News Shorts and Other Busyness

Contaminated Ecstasy Blamed For Deaths

Squall 11, Autumn 1995, pg 8.

A seventeen year old boy died and two of his friends were admitted to hospital after ingesting contaminated ecstasy tablets in a Blackpool night-club in September.

Since 1990 there have been 51 ‘ecstasy-related’ deaths in commercial night clubs, 46 due to dehydration caused by packed dance floors and by turning off water taps to increase water sales at the bar. There have been no reported deaths at free raves.

The death of Daniel Ashton has induced calls for a more sensible and less hysterical official approach to ecstasy use in Britain.

The dodgy ecstasy tablets are thought to have been dumped onto the UK market by Dutch manufacturers. With Dutch dance promoters encouraged to provide testing booths at raves, manufacturers of crap and contaminated ecstasy can no longer find a market there. Thus it looks likely that the UK dance scene is providing a dustbin for their unwanted products.

The exaggerated politically-motivated rhetoric surrounding ecstasy means that it is not possible for someone to be present at a UK rave testing people’s tablets before they are ingested.

However, following the latest death, the Exodus Collective who run free raves in Bedfordshire say they are to set up a testing booth at their dances in future.