seeing much more mixing of uppers and downers, people taking Valium to come off E, or coke so
you can drink without getting sloppy."
This 'combination self-therapy' can have unpredictable and dangerous effects.
Your body builds up tolerance, meaning you need to spend bigger bucks
for your buzz, but that doesn't mean your liver or brain cells do.
One of the more dangerous new arrivals on the club scene in recent years
is that ancient and legal drug, alcohol. Brewers saw their profits vanish
with the E generation swigging nothing but Evian and Lucozade. So they
started packaging alcohol like E - in fluorescent-coloured Bacardi Breezers,
or added to caffeine-based mixers that keep you going like Red Bull.
"The arrival of caffeine-and-alcohol drinks into club culture in
the early 90s was a health disaster," says Matt Southwell. "'A'
and 'E' counteract each other's effects, so the temptation is to take
more of both, but they are also both fierce dehydrators - and it is overheating
that is the cause of most club deaths." A and E could land you in
A&E.
drugs, sex and HIV
Given the way it's caught, some of the most enthusiastic drug-guzzlers
are inevitably people living with HIV, in particular, though not exclusively,
gay men.
Some HIV drugs - see Q&A
- greatly magnify the effect of dance drugs, and fatalities have happened.
Caning it all weekend and then staggering into work on Monday is enough
to damage anyone's immune system, let alone if you only have 200 T-cells
to spare.
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"There's two different things about the gay male scene," says Monty
