Saturday night, and two boys from different parts of the country were getting ready for a evening on the town. It was going to be a big night; Stephen Brett, 19, had travelled from Surrey, while 20-year-old Bret Gilkes had come down from Birmingham, both excited about attending the Raindance party at the SE1 nightclub under London Bridge. A group of teenagers from north London turned up en masse, celebrating the end of their A-levels. Others came from Croydon and Coulsden.
At some point in the evening, Brett and Gilkes each took a white pill, 1cm in diameter, embossed with a five-pronged crown. It was a hot night, and the party was packed, with sweat dripping down the walls. Outside, a number of people were having real problems, going into convulsions and pulling off clothing to cool down. By the end of the evening, seven people had been rushed to hospital. By Tuesday Brett and Gilkes were dead.
Police have not yet confirmed the exact cause of death of the two men, but they know both had taken ecstasy - a "bad batch" of the drug appeared to be to blame, they said, mixed with a contaminant that may have been the rat poison strychnine.
Ecstasy deaths are more than the desperate tragedies they represent for the families involved - those who have died for the sake of a pill briefly enter the national consciousness.
While very many fewer people die from ecstasy use than from other controlled drugs, these are the deaths that linger: bright, beautiful young people, killed for the sake of a good evening out. It makes information about ecstasy use highly politically charged, and the search for something to blame all the more intense. "Rogue batches" are often fingered: media reports frequently cite contaminants such as toilet cleaner, guitar wax and rat poison being routinely "cut" into home made batches of the drug.
But the experts working with drug users on the London scene are perplexed. Because the evidence, they say, simply doesn't back this up. "The whole issue of contaminants in ecstasy is a myth," says Dr John Ramsey, head of the toxicology unit of St George's hospital medical school in London. His team collect pills and test them "to see what the kids are using". And there is no evidence, he says, of widespread contamination. Aside from the "fillers" such as lactose which bulk up the pills, "all the tablets we ever see contain nothing but drugs."
In fact, he says, the occasional dose of methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, or MDMA, the chemical form of pure ecstasy, should not, by rights, do you a lot of harm. Longer term use may cause more difficulties. "Put it this way, if you're using a lot and you're using it regularly, you're not going to be doing yourself very much good in the brain department," says Grainne Whalley, dance outreach coordinator for the drugs information charity Release.
It's not exactly good, but neither should it be fatal. So why are people still dying? It comes back to people dancing too fast, drinking too little, resting too infrequently. "Typically, the people who die are admitted to hospitals with extreme hyperthermia," says Ramsey. A million ecstasy pills are taken every week in London alone, points out Whalley, so you won't stop people using. But it puts an even heavier burden on club promoters to ensure that they are looking after clubbers, by providing free water, chillout rooms, proper ventilation. It's depressing, she says, that years after these issues first came to light, people are still dying.
Ramsey confesses to being baffled by the police assertion that strychnine may have been to blame for the young men's deaths. In years of testing, he says, only one pill has ever been found containing traces of the poison, and that may have been a hoax. So why the continued emphasis on contaminants in the drug?
"There's an element of denial from the user as to why things go wrong," he says. "They believe they aren't vulnerable, that it was a bad pill. I think it's because the effects of ecstasy are so pleasant, people really don't want to believe that something that can cause so much pleasure can also kill you."
