Raving

Hari Kunzru

• Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House by Matthew Collin and John Godfrey
  Serpent’s Tail, 314 pp, £18.99, April 1997, ISBN 1 85242 377 3
• Disco Biscuits edited by Jane Champion
  Sceptre, 300 pp, £6.99, February 1997, ISBN 0 340 68265 5

‘Ecstasy’ is a brand name. According to tradition, the tag first became attached to the drug MDMA (3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine) some time in the early Eighties, when it moved out of the American psychotherapeutic community, in which it had circulated for over a decade, and into wider use as a recreational drug. The street-dealers needed something punchy, and with its connotations of sexual abandon, the word ‘ecstasy’ propelled the drug into mass use, international prohibition and ultimately a social significance only matched, in the pharmaceutical stakes, by the flowering of an LSD culture during the Sixties.