The set-up sounds far more glamorous than it is. A basic ecstasy lab – consisting of mini electric cookers, distillation flasks, oversized pasta pots (for steam baths) and funnels with access to running water, electricity and a wastepipe – can easily be built in the average toilet. One recent example was set up in a garden shed. Ideally, the labs like to be close to areas of heavy industry or on remote farmland – somewhere the numerous fumes won’t be detected.
Start-up costs are relatively low. Apparatus costing around £4000 can be used to turn out several thousand pills a week, and getting hold of the right gear usually involves little more than bribing a destitute student to lift a few items out of their university storeroom. The labs are highly mobile: they are often packed up in the back of vans and moved from one location to another every few weeks to stay one step ahead of the authorities.
The two main motivations for setting up in the UK are increasing profit and reducing risk. With ecstasy from Holland, the biggest problem is getting it safely across the Channel and, with prices falling, the only way to make it worthwhile is to import in bulk, which greatly increases the risk of being intercepted.
Originally I was hoping Kenny would be able to arrange for me to visit the lab that produces the ecstasy he sells, but the more I learn about what goes on inside, the less keen I am. In places like Noord-Brabant and Limburg in southern Holland, at least twenty out of the estimated five hundred illicit ecstasy laboratories give themselves away to the authorities each year by suddenly exploding, sometimes with fatal results. Kenny, who understands the process inside out, explains why.
‘It’s simple enough if you know what you’re doing, but there are a few stages where, if you fuck up, it can all go horribly wrong. When you add the safrole or the PMK [two precursor chemicals used in the process] it creates huge amounts of heat but if the mixture goes over forty degrees it explodes. But it’s not just a question of keeping it cool for a few minutes, the mixing and stirring has to go on for sixteen hours. Then you start mucking about with things like benzene – which they reckon causes cancer – methanol, sulphuric acid and ether, which will explode if you so much as turn on a light switch.
‘The fumes are a big problem, you can’t get away from them and you end up with this thick layer of vapour on the floor. The ones that don’t kill you give you one fuck of a headache and the ones that don’t do that will burn your skin like acid. That causes other problems – a lot of the equipment is glass tubes and beakers and it’s all really fragile. But you have to work in these thick rubber gloves so you can’t feel anything and wearing a mask and goggles so you can’t really see anything either. It means you’re ten times more likely to drop or spill stuff and when you’re trying to get from one end of a room to the other with a load of hot sulphuric acid, that’s no joke. Some days I go home covered in burns and blisters.
‘And even once you’re finished, it ain’t over. Some of the leftover chemicals will explode if they’re not stored properly and you can’t just pour them down the sink or the drain without having the local environment-health or Green Party rep on your back. So you end up dumping it on some wasteland. Fuck knows what it’s doing to the water out there.’
Kenny has been selling ecstasy for more than fifteen years, ever since it burst on to the British dance scene, having first discovered it while on holiday first in Amsterdam and then in Ibiza during the 1980s. His move into manufacturing two years before we met came almost by accident when he stumbled across a like-minded group of people who wanted to avoid contact with the worst of the criminals who have now moved into the trade. For Kenny, it’s a welcome return to the early days of innocence.
‘It’s a bit like cannabis. At first the whole trade was run by university students and toffs like Howard Marks and it was all some jolly boys’ adventure. Then mobs from London and Essex moved in, and before you knew it, people in Range Rovers are getting their heads blown off.’ At first Kenny smuggled his supplies from Amsterdam himself, but as his business grew, he had to rely on others with more sophisticated trafficking operations.
‘The problem now is that the people smuggling E are also bringing in heroin and cocaine. There are gangs that specialise in getting stuff across the Channel, charging a set price per kilo, and don’t care what it actually is because to them anything Class A is all the same. But these people are always ripping each other off, always fighting over stuff. They’re not nice people to be around. We started making our own because we thought we could make more money and get away from the aggro. I know we’re breaking the law and making money from illegal drugs, but that doesn’t mean we want to be gangsters.’
