Ecstasy: the comeback pill

The closure of headshops, the low price of tablets and the ease of manufacture and supply have reignited the almost-dead ecstasy scene. How big is the problem?

The crowd heaves as the dance-music DJs Paul Oakenfold, Jeremy Healy and Judge Jules spin tunes from the stage hour after hour. Ten thousand people are dancing outdoors, at the former holiday village of Mosney in Co Meath. The crowd are drinking more water than alcohol, to ensure they don’t dehydrate. This is Homelands, the biggest dance festival of 2000, a 14-hour marathon fuelled by ecstasy.

The rave scene began in London and Manchester in 1987, the so-called summer of love. By the early 1990s dance culture, and its byproduct “E”, had become established on Irish campuses and in Irish nightclubs. But by the time of festivals such as Homelands and Creamfields, with their loved-up, euphoric crowds, the drug’s potency had plummeted. Drug gangs were adding agents to bulk up the powder pressed to make the pills. They reduced levels of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, the chemical that caused the euphoric rushes and made the pills so popular.

Users would complain of having to pop a handful of pills on a night out for the same high provided by one tablet a few years earlier. “They weren’t the same any more, and the comedown wasn’t as clean either. You’d be all over the place for a few days,” says one former heavy user of the drug.

Ecstasy use seems to have peaked around 2003, when the Garda seized €9.7 million worth of the drug. As the dance music synonymous with the drug waned in popularity, and as Ireland and most of Europe became more affluent, cocaine replaced ecstasy as the recreational drug of choice. Ecstasy had all but disappeared by 2010, when the Garda seized just €88,000 worth of the drug.

But now it is making a reappearance. Seizures of the pills this year are already higher than at any point in the past eight years. And 2013 is the third successive year that finds of ecstasy have increased.

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Source: Conor Lally, Irish Times, 12/10/2013