The Perfect Pill....

I saw this article, and thought some of ya might appriciate it. Its quite long, but a good read...


The score

In the early 90s, Decca Aitkenhead fell in love with club culture - and ecstasy - while a student in Manchester. Ten years on, she wanted to know if that heady mix was still to be found - and if so, where. So along with her husband Paul she set off around the world with one aim: to find the perfect E. In the first of two exclusive extracts from her new book, they travel from the mean streets of Detroit to the hippy haven of San Francisco

Monday January 7, 2002
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk&gt;

Any clubber who has been buying drugs for a while imagines that they are getting better at it with experience. It certainly gets easier, and as time passes you find yourself telling amusing anecdotes about the occasion you mistook a head bouncer for a dealer, or about the wretched night you wasted looking for a man in a student dance, armed only with the information that he was on a murder charge and had false teeth. But the crucial point about these mishaps is that they took place a long time ago, and as you chuckle away - What a fool! - what you are really saying is that you are now something of an expert. Expert drug buyers do exist, and I don't doubt the celebrity smack addicts on chatshows who boast of being able to arrive in any small English town and find heroin within the hour. But most of us would be hard pressed to find the police station in that time, for despite our fond self-regard, it gets easier to buy drugs only because we've made friends with more people who sell them.

I liked to think of myself as an old hand. Paul assumed that the reason he was hopeless at buying drugs was inexperience. Only as we stood in the middle of Detroit, a city that appeared to have no one living in it - and certainly no one I knew who sold Es - did the folly of our thinking begin to dawn. It is probably a good thing that neither of us knew then what the miscalculation would mean. But with Paul waiting expectantly to hear our next move, it was already too late. "Easy," I smiled brightly. "We'll find a bar and ask someone to point us towards a good club."

After about an hour, we found a sort of concrete shed with thrash metal pounding out of an open door. It looked like a bar, but it was hard to tell, on account of it being pitch-black inside. Tiptoeing in, we waited in the dark, and in due course a heavy young man with a spike through his chin lurched through the gloom. When he'd recovered from the surprise of seeing customers, he explained that downtown got "kind of quiet" on a weekend, and chuckled softly to himself as he poured drinks. Foreigners in his bar were, apparently, some form of private joke.

"Would you know of any good dance clubs we could go to?" He stopped pouring and looked up.
"You're kidding, right?" I shook my head and smiled encouragingly. He handed over a copy of the city's listings magazine, the Metro Times; we bought a box of matches, and under a tiny pool of light read through the column of club entries. It was an unexpectedly short list.

Most of the descriptions sounded more like a threat than a promise ("Six hours, one DJ, one room"), and almost all the clubs were billed as "old skool". Different categories of dance can be identified by their deliberate misspellings; variants of hip-hop tend to contain a "ph" where there should be an "f" - hence phunk etc - and anything to do with techno is peppered with the letter "k". There seemed to be an awful lot of ks in these listings. Really hardcore techno, the type that makes your ears bleed, is spelt hardkore - and this word appeared on every other line. As we turned to leave, the barman called after us.

"Don't get shot, now."
Outside on the deserted street, blinking in the sunlight, a kind of nervous hysteria set in. Paul wanted to know just how fierce a techno night in Detroit would have to be to qualify for the distinction of "old-skool hardkore".

When a lone taxi idled past on Monroe Street, there was some confusion as we tried to explain that we wanted a tour of the city. Geriatric, one-armed, the driver squinted through the cracked glass partition. "Huh?" With a doubtful shrug of his stump, he took us on a loop through more urban desolation, and still we saw no one. We did find a dance-record shop after about an hour, but it was empty save for the owner, a kindly man who looked thoroughly alarmed to hear that we planned on going clubbing.

"You guys sure you know what you're doin'?"
Paul chipped in that he was from Glasgow, so there was no need to worry. When the man had turned his back, I got a long, questioning stare.

The only person he would be willing to approach for drugs, Paul announced once back in our hotel room, was an obvious undercover cop, in the hope that we might then be arrested and taken somewhere safe. Face down on the bed in a fit of morbid speculation, he conjured visions of derelict nightclubs full of gangsters. It seemed entirely likely.

I had read somewhere that Motor Lounge, in the east of the city, was the "sixth best club in America" and this was our nervy choice. We took our time getting ready to go out, fussing about and propping ourselves up with bogus enthusiasm, but had more or less run out of steam by the time we pulled up outside a plain redbrick building on a dank street corner. In the inky midnight, coils of steam were slinking out of manholes, playing in the shadows. Huddled on the back seat of a cab, Paul asked our driver to wait for a few minutes, just in case, and when a bouncer fixed plastic tags to our wrists, Paul suggested that this was to assist the hospital with identification later. Shooting a last, thin grimace, he went inside first. Following him down a narrow passage, I found him standing very still, staring at the scene before our eyes. It was a few minutes before either of us could say a thing.