In the earliest days ecstasy production was being pioneered by men like Dutchman Rob Hollemans, a former electrician who, by the mid-1980s, had become one of the biggest ecstasy producers in Holland. By sneaking into chemistry lectures at his local university, Hollemans learnt enough to make some of the highest quality tablets the market had ever known. Working hand in hand with his brother, Hollemans’ sole aim was to provide clubbers with the best possible psychedelic experience; making a profit was the last thing on his mind. To that end, Rob and his brother threw open the doors of their Limburg lab to show everyone and anyone exactly how it was done.
‘Back then the quality control was excellent – if a particular batch didn’t quite hit the mark there was instant feedback and they’d make sure they fixed it,’ says Kenny. ‘Of course, it helped that it was legal but even after it was banned that was still the case for the first few years.’ But as the knowledge spread, so gangs who had previously trafficked in amphetamine moved in and profit became the primary motivation. Hollemans was so disillusioned by what had happened that he quit the ecstasy business altogether. The last anyone heard, he was working as a carpenter in Hungary.
Just like any other mass-market product, ecstasy is subject to the laws of supply and demand, and prices have tumbled as production of the synthetic drug has moved from a cottage industry to a sophisticated, industrialised global business that is worth billions of pounds.
Kenny has seen the price of pills plunge dramatically as a result. ‘In 1990 I was going out and buying around a thousand pills for between six and seven pounds each and flogging them for up to fifteen quid a throw. Today I’m paying between forty and seventy pence a pill and in some areas the price is down as low as two pounds and sometimes even less.’
What the dealers have lost in terms of margins they have more than made up for in volume as clubbers consume the increasingly poor-quality drug in ever greater numbers to achieve the desired effect. In the 1980s most of the tablets in circulation contained pure MDMA. The latest research suggests that half of all tablets on sale contain no MDMA, and those that do have had the dosage reduced to such a level that some clubbers routinely take four or five tablets each night.
‘Half the people out there are getting a bit of a speedy buzz from something that has so little ecstasy in it as to be no use whatsoever, but because it’s all they’ve ever known, they don’t care. In the big cities it’s all the same but out in the sticks you actually get different grades of ecstasy. The prices vary from two pounds to fifteen per pill and, believe me, you get what you pay for.’
Kenny shakes his head, almost mournfully. ‘The trouble is no one really cares any more. Every dealer says the tablets they are selling are the best ever so no one believes it any more, not enough to pay more for a premium product. They’d rather take pot luck. We thought we could clean up by making some top-quality stuff but in the end we had to charge exactly the same amount as everyone else, otherwise no one was interested.’
MDMA was first patented in 1912 by German pharmaceutical giant Merck, who developed it as a diet pill but decided it wasn’t suitable to put on the market. It resurfaced briefly during the 1950s when the US army tested its potential as a tool in psychological warfare and then a decade later when it was taken up by marriage counsellors, who believed it could help estranged couples to empathise with one another.
But it wasn’t until research by the American chemist Dr Alexander Shulgin stumbled upon the compound in the mid-1970s that its journey to the dance-floor really began. Fascinated by psychedelic substances ever since he had experimented with mescaline in the 1960s, Dr Shulgin, who will celebrate his eightieth birthday in 2005, has carried out vast amounts of research on a wide range of substances, famously testing every new compound on himself and meticulously recording the results.
His 1991 book,
PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved),
includes the recipe for ecstasy – the first time it had been widely published – and more than two hundred similar substances, and is found in almost every ecstasy lab on the planet. Age has not slowed him down and he continues to test new substances and publish new papers.
Having found MDMA to be the pick of the bunch from an early stage, Dr Shulgin and his wife, Ann, began sharing it with their friends, who in turn introduced it to an even wider audience. Seen as an enlightening alternative to LSD, the substance was openly sold in nightclubs across America and instantly proved a success. When it hit Dallas, Texas, it was renamed ‘ecstasy’ by an entrepreneurial drug-dealer who spotted its commercial potential. Thanks to his marketing efforts, the new drug was soon selling 30,000 units per month in that one city alone. By April 1985, the US Drug Enforcement Administration had also spotted its commercial potential and made MDMA a Schedule 1 banned substance, classing it alongside heroin and cocaine.
