Pill culture is ruining university

How clubbing became the most monotonous experience of your degree


It’s Friday night and I’m having a shit time. The great night out I was promised has spiralled in to a quagmire of discomfort and misery as I stand lifeless in a mob of sweaty gurners.

Surely others have stood there whilst their glittery friends start gumming some mandy, and ended up in a dingy smoking area surrounded by manky pill-takers who look around gormlessly, wide-eyed with emptiness and amphetamines. Surely others share my view that pill culture is absolutely tragic.

Anyone boring enough to indulge in pills claim they save money taking them — and they’re probably right. If you wanted to go all night off just booze you’d have to spend a lot more than 20 odd quid.

But this cost is deflected.  I spoke to Jayson, head bouncer at a well known club in Croydon, about the costs that pills have on the club, and he told me prices are put up elsewhere to compensate for the pill culture.

Jayson said: “We’ve started losing money behind the bar, and with the government talking about introducing breathalysers on the door, we’ll start to lose even more.

“You’d presume we would make more money off alcohol sales, but it doesn’t work like that. Nobody wants to come in sober and so more and more people will start abusing drugs to have a better night.

“Because we’re losing money there, entry prices have to go up which is why many of the famously druggy night clubs in London are also the most expensive on the door.”

Croydon

Costs aside you have to wonder why you would want to pop pills in the first place.

Why would you knowingly put something in your body that you know some random dodgy bloke has concocted in a grimy cellar somewhere, with next to no interest in your well-being? Why would you then go out of your way to text some even dodgier bloke who’s making a load of money illegally off your stupidity? And why would you put this horrendous batch of chemicals in to your mouth knowing full well that it’s about to completely fuck with your brain?

There’s no point in arguing about the obvious and very glaring health effects which come with taking drugs like ecstasy, because as soon as you open your mouth some goif will get back to you with a well-rehearsed rebuke detailing a long list of risks for alcohol and cigarettes. But if you can’t argue about the health risks, you can whinge about the side-effects pill culture has on a drug-fuelled university environment.

Firstly, pills have come at the cost of pre drinks. Can we just take a moment to lament the loss of this wonderful aspect of pre-ecstasy university? Sitting around a table, bonding with one another over “never have I ever” and beer pong. It was a simpler, less jaw-crushing time, when we could all just relax. Pre drinks are the most under-rated part of a night out, and memories of pre drinks often surpass those of a club. Why have they been ditched just because a few people want to get ketty?

Woh man, so trippy haha x

And it’s inevitable your boring love of pills leads to a love of awful house music. Let’s be honest, nobody sober has ever actually liked house. Yes, sitting in the sunshine with a nice fruity cider and listening to some soft, lyrical house music with your pals is nice. But why people would want to throw their bodies around like they’re having some sort of super-charged epileptic fit to the most monotonous music in human history, I have no idea. Smothered in glitter, in bindis and crop tops, pilled out clubbers sway from side to side, oblivious to the shit vibes all around them.

What happened to music you could scream the lyrics to and introductions that would make people scream in excitement when they came on in the club? The times you and your buds would stand in a tight circle and point at each other screaming the lyrics of a song completely out of tune, whipping out funny dance moves and getting someone to request an absolute banger?

I don’t look good with glitter on my face, and neither do you

But do people really love house music that much? Or is it just part of the bullshit facade that they put on to try and highlight how sick they are?

I understand why people do it at festivals, but I really, really can’t get my head around clubs. The attraction of standing in the middle of soaking wet, sweaty students, gnashing their teeth together like some sort of cartoon dog just doesn’t appeal to me. People never look rougher than when they’ve dropped – perhaps that’s why they all wear sunglasses to an already dark nightclub – so they don’t have to endure looking at one another.

Okay, it covers your eyes and stops people knowing you’ve taken something, but when you’re standing by the bar drinking a tap water in your circle-rims, don’t you think it’s pretty obvious anyway? It’s all just too ridiculous.

Nowadays, you can’t even avoid house nights. The pill culture has become so entrenched in to university life that clubs, being the businesses they are, have realised house nights are always successful. The number of pinger fiends who will turn up to a house night way exceeds boring pricks (myself included) who will turn up to a chart night. So there’s no incentive for them to try to fight against it.

This photo is deliberately ironic

If you want to take drugs, that’s fine — but don’t rub it in everyone’s face, and don’t take everyone else’s fun with you.

Your Instagram photos of you with glitter all over your face holding a bottle of Lucozade looking through sunglasses at a polaroid camera – all made extra tragic by an X-Pro II filter – don’t make you look like a legend, and they don’t make you look wavy, you just look like an idiot.