Saturday night fever means popping pills
Ilias, now 26, stopped taking ecstasy one-and-a-half years ago. «I couldn’t stand it any more; I felt my head was splitting,» he said. «I couldn’t make a single decision, whether about my future, or which girl I liked. I was completely disoriented, I couldn’t make a single timetable. Timetable? It seems like a joke now…» He doesn’t quite know how it all began. «I went out one Saturday, took a pill and felt I was flying. But for the whole of the next week, I felt so down that I was waiting to go out and get high again. You go out once, and the next few days you don’t want to see anyone. All the complexes that disappear with the pill, come back double strength.» Ecstasy, cocaine, speed and ketamine, or «special K,» destroy every moral barrier. «You feel as though all your fantasies are being realized. But the energy it takes away from you can’t be replenished.» At the clubs he frequented, pills were handed around like glasses of liquor. If someone was already a user, he would have pills on him. «In any case, the dealer would be in every night, leaving supplies.» At the beginning, a pill lasted till dawn. But with time, the dose increased. Then the experiments began, the combinations with other substances. «The worst combination is with cocaine. It’s out of this world. I met some Italians who were stunned. ‘We mix them up too, but only you in Greece do it all’,» Ilias admitted. «When you combine it [ecstasy] with alcohol, you become more aggressive. My friends had to hold me back one day. Me, and I’m a lamb, normally…» Ilias continues to go out but does not stay long. «I see what the situation is, the faces of the kids who have broken from drug use, and I get upset. And angry. I say, God, I used to be like that…»