The journey to Britain took a little longer. Some, like Kenny, discovered ecstasy in Ibiza, or Amsterdam, while others came across it in hippie communities in America. Legend has it that one of the first major importations was carried out by none other than a member of the leading Manchester band the Happy Mondays, who allegedly set off to the Netherlands and returned with a bag containing more than a thousand tablets. Some were sold, others were given away for free, and within the space of a few weeks people were asking for more.
Ecstasy use in Britain really took off in the mid-1980s when it became the drug of choice (along with LSD) at vast outdoor parties, raves, organised by New Age travellers and free-spirited devotees of Acid House music. Rarely had a drug received better press. The reputation that preceded it was that ecstasy kept you up all night like speed but without the comedown, and gave you acid-like experiences of sound and colour but without the possibility of a bad trip. The ‘love drug’ was part stimulant, part hallucinogen and part aphrodisiac. Above all, ecstasy was said to be 100 per cent safe with no long-term side effects.
‘I’ve tried everything – dope, cocaine, speed – none of them compares to ecstasy at all,’ says one regular user. ‘It’s all the best feelings you’ve ever had compressed into one night. It’s called ecstasy for a reason. With ecstasy, everyone’s your brother, everyone’s your sister, and everyone’s your best friend.’
Use of the drug only heightened what was already an utterly mind-blowing experience. Those first outdoor events would often last days at a time and attract crowds of ten thousand or more. But by 1988 cunning, well-bred entrepreneurs, like the infamous Tony Colston-Hayter, had stepped in and the free events became so-called ‘pay parties’.
For thousands of young revellers, just getting to an event was half the thrill. Convoys of cars would disappear into the countryside in the dead of night following last-minute instructions left on numerous answering-machines in a bid to keep the organisers one step ahead of the police and get round the public-entertainment, public-order and noise-pollution laws. Another reason ecstasy took off at the events was that, without a drinks licence, organisers faced serious penalties if any alcohol was found on sale: ecstasy, whose effect is diminished if taken with alcohol, proved the perfect alternative.
At the same time ecstasy became a Class A drug, the police formed the Pay Party Unit and pretty soon the organisation of security at the parties and then the parties themselves fell into the hands of organised crime.
If you control who gets into a rave, or who goes in and out of a club, then you can control who deals the drugs and can therefore ensure you get a cut of every pill sold. With this in mind, gangs of modern-day hard men began setting themselves up as security firms, often with alarming results. Strikeforce Surveillance, for example, became notorious on the rave scene before it disbanded in 1990. Its reputation for aggressive tactics was sealed when, during an outdoor party at Reigate, Surrey, in September 1999, the sixty-strong Strikeforce team, ostensibly there to guard the event, attacked police officers who were trying to arrest one of their dealers. Armed with baseball bats, knives and CS gas they left sixteen police officers injured.
At one Kent party drug-taking became almost mandatory as the heavies policing the event with their Rottweiler dogs and shotguns ‘encouraged’ every participant to purchase an ecstasy tablet for fifteen pounds before allowing them in.
One eyewitness commented: ‘What has become increasingly clear is that many of the people who claim to be running these parties are nothing more than front men. Parties are now being taken over by well-organised psychos.’
New laws designed to allow clubs to open twenty-four hours a day and increasing the penalties for pay-party organisers forced the rapidly growing dance culture inside and into a commercial setting where police and government officials believed it could be more easily controlled. In fact, all they did was shift the balance of power to club-owners and the criminals who turned up and offered to become their ‘business partners’.
The shift from outdoors to indoors was virtually seamless and the drugs became more of a feature than ever. On certain nights, at major venues up and down the country, up to 90 per cent of the crowd would be on E. Any petty dealers would have their stash confiscated at the door and these would then be resold by the doorman’s favoured trader. In odd cases where a dealer managed to slip through the net the doormen would give someone some cash and send them out into the crowd asking all and sundry to ‘sort them out’ until the hapless dealer was found.