Source: The Guardian, UK Pubdate: Fri, 17 Jul 1998 Contact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Author: Decca Aitkenhead ECSTASY IS FINISHED. BUT IT WASN'T LAW AND ORDER THAT DID THE JOB There are few things more boring than other people's drug anecdotes. They are like other people's dreams - fascinating to the individual involved, but opaque and largely tedious to everyone else. So it is with some reluctance that I offer the following tale, but I think it merits an account. A young man who had reached his 30s without encountering narcotics recently decided he wanted to try Ecstasy. The Ecstasy veterans he consulted were doubtful. It would change his life, they warned. Once he'd tried it, he'd be charging around nightclubs every weekend like some teenage raver. He'd be tormented by all the Ecstasy clubbing years he'd missed. It's an epiphanic experience, they cautioned. Was he ready for all that? Undeterred, he took a pill. He waited for something to happen. After an hour or so, he was still waiting. So he took another, and then another. By then he had run out of Es, and could detect only a minor tingle in his left leg. He bought more, and at last, after the fourth pill, could be described as mildly chemically enhanced. After calculating the level of enhancement which A340 worth of lager would achieve, however, he drew his Ecstasy experiment to an early and disappointed close. This year sees the 10th anniversary of the arrival in Britain of Ecstasy and House music. What began as a private piece of magic for those who knew which secret warehouse was staging the rave, soon transformed the entire anatomy of British nightlife. Youth culture became dance culture. DJs became household names. Everything, to quote a truly terrible House track, really did start with an E. Ten years on, publishers are churning out books to mark the anniversary. Titles like Once In A Lifetime and Class of 88 chronicle the Ecstasy revolution, and magazines have printed special celebratory issues. The tone is at times wistful, scattered with laments that it's "not as good as it used to be", but the general consensus holds that the revolution stood its ground. The mainstream media is in agreement, repeatedly reporting that at least 1,000,000 people take Ecstasy every weekend, and that superclubs like the Ministry of Sound are the future of the leisure industry. Last week, a museum in Rotterdam opened an exhibition to commemorate 10 years of House. Different rooms feature club flyers, photos of clubbers, re-creations of nightclub interiors. It is a charming installation, and evokes the spirit of the decade - but critics have queried the sense in a museum memorialising a trend just 10 years old, and still going strong. What few have recognised is that a museum exhibition is entirely appropriate. Just when everyone is agreeing that Ecstasy is here to stay, club culture is, in fact, dying. In cities like Manchester, the British birthplace of House, clubs are closing because people can no longer be bothered to go to them. They prefer to go to bars and drink bottled beer and jiggle about to a DJ whose name they neither know nor care about. House clubs managing to stay busy are increasingly reluctant to pay out thousands to celebrity DJs, for the DJs no longer pull the crowds; the crowds are more preoccupied with pulling each other. All the defining features of House clubs - asexual friendliness, non-violence, trust - are vanished, replaced by the tensions which typified pre-Ecstasy nightclubs. To those who bypassed 10 years of popular culture, the state of British clubland possibly seems neither here nor there. For the millions who engaged with it, however - and for the authorities attempting to control them - it merits examination. For a few years, a generation genuinely believed it had discovered a new existence, one of infinite social possibility unlocked by a chemical tablet which led into a world free of prejudice. Otherwise-conventional people were happy to break the law to get there. In Once In A Lifetime, a clubber is quoted saying, "Before Ecstasy, it was like there I wasn't, then there I was"; an Observer journalist wrote: "It's as if music is translating our lives, re-writing our genes." You would search hard to find a clubber saying anything like that in 1998 - and even harder for one who will admit why. They usually blame the very thing Ecstasy was originally supposed to represent: universality. They say that if House culture is collapsing, it's because Sharon and Kevin and their dodgy mates heard about it and came clubbing, but don't know how to behave themselves. They are aggressive, don't dance, and ruin the vibe. This is a popular notion, and it's rubbish. The whole point about Ecstasy was that Sharon, Kevin, Henrietta, Swampy and Leroy could all take it, and consequently got along like a house on fire. Yet the same people who, in 1988, were enthusing about Ecstasy because it "broke down barriers" are, 10 years later, saying the problem is that any old idiot thinks he can join in. The House and Ecstasy scene is effectively finished, but the post-mortem is not. There is only one reason why it is dying, and it is because what people now describe as Ecstasy is nothing of the sort. Successive analyses of "Ecstasy" reveal that it is a hotch potch of glucose, caffeine and occasionally some chemicals which may, if you are lucky, make you feel vaguely altered, but inspires none of the emotions which created House culture. Enthusiasts may like to think House was more than a chemical construct. A visit to any club tonight would demonstrate that it wasn't. Just now there are still enough older clubbers who remember real Ecstasy - and therefore act out the memory of its impact, despite having taken a tablet of expensive glucose - to sustain the illusion of dance culture. The man who took four Es was accompanied by a veteran who, until he witnessed his friend's indifference and reassessed his own condition, thought the E's were great. But soon clubs will be full of people with no memory of real Ecstasy to re-enact, and the game will be up. A colossal amount of public money and energy has been spent in the war on Ecstasy. It had no effect whatsoever. The people destroying the market for Ecstasy are the dealers themselves, who got greedy and knocked out cheap imitations instead. After all the costly attempts at control and crackdowns, what has finally killed Ecstasy is the unregulated free market. - --- Checked-by: "Rich O'Grady"