‘Sorted’ for Es? Women and Ecstasy in 1990s Britain

Peder Clark, Ph.D

Growing up in Britain in the mid ‘90s, the name, and image, of Leah Betts featured prominently in my drugs education. Black billboards across the UK proclaimed: “Sorted – just one ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts.” A Polaroid picture of Betts on a life-support machine, shortly before she died after taking an Ecstasy pill at her eighteenth birthday party, was circulated widely around secondary (high) schools. The message that I understandably took from this material was that, in the words of South Park, a programme popular with adolescent boys around the time, “drugs are bad, m’kay?”... continue reading.