
E is for Ecstasy
Britain's early-1990s rave scene runs on Ecstasy, and this BBC2 programme sits down with a small group of users to ask why. They describe the pull of the drug directly: the euphoria on the dancefloor, the sense of connection with strangers, and for some, a way to blot out problems they'd rather not face. Interviews with medical experts run alongside the users' accounts, weighing what was actually known in 1992 about the drug's risks, including memory loss and depression, against how little research existed at the time. The programme doesn't moralize or sensationalize the club culture it's filming; it treats the users as people explaining their own choices, and lets the doctors' caution sit uneasily next to that. The first five minutes of the original broadcast are missing from this copy, but what remains is a plain, direct record of a subculture and a drug that had, by the early nineties, become inseparable from a generation's idea of a good night out.