Strangeways Here We Come

Dave Haslam

The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E by Decca Aitkenhead
Fourth Estate, 206 pp, £12.99, January 2002, ISBN 1 84115 337 0

The 1990s were characterised by the astonishing market penetration of products such as mobile phones, Microsoft Windows and Starbucks coffee shops, but an even more remarkable example of booming sales and global spread is the massive rise in the consumption of Ecstasy. In 1988 Ecstasy was a secret; now it’s a cliché. In the first few months of 1988 the number of Ecstasy tablets taken during a weekend in Britain was probably something like three or four thousand. Now it’s about two million every Saturday night. Ecstasy makes the user feel euphoric, very sociable, and provides a mildly hallucinogenic combination of the soft focus of marijuana and the anxiety-busting rush of amphetamine.

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Vol. 25 No. 2 · 23 January 2003 » Dave Haslam » Strangeways Here We Come (print version)
Pages 29-30 | 2559 words

Letters

From Nick Davis

Dave Haslam (LRB, 23 January) is wide of the mark in his account of how Ecstasy produces its effect. Psychotropic drugs work by stimulating the post-synaptic receptors. This can be achieved in two ways: by stimulating the receptors directly or by increasing the level of the brain transmitter which naturally carries out that task. Ecstasy does it the second way, by bursting the vesicles containing serotonin and dopamine in the pre-synaptic neurones, making them active in large amounts in the synapse and producing the sought after rush.

So far, so good. However, as the Ecstasy wears off, and the serotonin and dopamine are reabsorbed into the neurones and broken down, the neurones themselves undergo a change: a pruning of some of the dendrites that connect each neurone to thousands of others. The cumulative effect of this damage is a feeling that the high is not as good as it used to be; any attempt to chase it will be counter-productive, since further micro-damage will ensue.

Nick Davis
Weybridge

From Graham Kemp

Dave Haslam doubts whether it's possible to appreciate Frank Zappa 'without a brain half fried on LSD': an odd example to choose, as Zappa himself famously used only coffee and cigarettes. He took a libertarian line on drug supply, but had rather stern views on consumption.

Graham Kemp
University of Liverpool