Could the Netherlands become the first country to legalise MDMA?

On a dancefloor in Amsterdam in 1984, Dutch DJ Joost van Bellen was told: “You have to try this.” He took a dab of MDMA and, with his curiosity piqued, he soon swallowed an entire pill. Naturally, he had an incredible journey. (Everyone remembers the first time they felt that euphoric rush.) “Everything was like an entirely new experience. We would touch each other; sensations and warmth,” he is quoted as saying in XTC – a Biography, co-written by Wietse Pottjewijd.

The ecstasy scene then took off and the drug was integral to the rise of dance music in the Netherlands in the late-’80s, when the Second Summer of Love was taking the UK by storm with similar movements bubbling across Europe. MDMA, the key ingredient of ecstasy, was inextricably intertwined with the tidal wave of house music which surfed across the Atlantic from the inner cities of the US to Amsterdam, London and Ibiza. Club culture radiated outwards “in an unstoppable supernova of love”, writes DJ and author Bill Brewster.

Curiously, the original purveyors in The Netherlands of the so-called chemical of connection, including the man who gave a first ecstasy high to van Bellen — who brought his first house record the next year and was later a resident DJ at the legendary club, RoXY, that brought the genre to Amsterdam — were followers of the cult leader and tantric guru Osho. Known as sannyasins, they are understood to have brought ecstasy to Europe from the US, where its effects had only recently become known among New Agers. They did a roaring trade.

But as MDMA’s prevalence increased and the house raves got bigger, the yogi sannyasins were supplanted as the prime source of pills by more organised criminals who already controlled the amphetamine market (after first emerging as a force in an illegal post-war cross border butter trade between the Netherlands and Belgium). Those crooks began creating their own Es, known as XTC in The Netherlands. “They didn’t care so much about the quality,” says Pottjewijd. “And so a lot of other things were mixed into those pills and accidents happened.” The business also became increasingly violent as gangs began fighting over the bloating bounty.