THE AGONY OF ECSTACY

Those 20,000-strong mega-raves at the Orange Show Fairgrounds in San
Bernardino are no more. Big downtown events are fewer and farther between.

Superstar DJs are finding fewer and fewer gigs on the rave circuit. And
fans of euphoric trance and emotional ecstasy are relegated to a handful of
smaller, legit venues, places such as Pomona's Glass House, downtown L.A.'s
Orion, and Qtopia in Hollywood. Not like it was.

At Qtopia, for example, raving is still alive but not so well. The promise
of techno-hippie pastures filled with hugs and uplifting tunes has given
way to kids crashed out on the dirty concrete and vibing to infantile
trance. On a recent Saturday night at the club, all the trappings of
e-culture are in evidence, but little of the original uplift. Green lasers
pierce man-made fog as ravers begin hitting the ground with ecstasy-induced
fatigue. Pot smoke clouds a concrete patio outside, nearly every single
inch of which is covered in graffiti art. Cholos, skaters, and club kids
bounce to the sound.

Dancers are in overdrive, but the vibe is one of a culture being driven
posed to the thousands who would attend raves in the '90s. There are
strange sightings on the dance floor. A girl holds her face in her hands,
crying.Asian-American girls hold up a wall, pointing and giggling. Go-go
girls in club-kid platforms and super-small boyshorts dance in front of a
stack of eight speakers that let out an aural assault, but are later thrown
out of the club, apparently for being too provocative. Rave toys of the
sort once listed by the federal government as drug paraphernalia - blinking
red pacifiers, glow-in-the-dark necklaces - are sold at two stands. The
party's logo, an anime-style Michelin Man sendup, is depicted on banners in
Day-Glo colors. In each image, he holds a Popsicle.

Authorities from the federal government to the San Bernardino County
Supervisors have cracked down on ecstasy and raves. (In San Berdoo, you
can't have a party of 200 without a permission slip from the
county.) Venue owners are afraid to host events, and researchers have
unleashed dire, if not always accurate, information about ecstasy, once the
drug of choice. But the agony of ecstasy may be to blame for the decline of
rave culture, especially in a Southern California scene once known as the
country's e-culture capital.

The drug produces inner warmth and familial buzz, a feeling pop culture
journalist Simon Reynolds described as "an oozy yearn, a bliss-ache."

But frequent users often fall into a hole of depression and despair. The
lucky ones drop out of the scene. The hardcore graduates move on to
ketamine, GHB, and speed. Ecstasy's natural five-year cycle puts the rave
scene on a roller coaster, chewing up new converts and spitting them out
when they've hit bottom. With its deep depression, isolation, and wild
psychological swings - not to mention the potential effects on jobs,
family, and friends - ecstasy can be a long, dark, and lonely road. Last
year's decline, after skyrocketing increases in ecstasy use in America,
suggests that ravers have had enough.

Annual emergency-room visits for ecstasy users ages 20 to 25 declined by 39
percent last year, according to the federal Substance Abuse & Mental Health
Services Administration (SAMHSA). Total e-related visits to the E.R. peaked
in 2001, but then dipped the next year. Ecstasy use had seen a steady,
steep rise, with a peak of more than two million new users in 2001. But
last year saw its first decline since 1993, according to SAMHSA. The
percentage of high school seniors who had tried ecstasy also dipped last
year after peaking out at more than 9 percent in 2002. With such tools as
the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act and the federally funded
Partnership for a Drug-Free America's television commercial campaign, the
authorities and politicians are taking some credit for the decline.

"I think those campaigns do make a difference," says Trinka D. Porrata, a
former Los Angeles police narcotics detective who has become an authority
on ecstasy culture. But she says the kids' own experiences are the biggest
influence. "People either get totally screwed up on drugs and spiral down
completely or they get off of it. There are kids out there who aren't
totally stupid - rational kids who say, "Wait a minute, it could happen to me."

While the government has been warning youth - wrongly so, according to the
recent retraction of federally funded research - that ecstasy causes brain
damage, and pro-psychedelia cheerleaders have been touting the so-called
therapeutic benefits of the drug, the young unbelievers will continue with
their own personal research until they come to their own conclusions. This
year, their thumbs-down has led to e-culture exodus.

"It's a cycle - people are fucked up or they see their friends are fucked
up, so they chill out," says one longtime Southern California scene
observer who promoted his own raves at the dawn of the '90s. "A couple
years down the line, you're naturally going to have a decline."

