Ecstasy and the Rise of the Chemical Generation - Hardcover

'...an excellent piece of work...the first research based, book-length study of the most talked-about drug of the 1990s." - Geoffrey Pearson, Goldsmiths College, London

'This book will no doubt become a classic study of the most talked about drug of the 1990s.' - Alyssa Cowell, Streetwise Young People's Project, in Youth and Policy

This book about ecstacy users' lives is based on one of the biggest government-funded projects ever undertaken and gives voice to the chemical generation for the first time. In the UK, where the study was conducted, over fifty per cent of young people use drugs, a quarter of them regularly. The people in this book are ordinary, decent, family-loving people, with normal lives, normal problems and normal aspirations. Through their own words we hear how they first started using ecstasy, how they use it in different ways, why clubbing and raving are so important, how good sex is on ecstasy, how they chill out, how they come down, what problems they encountered and why they quit.

This path-breaking book ends by trying to answer the questions on the lips of every member of the chemical generation: what are the long-term effects of ecstasy? Because we can't answer them, the authors claim, we are failing in our duty to our children: telling them not to take ecstasy is alienating and pointless.