Pubdate: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 Source: Daily Telegraph (UK) Copyright: 2006 Telegraph Group Limited Contact: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/114 Author: Sam Leith Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mdma.htm (Ecstasy) 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?" - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom