Drugs like Ecstasy that were once only found at raves are now easily available online, says Richard Davenport-Hines.
Amid all the debate about Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, one contribution of her premiership to alternative culture was overlooked. In 1986, she presided over the opening of the M25 motorway encircling London, which swiftly became indispensable to eager young entrepreneurs unimagined in any department of business, innovation and skills.
These young moneymakers began organising outdoor raves within easy motoring of the M25, knowing they could be reached by Ecstasy-taking partygoers from all over southern England. Mike Power was one of the ravers. “Rejecting the strictures of a drab, individualist puritanism [and] Thatcherism’s dreary, market-obsessed world view,” he writes, rejecting too “the aggressive and misogynistic culture of tacky nightclubs and renouncing a politics that told us society did not exist, we danced together in fields and warehouses to music whose lyrics often urged unity”.
Nowadays, the Ecstasy market is dominated by aggressive Russian and Israeli criminals, and misogynistic Italian smugglers. And, as Power shows, Ecstasy was the antecedent of the “legal highs” that are the crucial development in 21st-century drug-taking. Specifically, at a time when the quality and availability of Ecstasy was falling, a substance called mephedrone was developed.