Everyone has their theories about the decline of raves and ecstasy use.
Rick Doblin, the Harvard-trained Ph.D. ecstasy public policy expert and a
proponent of the drug, thinks the feds' campaign against the drug and
against raves has indeed had some impact. "There has been this major
federal anti-rave act," he says. "I do think the ways in which they have
intimidated promoters has had a chilling effect on free speech and expression."

Word on the street, however, is oblivious to the crackdown.

"I stopped taking ecstasy because a lot of people started dropping dead
from that shit," said 16-year-old Kai as she tried to get into the party at
Qtopia recently. "I went to rehab over it."

Clubbin'

Outside the club, 23-year-old Shaun has E for sale, at an all-time low of
$15 a pill. The ecstasy boom of late has produced a glut of pills, some
manufactured stateside in places like the East Bay, and much of the rest
imported from the Netherlands. It's more available than ever, even if the
market has thinned out to club nights like this one which draw only a few
hundred dancers.

"You still have massives and undergrounds," Shaun says, "but now it's all
about the clubs."

Shaun says the crackdown of late has made things a little more
uncomfortable, and he stays on his toes. Gone are the days of "X" baseball
caps and "ecstasy" T-shirts for dealers. He wears a glow-in-the-dark
plastic bracelet. "If you wear bracelets like this, or a pacifier, the cops
will pull you outside the club," he says.

Still, business is not bad, and Shaun says he's a smart salesman.

"When I first come to a party, I sell them for $15, undercutting every
other dealer," he says. "Then at the end, when people are jonesing, I
charge $20. I walk out of a party making $500 a night."

Inside, a girl who looks not much older than 16 circles the main room again
and again, advertising "X - X." Stopped by a stranger, she looks alarmed,
positively busted, her face flush with guilt. After being assured there are
no narcs within earshot, she admits business hasn't been too good for her
$20-a-pill enterprise. Wearing a red sweatshirt and beige denim pants, she
says she's 18, the minimum age for admittance.

"A lot of people are getting out of the scene," she says. "I think it's
because a lot of the ecstasy is bad."

The DJs - older scene veterans including Mars and Thee-o - spin the same
three-chord trance that's been in favor at raves for the last five years.
Dreadlocked Mars gets on the turntables and rinses out a
140-beats-per-minute version of 'O Fortuna' - a rave hit under its
techno-version guise a decade ago - and the crowd goes wild, hands in the air.

The party's promoter, Jason Sperling, says the scene has indeed fallen on
hard times. His Skills crew does big events in the Bay Area, and he claims
to have had 9,000 customers at his last rave. The federal government's
focus on raves has made club proprietors reluctant to risk their businesses
on rave-like events. Rave is a dirty word.

"Our problem is venues,"4 Sperling says. "Everything ends at 2 a.m. Not too
many venues will let us do these late-night shows. They don't want too many
young kids gathering. The scene is slowly moving into legitimate clubs, but
it's slow because not everyone is 21."

Mainstream media, however, is not too shy to capitalize on the remnants of
e-culture, even while its core is marginalized, even criminalized. During
the rainy drive home from the club, three radio stations are playing rave
music. KROQ (106.7 FM) weighs in with British 'progressive' house. 'Party
Station' KDL (103.1 FM) has pop trance. And Power 106 (105.9 FM) spins 'old
school' techno.

Perhaps one of the surest signs a subculture has lost its edge is when
corporations co-opt its trappings for a big buck, and here in the
entertainment capital of the world, e-culture is for sale
everywhere: Mobile phones come with glow-in-the-dark accessories;
psychedelic, blinking lights; and ring-tone downloads set to trance. Clear
Channel, the country's largest radio chain, and a conservative one at that,
owns KDL and has booked the king of trance DJs, Paul Oakenfold, at the
mainstream Wiltern Theatre in Koreatown. It begs the question, where do you
draw the line when it comes to regulating culture? The unsuccessful
congressional RAVE Act would have held pacifiers, glow-sticks, and
repetitive beats as evidence that a club owner or party promoter reasonably
knows ecstasy use is going on at an event. But we doubt the feds will go
after Clear Channel anytime soon. With this kind of absurd cultural
policing, on top of what turned out to be faulty claims about the dangers
of ecstasy, it's no wonder kids have turned to their own experiences to
learn the hard way about the dark side of e-culture.

