Image by Paul Barlow from Pixabay

A review of Chemical Cowboys: The DEA’s Secret Mission to Hunt Down a Notorious Ecstasy Kingpin, by Lisa Sweetingham

Chemical Cowboys, by Lisa Sweetingham, is an account of the illegal Ecstasy market in the U.S. and around the world in the 1990s. I found it on the discard shelf of my local public library for fifty cents and thought, this looks interesting.

It is. In the mid-nineties, the USA’s ‘War on Drugs’ was centred on cocaine and heroin. DEA Special Agent, Robert Gagne, however, wanted to take his inquiries in a different direction and focus on the growing problem of Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) or Ecstasy, as it was commonly known. Prior to Gagne’s investigation, Ecstasy was not a priority for the DEA; it was considered ‘kiddie dope’. But as the decade progressed and its popularity exploded to the point where it became the drug du jour for the young nightclub and dance party set, there became a growing awareness of its addictive properties and the potentially tragic consequences of its heavy use.

As the story’s central protagonist, Gagne is one of the few rounded characters in a long and often unsavoury list (we’re talking about drug manufacturers and dealers here, after all), struggling to balance his desire to ‘catch the bad guys’ with the demands of family life. The action bounces around the world, from the US to Israel to the Netherlands and back again. With all this globetrotting and the frantic pace of the story, I found it difficult to keep track of all the players. Not that it particularly mattered; Sweetingham is an accomplished journalist and the book is meticulously researched, yet it’s never boring. I was swept along with the energy of the story, fully engaged, entertained, and informed from beginning to end.

At times, the book almost reads like fiction. Perhaps the most tragic example of this is the story of ‘Club Kid’ king, Michael Alig, a New York nightclub promoter who ends up murdering fellow ‘Club Kid’, Andre Melendez, over a drug debt. Not knowing what to do with Melendez’s body, Alig keeps it in the bathtub of his apartment until it begins to decompose. Worried about the smell, Alig takes it upon himself to dismember the body, placing the pieces into garbage bags which he subsequently dumps in the Hudson River, before bragging about his gruesome deeds to his friends and followers. Initially, nobody believes him, thinking he’s just doing it for attention, but in the end, justice is served and Alig is imprisoned for his crimes. It’s just one of numerous events in the book that prove truth is often stranger than fiction.

I was a student at the University of Otago in Aotearoa in the mid-nineties. I was a rocker rather than a raver (or at least an indie-rocker, my wardrobe consisting of ripped baggy jeans and checked flannel shirts rather than studded jackets and leather trousers), but Dunedin was a small town and entertainment was at a premium so I found myself attending the occasional rave.

One in particular sticks in my memory, held in the crumbling ruins of the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum.

Now, you can make what judgements you like about the link between ravers and the mentally ill (it’s all right there in the name). Still, in reading Chemical Cowboys, I found it fascinating to join the dots. Who would’ve thought a crowd of sweaty, swaying youths in fluoro face paint, dancing and waving their glow sticks at each other until sunrise on a remote island at the bottom of the South Pacific, could be directly connected to an international drug-trafficking racket centred on the Israeli mafia? Certainly not me; not at the time, anyway, but now that I’ve read Chemical Cowboys, I know better.

FREE BOOK!

A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.

GET YOUR FREE BOOK >>