Around 250 white teenagers filled a small hall decorated in the style of a student beer-cellar. The boys were dressed for a boy-band audition and the girls for babysitting. Even the few trying to affect vacant nonchalance were careful not to trip anyone up and everyone smiled sweetly. A number had made it on to the dancefloor, where they observed each other's space politely while dancing a kind of epileptic hoedown - furious jerking of arms and legs, like speeded-up breakdancing. One girl was dancing like a string puppet; another boy took a great sprint on to the dancefloor and kept running, doing laps around it, waving his arms about. As each dancer launched into a new flailing of limbs, the others would gather round in an admiring circle; when the record ended, the dancer would give a rueful smile and it was someone else's turn. It was clear that no one had taken any drugs - not just tonight, but ever - and doubtful whether anyone had even had a drink. Motor Lounge resembled nothing so much as a Christian youth-club disco.

In due course, the house music descended into demonic Detroit techno, but there was nothing to suggest that anyone noticed the switch, and if the DJ had broken into Abba, I suspect the crowd would have carried on politely bobbing along. Hours passed. We kept waiting for Paul's gangsters to arrive, but they never came, and when the thought occurred to us that the two meanest-looking people in the club were probably ourselves, we left.

A Californian chemist resynthesised MDMA in 1956. Alexander Shulgin was an unusual individual - a licensed pharmacist with a major drug company, but also a hippy - and for the next 30 years he operated a drugs laboratory from his home. By the late 70s, the Californian therapeutic community was prescribing MDMA to patients in psychotherapy, but still hoping to keep it a secret, fearful that widespread use would lead to abuse and attract the attention of the authorities.

"Let's face it," wrote Timothy Leary. "No one wants a 60s situation to develop where sleazy characters hang around college dorms peddling pills they falsely call ecstasy to lazy thrill-seekers."

But, of course, there were plenty of people who couldn't wait for such a de velopment, and the secret of the elitist hippies was soon out. Businessmen in Texas began marketing ecstasy as a club drug, and on the east coast it became a feature of the gay black dance scene. The media got wind, then the authorities, and in 1985 the drugs enforcement administration issued an emergency ban making MDMA an illegal substance.

Had they moved sooner, it is possible that none of us would have heard of ecstasy today, but they were too late. Followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh were using the drug, and with branches of the cult scattered across the world, ecstasy had already spread to Europe. The cult communities still thought of it as a therapeutic tool, though, rather than as a recreational drug. The credit for the missing piece of the ecstasy equation - music - goes to Chicago.

In the mid-80s, DJs at a club called The Warehouse were inventing what soon became known as house - computerised dance music, like techno, but more soulful and textured - and with its happy marriage to ecstasy, modern clubbing was born. Since then, over the years house music has splintered into so many subgenres - hard house, deep house, trance, handbag - that "house" is no longer a definition so much as an umbrella term. Unfortunately, the same could be said of "ecstasy".

Ecstasy comes in a pill. Every tablet bears an imprint - a logo, if you like - and has its own name. In 1990 you might have had a White Dove, bearing a tiny engraving of a bird, and these days you might get a Mitsubishi, bearing the triple-diamond indentation of the automobile logo. Occasionally, you still come across ecstasy in capsule form. Capsules were popular in the early 90s, for there was a feeling that you got more for your money, and you will still hear clubbers speak wistfully of Dennis the Menaces (black and red), or Rhubarb and Custards (pink and yellow).

Manufacturers of ecstasy have demonstrated a nice instinct for topicality. As Oliver Stone's Malcolm X was released, we had Malcolm Xs, imprinted with a large X, and Pterodactyls were issued to coincide with the release of Jurassic Park. In the run-up to the 2001 general election, pills bearing the euro symbol were popular, and if Britain ever has a referendum on its currency, no doubt Es will appear with a pound sign on them. Manufacturers are nothing if not inventive, clearly, but sadly it's not only the names they change. Though there is far greater choice on the market nowadays, the impression of consumer empowerment is illusory - for as soon as a wider variety became available, the quality began to vary drastically.

When manufacturers began tampering with Es, they would substitute the cheaper ingredient of amphetamine for MDMA. Then came a spell when pills were laced with a hint of barbiturate, followed by a short but nasty batch of Es containing ketamine, a devastating veterinary anaesthetic. A particularly sneaky substitute is something called MDA, a derivative of MDMA. Popular with drug dealers, it mimics the effects of its chemical cousin for the first 15 minutes but then, very suddenly, it's over - giving the unlucky clubber just enough of a glimpse to tempt them back to buy another. A typical dud pill nowadays contains little more than glucose and caffeine, but MDMA is still out there and the quality of Es varies widely, each new brand quickly acquiring a reputation on the club scene.