Agony

Chris, a 22-year-old office manager from Atlanta, felt so compelled about
the real dangers of E that he posted his story on an e-culture website for
all the world to see. Last year he went through several cycles of bingeing,
only to end up in wild swings of depression or anger.

He did it "to escape reality, because of all the anxiety I had to deal
with," Chris says. He was in a near break-up with his fiance. "All the
while, I was making the problem that much worse. I went into a deep
depression. I couldn't deal with normal everyday problems - they made me
feel like I was going to blow up at the smallest thing. Carrying around
that kind of attitude tends to push people away from you."

Six months off of E has helped Chris put his life in order and get back
together with his girl. He still likes electronic music, but the scene is
where he used to be, in a black hole.

"The party scene definitely went downhill, and drugs are to blame for it,"
he says. "A lot of heavier drugs like meth got popular. The whole feeling
of it has changed. It's not a friendly place to go. There used to be a
feeling of unity. Now people are all sketched-out on meth, others are
coked-out. It's dirtied-up the scene in my opinion."

Many like him are graduating to greener pastures. Chris warns the new kids
that "one of my friends abused ecstasy and sank into a depression and never
wanted to leave the house or even his room."

"I'd tell them before they try ecstasy to research it," he says. "You need
to respect drugs like that. It's a hard line to draw between using and
abusing. If you end up in a hole, it's just not worth it, no matter how
good it felt."

That's probably good advice, according to Dr. Charles Grob, a foremost
authority on the psychiatry of ecstasy who's based at L.A.'s Harbor-UCLA
Medical Center. "If you give people honest info, they're more likely to use
good judgement," he says.

"If there's a dip right now in ecstasy use it has nothing to do with the
government's dubious anti-ecstasy campaigns," he says. "These ebbs and
flows are cyclical."

The federally funded anti-drug campaigns started in 1999 with the
$54-million "club drug" media blitz and rolls ahead to this day. The latest
commercial from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America depicts young
people frolicking in a pasture. It's an almost humorous rave-style mock-up
of a major-pharmaceutical spot. But the scene grows dark, teenagers hit the
ground and hang their heads low. Subliminal messages such as "depression"
flash on screen. Effective? Grob says not all of the government's messages
have been honest, making any official anti-E arguments a hard sell with
today's teens.

He points to the controversial research of Johns Hopkins University's
Dr.George A. Ricaurte, a favorite scientific tool of the feds in their war
on e-culture. His 2002 study concluded that even a single dose of ecstasy
could result in permanent brain damage. But it turned out Ricaurte's test
subjects, baboons and squirrel monkeys, had been injected with meth instead
of E. He withdrew the federally funded study, and the journal Science
retracted its publication of his findings. Grob says that kind of science
will backfire with youth, who need to hear about the real risks of E before
learning the hard way.

"If the federal government's goal is for safety and welfare, Ricaurte's
research has blown up in their face," he says. "Science in the service of
political agendas is very dangerous and distressing and counterproductive."

"There are serious medical risks, especially in these dangerous rave
settings," Grob says of the drug. "The younger the age, the more
psychiatric risks there are, for sure."

He warns that frequent use can lead to higher tolerance, higher doses, and
even graduation to the harder drug methamphetamine. "Although they don't
get much effect from the MDMA, they're into the scene, so the meth will
energize them so they can dance all night," Grob says of these graduates.
He also says he has seen many people recover successfully from the effects
of long-term ecstasy abuse, and that there's always hope - and help -
available.

Former Los Angeles Police Department Detective Porrata would like to see
greater awareness of the dangers of driving on ecstasy (which might have
contributed to a notorious 1999 car crash that took the lives of five local
ravers, for example). And she wants more warnings about eye damage caused
by lasers beaming into teenagers' dilated pupils at raves. Ecstasy causes
this wide-eyed phenomenon, and Porrata says she's talked to doctors who
have seen vision problems as a result of too much eye candy.

Acting Out

This spring, Congress passed the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act, a
renamed version of the RAVE Act. It applies the infamous 1986 "crackhouse
law" to any illicit drug use at concerts, clubs, festivals, and live
performances - making club owners and promoters responsible for the
behavior of their paying guests. Before it was rewritten, the Reducing
Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act equated raves with drug dens and
defined them as places where glow sticks, water consumption, and repetitive
beats are found.

