Why I Miss Mephedrone

Since its inception, rave culture has romanticised what it's like to take pills. From gabba to ragga, electronic music has moulded itself in the image of its most gurning sons.

In the latest Disclosure video: young, attractive ravers lose themselves in night buses and smoke machines. Warehouse venues and black tar wastelands are transformed into soft focus playgrounds for dancing and chirpsing; warm breath in the cold air like the haze of chemical love made corporeal. (The video was taken offline after a few hours, for fears of glamourising drugs.) This rose-tinted view of ecstasy has been self-prophesied for generations. Take a look at the religious like rapture with which these Liverpool ravers discuss taking ecstasy in the 1992 cult BBC documentary E is for Ecstasy:

The reality of ecstasy however, is quite different. Sometimes you got lost in the moment; dancing with yourself for hours on a cloud, but mostly you end up falling between a private nirvana and self-conscious paranoia. This might be manageable if everyone else was in the same place, but drug taking, like sex, rarely has the synchronicity one would desire. While you're feeling like you want to curl up in a ball and talk about feelings, your mate wants to bounce up and down to Borgore. What's more, because buying illegal drugs is often a laborious and takes a lot of preparatory work. You often don't have ecstasy when you want it, run out at 1am and can't get more, or your mates only have enough for them. Typical.

But there was a moment when ecstasy wasn't the go to drugs for young people who liked to flail their limbs around to repetitive beats; when Mephedrone was widely available in the UK from the spring of 2008, when a spring of "plant food" stockists sprung up online, to April 2010, when MCAT was reclassified as an illegal substance. It was so easy to get hold of. A bank transfer or PayPal to a website, and it'd arrive at your house the next day. It was also so insanely cheap (about a tenner a gram) that everyone could get it.

Me, in The Mephedrone Years. Sick chain, bro.

Mephedrone didn't feel like ecstasy. The "coming up" and "coming down" moments were less like smooth, floating transitions, and more like being shoved on the Detonator in Thorpe Park wearing sandpaper boxers. When you were up, you really knew about it. As it was dirt cheap, you could buy loads of it and keep rattling it for hours, meaning that intense hit could last all night.

The lows were also way worse: big thudding comedowns that not only made you feel futile and unloved, but also gave you the irrepressible urge to tell someone about those feelings, in the most honest, gory details you could muster. I can think of no other drug that is such a potent truth serum. Every party transformed in a matter of minutes from a loved-up disco to a bitter confessional, telling your darkest secrets to friends you'd just made with your hips. Things that were buried deep inside escaped out your mouth like a canaries. Whether it was a profession of love or previously unspoken sexual preference, I learnt more about my friends during 4am DMCs in The Mephedrone Years than I have before or since.

Mephedrone didn't make you want to have sex like coke, or hug a stranger like MDMA. All you wanted to do is snog someone. Anyone, your best mate, the tramp that sit outside Budgens, but things never went too far because those snogs were horrible. All the moisture absorbed from your mouth, chapped lips and dehydrated tongues rubbing sexlessly against each other so loudly that I can still hear it now. Never have you felt so sexually empowered and yet so utterly unsexy. I think that's something we should all experience.

The size of the mephedrone phenomenon in the UK was never really appreciated. People who would never take illegal drugs for fear of ill-effects, prosecution, or just a general guilt instilled into them by their parents and year 10 drugs awareness plays, were happy to buy drone by the bucket-load. When I arrived at university about a year into its popularity, boring kids who had never taken drugs before were transformed into fun, exciting people. I remember going to one night where there was a small queue for the girls toilets, and another hundreds-deep for the boys. When I got to the front I found the urinals entirely unused, while lads filed in-and-out of the loos, either sniffing Meph or doing gargantuan poos: one of the many horrible side effects of the drugs. This was a phenomenon that reversed decades of cubicle patriarchy.

Others nasty effects included blinking into your own reflection like sycophantic puppy, the smell, like a cat's litter tray after a particularly nasty bout of feline cystitis, the taste as it dripped down the back of your throat like you'd just given head to a hoarder. Worst of all were the night terrors. Completely unlike regular dreams, lucidly real, and featuring an array of meat cleavers, infanticidal family members, and (this might just be a personal thing) former Match Of The Day 2 presenter Colin Murray as an unpleased satanic overlord.

The kicker was that anyone who did drugs in the 90s laughed Mephedrone out of town, claiming it was a horrible alternative to the golden days of E.

The Mephedrone Years: a different time. 

And the truth is, I don't really miss mephedrone. It's still available to buy from well-stocked dealers and on TOR sites, but I have no desire to seek it out. What I miss is those two years. Where going to a club didn't just a mean a good time, but an all-caps TIME OF YOUR LIFE; a guarantee of dancing and misguided hook ups and raging across metropolitan city centres, frictionless and free. I miss going round to my friend's to watch X Factor and ending up staying till 11am, performing our own versions of Ashanti classics and uploading them to YouTube. I miss ordering drugs in the same way I would a pizza or some knitwear.

All I can hope is that one day, a chart dance act will make a music video where a group of young, attractive teens snort a line of urine-stenched mephedrone, tepidly rub up against each other, and go home to dream of Colin Murray slicing them up like thin-cut ham.

Mephedrone is obviously bad for you. For more information and help about drugs visit www.talktofrank.com