NOTHING TO GET SMILEY ABOUT

Police attitudes to Ecstasy may be softening, but some old ravers are
beginning to worry that there's a price to pay for the good times they had
10 years ago. They talk to Sophie Radice

When it arrived in Britain from America in the late 1980s, Ecstasy (or
MDMA, to give it its biochemical name) was seen as the dream club drug. At
a time when there was officially no such thing as society, you could go to
a club or a field or an aircraft hangar and find hundreds, even thousands,
of loved-up, friendly people all seeming to wish you well. You could dance
and smile and later have the best sex ever - the textures, the touch, the
smells all intensified. It took the violence out of going out on a Saturday
night and changed the atmosphere on the terraces for a brief moment in
football history.

All this and no hangover, addictive longings or concrete scientific
research to show that it did any harm.

Fifteen years on, young people are still taking Ecstasy. (Some are not so
young; a 45-year-old I know has recently discovered the drug, and he and
his wife take a tab of E before they go golfing on a Saturday.) And with
the estimate of regular users hovering between one and two million a year
and a relatively small number of deaths - seven per year - directly
attributable to the drug, attitudes towards Ecstasy seem to have softened.

A fortnight ago, Camden council in London and Andy Hayman, the deputy
assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, called for Ecstasy to be
downgraded from a class A drug to a class B drug. Last week Police
Commander Brian Paddick told MPs that as far as he was concerned, any of
his officers who went into nightclubs looking for people in possession of
Ecstasy and cocaine were simply wasting valuable police time. 'It has no
adverse effect on the rest of the people they are with, either in terms of
people they socialise with, or within the wider community.

They go back to work on Monday morning and are unaffected for the rest of
the week. In terms of my priorities, they are low down.'

Certainly, if you were to visit the A&E of a major hospital or the cells of
a big police station on a Saturday night you would understand why these two
drugs compare favourably to alcohol abuse, in the short term at least.

But what about the long-term effects of taking Ecstasy and cocaine on a
'weekend' basis?

Everyone knows alcohol rots your liver, but what kind of damage is done to
our bodies by coke and E? Is it possible to have such an intense experience
without some payback?

I loathe drugs.

Cannabis makes people boring, cocaine is a horrible nervy drug and the rest
are plain scary.

But I was prepared to make an exception when it came to Ecstasy. I saw that
the people around me were not out of control and enjoyed the
lovey-doveyness of it all. When I took it I felt a tremendous amount of
goodwill, danced all night long, thought that my husband and I had
discovered a new way of describing history (it involved long charts and
graphs pinned up on the wall) and suffered no particular side effects or
comedown.

I stopped because I liked it too much and knew it could make ordinary life
seem lacklustre.

People around me were taking it a lot, though.

There were weddings where the bride and groom took their vows on it,
couples who never had sex without it, single men who would take it of an
evening when they were on their own. Other friends just took more and more
as the quality got poorer and the effects became more difficult to achieve.

Most people did it until their mid-twenties and early thirties and then
stopped or moved on to cocaine, from which they in turn drifted away when
they began having families. But some of these people found they were still
feeling the effects of Ecstasy in particular long after they stopped using it.

Serena, a teacher in her late thirties told me: 'I got into Ecstasy much
later then anyone else I know. I was nearly 29 and had a 20-year-old
boyfriend who dealt it. We used to go to Ibiza and Goa and had the most
fantastic time. Of course, overuse of anything is not a good idea and my
boyfriend started taking eight to 10 tablets a couple of times a week. But
all it seemed to do was cause insomnia, and an awful day about three days
after taking it. Then some years later he was hit hard by the weirdest kind
of depression, something they now call 'depersonalisation/derealisation
syndrome' in which you feel completely cut off and at one remove from the
rest of the world.

In his case it only lasted about two months but I've heard of others who
have felt like that for a lot longer.'

Scientists and doctors think the reason for this kind of after-effect is
that prolonged use of Ecstasy lowers the brain's serotonin levels, which
has been linked to depression and anxiety - and worse.

In a controversial experiment using direct images of the human brain,
Professor Una McCann of the US National Institute for Mental Health,
compared 15 Ecstasy users with 15 who had never taken the drug. The Ecstasy
users' brains had significantly fewer crucial serotonin structures then
those of the non-users, and the more Ecstasy they had taken during their
lives the worse the damage.

Her conclusion in The Lancet was bleak: 'Our data suggests that people who
use MDMA as a recreational drug are putting themselves at risk of
developing brain injury.' Or, as Oliver James, author of Britain on the
Couch: A Treatment for the Low Serotonin Society, says, 'It is beginning to
look as if Ecstasy is another of those grim medical timebombs already
ticking away. As we ponder the potential damage done to our brains by
mobile phones and beef, a significant slice of 40-year-olds will have to
add Ecstasy to the list.'

Sarah, 37, a university English professor, was involved in the rave scene
and took large amounts of Ecstasy during the late 1980s. She has no worries
or regrets - yet - even though she has read reports on serotonin depletion
in Ecstasy users.

'I was 22 when I first took it. I had just graduated and was extremely
unconfident. Then I went along to a 'rave' and had the best night of my
life. What struck me was that it wasn't just my body that was free, it was
my mind - it made me interested in the processes of my own thoughts and I
carried the excitement around with me through the week, which got me
through the low feeling you get on the third day after taking it. I think
it actually helped me become an academic because I had more confidence in
my own ideas.

I haven't noticed any side effects at all. Right now I look back on Ecstasy
with gratitude and nostalgia'

Justin, 38, (not his real name) feels less warmly towards the drug. Now
running his own landscape design company, he took Ecstasy four or five
times a week in increasing amounts for four to five years.

He took cocaine for almost as long.

'I have definitely suffered from manic depression since those days and feel
sure that the drugs, especially Ecstasy, may have caused that. At one point
I was sure that Ecstasy had mucked up my short-term memory, because I was
struggling to remember things, and suffered from panic attacks, which I
felt had something to do with the E. Cocaine affects your personality - it
made me aggressive and erratic - but it doesn't permanently affect your
brain the way MDMA does. I am wary of blaming the drugs for my depression
because I may have been predisposed to it but of course I think that they
had something to do with it. I would be a fool not to.'

It is hard to be absolutely sure that low serotonin levels lead to
depression and memory loss. Neither is it clear whether brains damaged by
Ecstasy are capable of repairing themselves after time (there is thought to
be a small possibility of this). McCann will have to take images of the
same brains in 10 years.

These issues do not come very high on Commander Paddick's drugs control
'priority list', however.

Nor does the crucial question of whether, for some users, Ecstasy improves
their life so much that the possibility of a payback is worth it.

'We've seen people bang at it for six or seven years,' says Mike Lineal of
the drug advice organisation Life-line in Manchester, 'and in some cases
they are very depressed, but what we don't know is if they're depressed
because of the serotonin depletion or whether they had such a good time
that reality has become unacceptable.'