After the nation's electronic music community protested, the language was
cleaned up to remove the rave slant and paraphernalia. As it stands, fines
and penalties for venue owners and promoters found guilty of hosting
parties where drugs are knowingly used and tolerated can reach $750,000,
with the possibility of 20 years behind bars. The new law could apply to a
rave, a reggae concert, and to a DJ set by Oakenfold at the Wiltern.

"This bill has drawn serious grass-roots opposition, and I know that I am
not alone in hearing from many constituents about their serious and
well-considered objections to it," a concerned Sen. Patrick D. Leahy
[D-Vermont] told the U.S. Senate. "Business owners have come to Congress
and told us there are only so many steps they can take to prevent any of
the thousands of people who may attend a concert or a rave from using
drugs. They are worried about being held personally accountable for the
illegal acts of others."

Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Drug Policy
Alliance have promised to challenge the law the minute a rave promoter or
venue owner ends up in court. Clearly, however, many club-owners and
promoters would rather not be in court at all and have shed the rave scene
in favor of hip-hop or house music events.

Some argue that the latest rave and ecstasy crackdowns only force those who
want to dance till dawn into dangerous, underground locales. But Detective
Porrata says good riddance to mega-raves.

"When they say they have to go underground, they admit they have to keep it
about drugs," she argues. "The culture is really depressing. Going to a
rave is like standing in the middle of a giant ant farm, with people
milling about because they have that energy for mindless rotation. I find
raves really sad."

The Roots

The Los Angeles rave scene took root in the late 1980s when the Levy
brothers from the U.K. held "Moonshine" parties near downtown that featured
ecstasy-friendly acid-house music. The return of homegrown DJ Doc Martin
from San Francisco in 1990, along with the launch of rave 'zine Urb that
year, solidified the city's capital status for stateside rave culture
(despite the dubious claims of some authors that New York's scene took off
first).

In boom-and-bust cycles, L.A.'s e-culture hit a low point in the mid-'90s,
when many burned-out ecstasy users simply dropped out of the scene,
although the hardcore moved on to the more economically potent
methamphetamine. Gritty inner-city parties buoyed their need for speed.

In that era, a small club held in a deco residential hotel on Beverly
Boulevard, not far from the LAPD's notorious Rampart Station, was haunted
with lost souls hanging on to the music but too far gone to realize they
had hit the curb. Speed was snorted in the bathroom and the hardcore passed
out next to booming loudspeakers. By sunrise a chill-out lounge was filled
with zombies, some barely conscious, others passed out on the dirty floor.
Every few hours or so an LAPD cruiser would stop out front and officers
would chitchat and joke around with the promoter.

Rave culture resurfaced again in 1996 with a local radio station, Groove
Radio, and concert-style electronic music events. By 1997, the music
industry was abuzz about the potential of electronic sounds, a promise that
never quite filled the pockets of major-label suits, but one that fueled
e-culture's biggest wave yet. From then on, the scene continued to grow,
consuming new micro-generations of followers hooked by MTV's Amp e-music
video show, Moby's No. 1 album Play, and college radio shows across the
nation. Blockbuster sponsored a rave tour. Microsoft paired up with the
foremost rave website, Raveworld. Mitsubishi, which, ironically or not, had
its symbol become a popular stamp on ecstasy tablets, featured a
psuedo-pop-locking raver in a television commercial.

The growth continued until 9/11.

After that, there was "a national mood of cynicism," says ecstasy proponent
Doblin, head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
"The open-hearted optimism associated with raves and MDMA is out of fashion
now. It seems so hippyish and naive to talk about peace, love, unity, and
respect."

Today the mainstreaming continues, but the underground foundation has been
eroded. Raveworld has been taken over by leading skateboard magazine
Thrasher. MTV no longer airs Amp, although e-music videos do make it into
its mainstream rotation from time to time. The music plays on in Hummer
advertisements and on commercial radio.

"There's been several cycles in the scene," says Gary Blitz, national
coordinator of the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund, which
formed to defend a New Orleans rave promoter unsuccessfully prosecuted by
the feds under the old crack house statute. "No one wants to listen to what
their older brothers or sisters listened to. It can't be the same as it was
10 years ago."

Back at the Hollywood party, a young man standing outside admits that
things aren't as hype as they were only a few summers ago. But he says
another cycle of teenagers is coming through the pipeline, ready to take
over where the dropouts left off. "Us young people will bring it back,=" he
promises. "It's already coming back. And the drugs will be around till the
day that I die."