The Ecstasy of Consumption: The drug Ecstasy as Mass Commodity in a Global Market. Daniel Maurice Silverstone The London School of Economics and Political Science, submitted for the award of PhD at the University of London. UMI Number: U586648 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U586648 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 POLITICAL AND 7h t =.s £ h Si 2S> Abstract This thesis is an examination of the drug, ecstasy. The central objective was to investigate the people who used the drug, where they used it and how it was dealt. In pursuit of this I undertook two empirical pieces of work, a series of interviews and an ethnography. The interviews were of two sorts, firstly a set of longitudinal interviews of middle class ecstasy users, first contacted when they had just began taking the drug and again when they had stopped. These interviews were supported by one-off interviews with three other groups with similar class backgrounds. The other part of the study was a nine month ethnography of a large London night-club, where the author worked first as part of the bar staff and secondly as part of the security team. This involved participant observation with an occupational culture which is hard to gain access to and observation of an under researched environment. The two studies are linked, as the club was typical of one that my respondents visited and both groups were linked by their intense involvement in drug subcultures. In the first half of the thesis I concentrate on occupational culture and illuminate how criminal activity was structured within the club. In the latter section I concentrate on how the respondents subjectively felt about their drug use. In the last part of thesis I put the rise of ecstasy into the context of British popular culture. On the one hand I argue that it could be posited as part of new dystopian trends, on the other I argue against this, instead characterising its rise as something more positive and more inevitable. However, I conclude that our current methods of regulation are antiquated and unequal. Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. The Club 30 3. The Security Team 47 4. Interview Methodology 109 5. The Interviews 130 6. Dystopia 186 7. Utopia 202 8. Conclusion 232 Appendix 236 Bibliography iii Thanks: To my Supervisor, David Downes, for his continual support and to my family for their patience. Dedicated to Joshua Silverstone. 1. Introduction Prologue In my thesis I have looked at the use of ecstasy as an example of a modern commodity chain. I have tried to look at the drug from a variety of perspectives: the history of the drug, the way it is distributed, the way it is consumed, where it is consumed, and the way its use is regulated or controlled. In doing this I have hopefully amalgamated the two theoretical approaches most likely to be applied in isolation to the subject matter. The first and most obvious is criminology. This discipline empirically underpins my thesis, and provides a wealth of ethnographic and interview material, which I have drawn on in my two chapters that contain these two respective methodologies. It also provides the theoretical context for the current debates over motivation for drug use, frequency of drug use and the way drugs should be, and fail to be, effectively controlled. However, the rise in drug use by several different sectors of society as part of a wider increase in crime in western societies has created problems for the part of the discipline still influenced by positivism, and prey to universal theories addressing the causes of crime. Put at its simplest the volume of drug takers raises problems for the viability of the positivist tenets of difference, differentiation and pathology. Meanwhile the huge differences between some drug takers and other criminals means that one overarching criminological theory cannot suffice. Fortunately, the consumer driven desire for goods has also been integral to the modern criminological project and consumer theory though deficient in empirical evidence does provide the theoretical tools to position these changes in drug consumption both into wider society and into the wider changes being experienced elsewhere 1 in it. In particular, it has been1 and still is2 aware of the links between illegitimate and legitimate consumption within the city, something that is crucial in understanding crime in its modern context. To put the argument succinctly, the emergent popularity of ecstasy is less surprising in an affluent global society, driven by rapid technological change where most interaction is mediated and made manifest by consumption. On these foundations I want my thesis to build. More specifically, hopefully both theories can be incorporated into Ben Fine’s proposal for the study of consumer objects, “The commodity chain”. This idea provides my theoretical grounding as contained within it, is an empirical agenda. It can be summarised in the sentence: to understand consumption it is not enough just to look at the object at the point of purchase but to illuminate the chain of factors which give rise to it. In his own words, this has three facets: firstly, “explanations around consumption must be specific to particular commodities or groups of commodities”. Secondly, “each commodity should be analysed in the context of the chain of horizontal factors that give rise to it, production, distribution, retailing, consumption and material culture surrounding if. Finally, each “consumption good will be linked to its own differentiated chain of activities, which will form an integral unity and will be termed a system of provision3”. An almost identical concept is proposed, by Paul du Gay, who uses the label, a “circuit of culture”. His circuit includes the following five categories, “production, consumption, regulation, representation, identity4”. My idea is to take the drug ecstasy as example of a particular commodity and then analyse it, in precisely the way Fine recommends, examining the five horizontal factors that give rise to it. I hope this will have a number of 1 See, for example Chapter O, (Prostitution, Gambling), in Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London :The Belknap Press o f Harvard University Press. 2 Ruggerio, V. (2000) Crime and Markets: essays in anti-criminology. New York; Oxford University Press. 3 Fine, B. (1995), ‘From Political Economy to Consumption’ in D. Miller, (ed.) Acknowledging Consumption: A Review o f New Studies. London: Routledge, p 42. 4 du Gay ,P. H all ,S. Jones, Mackay, H . Negus, K. (1997),Doing Cultural Studies: The Study o f the Sony Walkman, London: Sage in association with Open University Press, p. 3. 2 advantages. Firstly, as a novel way of looking at any consumer object, as Lee5 mentions later in the same book, it has the advantage of exposing our fetishism of commodities. As it forces us to consider both production and consumption, the researcher must delve beyond the image and the use of the product, to reveal the forces and labour present in its construction. This is useful, as du Gay et al., (1997, 17) states in his study on the Walkman, as “ what makes the Sony Walkman a part of our culture, we argued earlier, is not only the ‘work’ which has gone into constructing it meaningfully, but the social practices with which it has become associated”. Secondly, by dwelling on distribution, the study can be focused on who is part of the sales process and how a particular commodity is sold. This is especially interesting when addressed to an illicit commodity like ecstasy. It also forces us to examine where the commodity is sold, to look at the actual physical space where it is on offer, in my case a club. These spaces can be important, as Glennie comments on the centrality of the department store in the 19th century. “Department stores were pivotal sites of cultural appropriation and identity construction, through their ability to create the meanings of commodities and consumers6”. Thirdly, in Paul du Gay’s incarnation it includes the stipulation that regulation must be considered. Again by looking at both distribution and consumption, this immediately directs the researcher to the crucial question that regulation is unlikely to be uniform in theory or practice. This insight leads to macro questions about the general enforcement of law but also to micro concerns. Thus my study 5He asks why, ‘when a commodity arrives in our shops, it should show no manifest trace of all the labour that was invested in it during its production’. He goes on to show how ‘surplus value revealed in the exploitation of labour, is concealed in the fetishism o f commodities and how the commodity form is the mask hiding the expropriation of value of one class at the expense of another’. Lee, M. (1993) Consumer Culture Reborn: the Cultural Politics o f Consumption, London: Routledge, (p. x ii), quoted from Jackson, P and Thrift, N. (1995) ‘Geographies of Consumption’, in D. Miller, (ed.) Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies. London: Routledge, p.220 6 Glennie, P. (1995) ‘Consumption within historical studies’, in D.