Ekstaasin jäljillä

Abstract

Ecstasy is the trend drug of the 1990's. Its use spread among the so-called techno and rave culture from Great Britain from the late 1980's to all western countries. Even the phenomenon is quite new; the substance was already found as early as 1912 in Germany. The substance was not taken into use until early 1950's, when the U.S military tested possibilities to use it for military purposes. It is supposed to have entered human use in the early 1960's, when the police confiscated a small amount of an unknown substance on the U.S. west coast. In the mid 1960's some researchers were interested of MDMA's possibilities in therapy. At that time the same kind of substances were under strict control, while the hippie era had taken LSD to symbolise their way of living. MDMA came also to be sold in street markets and used in Disco's and night clubs. The most important symbiosis was that between acid house music movement and Ecstasy in the mid 1980's in the Balearic Islands. There the new music style and ecstasy were connected in same party context - later to be called rave culture. The new party culture spread to U.K. and spread rapidly to all western countries. The drug, which earlier had been used by a small marginal number of people, came to represent new postmodern generation. This brought the need to re-define and stigmatize the substance among the law enforcement, public and policy. Nobody was able to anticipate the scale of the impact of an 80-year old substance on the youth culture at the end of the 20''' century. It remains to be seen if the next global large scale youth cultural movement will be drug-related or not.