassily at nothing much in
particular. A member of the venue's staff with a walkie-talkie crouched by him.

"Dude," said the man with the walkie-talkie. "Can you hear me? Hello,
dude. Do you know where you are?" The hippie continued to stare at
the ceiling, conscious, but not communicating. "Can we get a medic
over here?" the man said into the walkie-talkie. He set about trying
to raise the hippie's head, and pour water from a bottle into his mouth.

This was Tuesday night, a rock venue in Cambridge, where we were
seeing Mogwai - a band that specialises in producing ear-bashingly
loud yet melodic walls of guitar noise. They are the sort of band,
the downed hippie had obviously decided, that might sound
particularly nice on ecstasy. Cabbaged before the main act had even
come on stage, he had to sit out the remainder of the gig on a low
stool, sipping quietly from a bottle of water and staring benignly
into the middle distance.

If you think he had problems, what of Mr A? Mr A is a 37-year-old
who, we learnt this week, claims to have taken 40,000 ecstasy tablets
over nine years, including 25 pills a day for four of them. Bloody
hell. If we take this - admittedly questionable - data as read, that
represents a twentyfold improvement on the previous documented record
of 2,000 pills in a lifetime.

Mr A is unlikely to get it together to contact the Guinness Book of
Records, however, because he is a gibbering wreck. His short-term
memory is so bad, he can't go to the supermarket because he forgets
what's in his trolley. He suffers hallucinations, depression, and
muscle seizures so severe he sometimes can't open his mouth.

Unfortunately, the conclusion many will have drawn from the tale of
Mr A is exactly the opposite of the one its shock-horror presentation
hopes to lead us to. They won't think, wow, this drug must be really
bad for you: the man's a gibbering wreck. Of course the man's a
gibbering wreck: he was taking 25 doses a day of a drug with a
powerful impact on the central nervous system. They will think,
instead, wow: gibbering wreck or not, he is still alive. It suggests
to the layman, in fact, that the toxicity of ecstasy is astonishingly low.

I am not a pharmacologist. But I'd guess if you drank 25 large
espressos a day for four years, you would be a gibbering wreck. If
you took 25 paracetamol tablets a day for four years, you would like
as not be stone dead. The effects of taking 25 Imodium a day for four
years do not even bear thinking about.

This is not to say that ecstasy is good for you. Just ask Mr A, if he
can concentrate for long enough to give you a straight answer. There
are indications that long-term use is associated with depression and
memory problems. In the short term, it causes mood swings. Its use is
also associated with very perilous behaviour, such as dancing
maniacally until you overheat and collapse, or drinking so much water
you poison your system. Nasty adulterants are present in most pills.
It would be best if nobody took ecstasy.

How to stop them, though? Not the way we're currently going about it.
The iron orthodoxy in public life is to treat all illegal drugs as if
they were morally and pharmacologically identical. This is
counterproductive nonsense. Talking about any illegal drugs calmly or
even positively is regarded as "irresponsible", and suggestions of
drug use are a cheap way for the press to seek a political scalp.
Drugs are regarded as a blanket evil.

Perhaps this is a reasonable position to take for the public good.
The trouble is, it's a position that will serve the public good only
if the sizeable minority of people who use one or several of the wide
spectrum of different drugs available believed it for a second. And they don't.

Every time a raver reads that "ecstasy kills", they will look about
them at hundreds and thousands of their contemporaries, or even at Mr
A, and they will think: "No, it doesn't." Every time the example of
Leah Betts is wheeled out, they will consult their dim understanding
of statistics and wonder what it means that the totemic instance of a
death from a drug taken by the million, over nearly two decades,
happened in 1995 - and was from water-poisoning, not directly from
the drug itself.

Thousands of people continue to take ecstasy because it can produce
feelings of great spiritual and somatic warmth and wellbeing. And
they take it because they calculate, rightly, that it is very
unlikely to kill them. If we want to stop them, we're going to have
to do better than repeat, like South Park's Mr Mackey: "Drugs are bad, 'mkay?"