Better to have an E than a bee
We should stop agonising over Ecstasy. Richard Brunstrom is right – it is remarkably safe
Martin Samuel
This is the story of Mr A, a patient formerly under the addiction centre at St George’s Medical School in London. His name was kept private either for professional reasons or because he cannot remember it. Between the ages of 21 and 30, Mr A is believed to have taken 40,000 Ecstasy pills. This figure is so insane it is actually comical. His intake rose from five pills over each weekend, to a little over 100 each month and, finally, 25 every day, a habit he maintained for four years, no doubt to the awe of his social circle.
Unsurprisingly, he was left with severe short-term memory problems, hallucinations, paranoia and muscle rigidity; which, in the circumstances, is like taking a header from the top of Canary Wharf and getting away with a chipped tooth and a mildly sprained ankle.
Christos Kouimtsidis, who was his consultant psychiatrist, described Mr A as having trouble functioning in everyday life. “He could not remember the time, the day, what was in his supermarket trolley,” he said, which seems a tad churlish considering most of us couldn’t be trusted in the canned goods aisle on much more than Piriton and two slugs of Night Nurse.
So what does this tell us about the killer drug Ecstasy? Well, as killer drugs go, it is a bit of a lightweight. Try taking 25 Sudafed a day for four years and see what happens. Try taking 25 of anything sold for a headache at Boots, for that matter. When the unpopular North Wales police chief Richard Brunstrom claimed Ecstasy to be a “remarkably safe substance” this week, he was predictably shouted down.
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Yet with recent estimates running at 730,000 users in the United Kingdom (2003 figures) taking between 500,000 and two million tablets each weekend, how else would its performance be graded? Since 1994 there have been approximately 400 deaths in which Ecstasy has been a contributory factor. In 2005 alone 8,836 deaths were alcohol-related and roughly 100 deaths each year are attributed to overdoses or adverse reactions to aspirin or paracetamol.
So say there are a ball-park 1.25 million Ecstasy tablets taken each week in Britain. That is 65 million annually and 910 million since 1994, working out as one death every 2,275,000 tablets. “Some users suffer heatstroke, nausea, blurred vision and sweating,” one newspaper told its readers, neglecting to add that by and large the rest have a blinding night out and get up for work on Monday morning with a clearer head than heavy drinkers whose drug of choice, though also given to side-effects such as nausea, blurred vision and sweating, not to mention acts of violence and severe mood swings, is legally approved. Ask any copper the cause of the violence in our city centres on Saturday nights and he won’t say Ecstasy.
“Brunstrom should be made to stand by Siobhan’s grave every week and see how he feels,” said Des Delaney, whose daughter died from toxic reaction to Ecstasy in 2005. The newspaper report on Mr Brunstrom’s comments said that Siobhan took an Ecstasy tablet, but that is not quite true (just as it is so often claimed that a victim was trying the drug for the first time, unlikely in the case of a person taking four or five tablets). In fact, the coroner’s report said Siobhan bought four and consumed one and a half Ecstasy tablets, drinking ten bottles of water and dancing until 5am. It described her reaction as an “extremely rare condition”, and said the time delay in receiving treatment was also a factor, although hospital staff were not blamed.
Getting your take on recreational drug use from grieving parents is like forming a view on the value of insects based on the thoughts of a person whose partner has died from anaphylactic shock caused by a bee or wasp sting (between two and nine people are killed this way each year in Britain, with four in every 1,000 believed susceptible).
And on a ratio basis hardly anyone gets stung by bees. Indeed, a bee sting is a topic of conversation for the rest of your life. “Yeah, I got stung once. Little bastard crawled up my trouser leg and when I reached down to scratch…” So think about it. Statistically, being in a nightclub full of Ecstasy-users may be safer than being stung in your garden in August.
Now I don’t see my views on drugs reflected too often in the mainstream media, so here goes. This is the comedian Bill Hicks quoted in performance at the Laff Stop, Austin, Texas, December 1991. “I don’t do drugs anymore,” he said, “but I’ll tell you something honestly: I had a great time doing drugs. Sorry. Never murdered anyone, never robbed anyone, never raped anyone, never beat anyone, never lost a job, a car, a house, a wife, or kids � laughed my ass off, and went about my day. Sorry.”
And there, in a nutshell, is the experience of most casual drug users in Britain today. We hear a lot about how harmful drugs are, never how harmless. Not a word about how, for most people, they are something you grow out of, as surely as you grow out of small cars with souped-up engines. The Ecstasy users of 1991 are now talking house prices and schools over dinner, just like their parents. So don’t worry, folks. This generation will end up voting Conservative same as the last lot.
It’s a phase. It will pass. Even Mr A knocked it on the head when he turned 30; even a bloke on 25 Es a day worked out he was too old to keep bursting into tears each time one of the little critters didn’t pull through on Animal Hospital.
Mr Brunstrom wants drugs legalised, though, and this is where we must draw the line. Not for reasons of morality but because, back in the days when such things were important, we would never have left our weekend in the hands of the same people who brought us the rotten rail service, failing NHS, useless schools, limp-wristed police force and tinpot incompetent councils. In our experience, the suppliers were, by and large, reliable, organised and provided a very professional service. Let Mr Brunstrom concentrate on getting his name in the newspapers, and leave drugs to the experts.