In other words, buying ecstasy has become a lottery. It's an endlessly frustrating game, and one that goes most of the way towards explaining why a world tour felt necessary simply to find a decent pill. I was absolutely certain we'd find some in the States. America had invented the drug as we know it, after all, as well as a philosophy for giving customers what they want. It seemed a safe bet.

The first days in San Francisco slipped by fresh and mild. We cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge, followed the election campaign, and idled about, eating burritos and watching Mexicans trade fake green cards in doorways. Awed by the mansions on Nob Hill, seduced by the glamorous seediness of SoMa, we rode the cable cars, ate out in laundrettes, sailed up and down in trams, and got lost in the pink and pale-blue streets at least once every day. It is an astonishingly pretty city, like a psychedelic Brighton, its gracious villas giving way as you climb the hills to a higgle-piggle of pastel terracing.

The other great thing about San Francisco, Paul and I both thought, was that there were obviously a lot of drugs around. It would be difficult to say exactly how we formed this impression. People weren't dancing through the streets off their heads, but there was something in the general mood that implied we would have no trouble in our search, and none of the prudish chill of most American cities with regard to depravity. Ecstasy was not going to be a problem.

We hired bicycles, and by mid-afternoon were hopelessly lost. A young man stopped to ask if we needed directions, and we fell into conversation. He had floppy blond hair like a surfer, and a manner like a Lonely Planet guide dispensing information. As he rattled on, I could feel Paul gearing himself up.

"Sounds as if you know this town well. Do you know where we can get any ecstasy?"
"Yeah, sure. Go to the corner of Haight and Masonic."
"Really?"
"Sure. Know where it is?" We nodded, hugely impressed.
"You'll have no problem." We thanked him - "Any time" - and he sauntered off.
Needless to say, the sensible thing at this point would have been to go home. The weekend would soon be upon us and we could set about finally buying some Es in a more plausible fashion. Had anyone told me they'd tried to buy drugs off the street in the old hippy quarter on the advice of a surfer, I would have blushed. Yet there we were, half an hour later, alighting from a bus at the corner of Haight and Masonic, making hopeful eyes at strangers in the dusk.

If Disney ever builds a 60s hippy theme park, it will look like this corner of Haight Ashbury. The intersection is the bullseye of the neighbourhood, made famous more than 30 years ago for its free love and pot, but which has since been turned into a lifesize souvenir of itself. Tie-dye and incense shops line the roads, next to vegan coffee shops and other gestures towards the quarter's former life. Red-eyed teenagers squat on the pavement, smoking wistfully and talking rubbish. Dogged lesbians buy African poetry in the bookstores, and German tourists buy novelty lighters. I could not believe we were going to try to buy drugs here.

One teenager was halfway through an incoherent ramble: "That's the point of Rainbow, man. You just are what you are..." when he looked up, broke off, and thrust a flyer in my face.

"It's a party, man, you're gonna love it." I studied the flyer.
"How do you know?"
"Er, because you will." His Jimi Hendrix T-shirt covered his knees.
"But you don't know us."
He thought about this for a moment. "I know you love to party."
"OK, then," said Paul, "can you tell me where we can buy some drugs?"
"We-e-ell." He studied us. "Are you a cop?"
"No," sighed Paul, "I am a British tourist now very bored with trying to buy drugs."
"Oh, OK, what do you want?" We told him, and he cheerfully bounded off up Masonic to find some, pausing only to give instructions to the young boy with him, who couldn't have been more than 13 years old. "Watch them, yeah?" he ordered. "And don't forget the only rule: no offering anything to kids."

Minutes later he was back, panting with excitement. "They're $25, man; they've got a butterfly printed on them; they're excellent." He clearly had no idea about ecstasy, and the pills were clearly going to be useless, but there comes a point where these transactions assume a logic of their own. Another whey-faced, catatonically stoned teenager approached, and this was of course our man's friend. We took a stroll around the corner together. With money and pills ready to exchange, he spoke his only words.

"You sure you're not a cop?"
"No," replied Paul, "I am not a cop."
He handed over the pills. Back at the guesthouse, we found that they had a sugar coating and looked a lot like headache pills; and that their butterfly logo bore an uncanny resemblance to that of a pharmaceutical brand. We took them, had some supper and went to bed, reflecting the following morning that it was an achievement of sorts to set out in search of the best E in the world and manage so soon to come across the worst.