Drug subcultures, as in these cases, emerge as a response either to new drugs or to new social situations. Over the last half century, both of these factors have been continuously in play, and illicit drug use has proliferated across the globe. Although this subcultural explosion is unprecedented in its massive scale, global reach and aura of modernity, it nevertheless echoes the long-established patterns through which other cultures have assimilated drugs into their ways of life.
During the early 1980s, a new ‘designer drug’ emerged from a research laboratory in California and became the subject of unofficial trials among experimentally minded members of the state’s large psychotherapeutic community. Word rapidly spread that methyldioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, was a substance of exceptional therapeutic promise, and possibly even transformative potential for society as a whole. Subjects experienced waves of euphoria that made them emotionally receptive, tactile and uninhibited; in this state, they proved remarkably open to analysis and acutely empathic towards the feelings of others.
Within months, MDMA - still, at this point, a legal compound - hac begun to appear alongside cannabis and cocaine on the streets, at parties and particularly in the nightclubs and discos of Texas, Chicago and New York. Its original marketers had attempted to christen it ‘empathy’, but ‘ecstasy’ emerged as a more commercial street name. Its distinctive spectrum of effects - stimulant, euphoric, empathic - made it peculiarly conducive to dancing en masse, immersed in a collective experience of brimming energy, warmth and joy. As the drug spread, so did the demand for a new type of public space. Warehouse and basement clubs with state-of-the-art sound systems and lightshows, previously the domain of gay or black subcultures, sprang up in cities across the USA and Europe musicians and DJs surfed the chemical wave with rushing, space-age sonics and extended, hypnotic mixes. Since ecstasy was best complemented with water rather than alcohol, alcohol-licensed venues became irrelevant, and youth culture, together with its high disposable income, began to migrate away from established nightspots in city centres and into derelict industrial spaces on the edge of town, or the open fields beyond, where they could dance until dawn, or even through the whole weekend.
The intensity of the shared ecstasy experience bound its users with a powerful, initiatic sense of group identity, and expressed itself in
Immediately distinctive visual, conceptual and musical forms. Although much of the iconography it generated was futuristic - digital, robotic beats and dayglo plastics, with the ecstasy pill hymned as the ticket to a space voyage or a pass-key to a higher evolutionary network - many inside the culture were equally attracted by the idea that they were returning to tribal or shamanic forms of intoxication, where ecstatic dancing generated a primal engagement with nature. Imagery drawn from the DMT-inspired cultures of the Amazon proliferated across posters and CD packaging clothing and body art, and ethnically-inflected dance mixes spawned new trance and tribal subgenres. Some underground dance collectives took to the road, travelling across Europe in a search for traditional nomadic lifeways, or migrating to the non-stop party circuits of Ibiza, Goa or Thailand. To the cultural mainstream, the phenomenon appeared terrifying: a cult that was consuming their youth in a reckless and hedonistic ‘dance of death’. To its initiates, it was closer to the universal solvent represented by kava in the Pacific: at once a badge of identity, a soul medicine and a secular sacrament.
But however transcendent the experience at the heart of the ecstasy culture, it was still unfolding within the embrace of a consumer society, and as a leisure activity for those who could afford it. From the beginning, ecstasy pills had been far more expensive than comparable recreational drugs such as cannabis, amphetamines or LSD; now the big clubs were becoming vast corporate ventures, with stadium-scale sound and light shows and ticket prices to match. Top DJs were commanding staggering fees and chartering private jets to ferry them between events; designer bags and dayglo clubwear were making membership of the new tribe an expensive business while diffusing its styles far beyond the consumers of the substance. As it swept through mainstream fashion, music and media, ‘e culture’ exposed the tensions between the consumer ethos and wider moral messaging: the news media treated the drug as a social and medical problem, even as representations of the experience it offered were shimmering and pulsing across billboards and shop windows, televisions and computer screens. Like betel, ecstasy had become the foundation for an exuberant material culture whose scale eclipsed the drug itself.
The cultural journey of MDMA could not have been predicted either by its advocates or its enemies, not least because it came to embody so many contradictory meanings at the same time. To its initiates, it was the trigger for a chemical carnival, a form of mass intoxication without precedent; less visibly, it also developed private and therapeutic uses closer to those envisaged by its original clientele. In official public discourse, it was a social evil, the spectacle of a generation prepared to risk liver damage, mental illness and even death for a night of self-indulgence; but it was also the emblem of a futuristic hedonism that insinuated itself across the youth-dominated worlds of advertising, media and commerce. It was an instantly defining symbol of modernity; but it nevertheless retraced and reinvented forms of drug culture only distantly remembered. The patterns made by drugs in human cultures may be endlessly varied, but all are perhaps woven from the same fabric.
World History
