BLOG: the sobering story behind the ecstasy statistics

  • Granada
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“If you take ecstasy, it’s like playing a game of Russian Roulette, you’re dicing with death.” That’s what one grieving mother told me, several years ago now. And it stuck with me.

Hilary Bass lost her son Gary in 2012. He died after taking what he thought was ecstasy. In fact, what he took contained an even more deadly chemical called PMA.

I met Hilary again a couple of years later. She was as passionate then, as she was the first time I met her, about trying to get that warning message across to other young people.

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From that moment it sowed a seed, I was convinced this was an issue that needed highlighting. And when, over the course of 2016, one person after another here in the North West lost their life to the drug, I knew we needed to investigate further. And that’s what began what has been almost 6 months of research and digging, to unearth just why people are ‘Dying to get high’.

The statistics tell a sobering story: Deaths rates from MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy, are now the highest they’ve ever been. And here in the North West there is a particular problem:

Death rates here are higher now than they’ve been in a decade, and are second only to London. Figures obtained exclusively by Granada Reports have revealed that the number of people attending A&E here in the North West over the last 3 years has risen by almost 20%. It has led to warnings that 2016 could be the most dangerous time to take the drug in a generation.

And what happened this weekend in Manchester, only makes that warning even more poignant. Lauren Atkinson was found in the early hours of Saturday after apparently taking ecstasy – she was just 19.

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It became evident very early on in my research for this series, that a harm-reduction campaign on the subject of ecstasy, has been long overdue. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the dangers of ecstasy were well-known.

High profile campaigns that followed the death of Leah Betts, 18, propelled the issue into the public consciousness, on a similar scale to the big awareness campaign for AIDS.

But as the popularity of ecstasy began to wane, so too did the public awareness campaigns, and now it seems there is a new generation naïve to the dangers of ecstasy, and unaware even of the name of Leah Betts.

The trouble is, as the popularity of ecstasy in the last few years seems to have made a resurgence, so too has the strength of the drug. Experts have told me they’re now seeing tablets and powders twice, sometimes three times, the strength they were in the 1990s.

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So what is the solution? How can the number of ecstasy-related deaths be reduced? And how effective is drug education in our schools? These are all questions I’ve strived to explore in the series of special reports going out on Granada Reports this week.

One issue that came up time and again with contributors was that of legalisation. I spoke to one father, Ray Lakeman from the Isle of Man, who lost both his sons to ecstasy. He is convinced that legalisation and regulation of the drug is the answer. He believes his sons would still be alive today, if they had known exactly what was in the drugs they took.

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Torin and Jacques Lakeman Credit:

But it’s a controversial stance, not shared by everyone. The Government told us they have no plans to legalise or decriminalise drugs. And another grieving mother told me she DOESN’T believe legalisation would be a good move. Michelle Shevlin, who lost her daughter Stephanie in June told me:

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Whatever the answer, most people agree that education is crucial. Raising awareness of the dangers and having open and honest conversations are the only ways to reduce harm.

Many of the people who’ve been interviewed for this series ‘Dying to get high’, have done so with immense bravery, openness and passion. It is their powerful stories that will hopefully make people sit up, listen, and think.

And if one person’s life can be saved from watching any of these reports, something positive can come from such heartbreak that many of these people are still living with every single day.