Last month in Kreuzberg Berlin a group of dance promoters, authors and journalists got together to discuss the effects of GHB in the club scene. GHB is a colourless, tasteless drug that mixes extremely well with liquids, especially alcohol. The French Navy developed the drug in the sixties as part of a research programme based in Hanoi, Vietnam, and the French chemist who takes the credit as inventor is a guy called Camille Georges. GHB is a metabolite of the central nervous system. It’s considered to be relatively tolerable but myoclonus, which is basically throwing an eppo, falling into a coma and chronic vomiting can occur. Passing out on GHB usually occurs if you’ve taken over 3 grams, which isn’t a huge amount if you consider you’re drinking the shit. Outside of clubs, it’s used as an anaesthetic and in Italy it’s popular as a narcolepsy cure and is prescribed to recovering alcoholics. Bodybuilders use it too as it stimulates the metabolic process, allowing them to beef up without having to jab their arses full of steroids or suffer from testicular atrophy – christ, can you imagine it?

But anyway, at the discussion were Hans Cousto, founder of Eve & Rave, Dorian Mazurek of Sound Addiction and Jonas Gempp and Timon Englehardt, music journalists. The main point to come from the meeting was that GHB was not welcome in Berlin clubs. It's now commonly agreed that Berlin is the GHB capital of Europe and with more and more cheap stuff coming in from Eastern Europe that doesn’t look like changing. Across the board everyone was agreed that GHB had nothing but bad to bring to nightclubs. People used to say that about Ketamine but now it’s as ubiquitous as pills. GHB is different. And the panel couldn’t see it cosying its way into accepted recreational drugs circles ever. The main reason every one was so against the drug was because of the unpredictability of people’s reactions and when you flip out and get muscle tremors so bad its like you’ve sat on a cattle prod it's one of the most frightening things to watch.

GHB first appeared in German clubs in 1997; the following year at the Love Parade the whole world found out about it when Germany’s News of the World ran a big spread on designer drug usage amongst ravers and mentioned GHB. It’s never been as popular as pills but in the past few years GHB use has begun to increase across Europe. Kids are getting raced out of clubs in ambulances because they can’t breath and nasty stories of rape and robbery as a result of taking the drug or being spiked are more and more common.

GHB is particularly bad if you pass out. As there’s a strong chance you will try to swallow your tongue. At the talk in Berlin, there was mention of the number of incidents where people had had to save their friends’ lives by holding their mouth open and gripping their tongue to stop them sucking it down. And a lot of these near-death experiences happened in nightclub toilets, not even the comfort of their own home.

It’s hard to get anything liquid into a club, so that’s one way that places are cracking down on GHB. But you can get it in powder too, and that’s a lot easier to transport. At the end of the discussion, everyone was agreed that the drug needed to be flushed out of clubs but no one was quite sure how. Especially because it’s so cheap and if you’ve got a techy mate, you can buy lactone and caustic soda and brew the crap up yourself.

GHB is filthy. Broken down to its constituent bits it’s one part degreasing solvent, one part floor stripper and a dash of drain cleaner. In solid form it’s actually found in a lot of products. Aqua Dots, a popular kids toy made in Melbourne and sold all over the world was recently banned when it was discovered that one of the components used to bond the toy together was GHB. Three kids in the States were hospitalised after chewing on their toys.

Samantha Reid, the American girl who died aged 15 from an overdose prompted a campaign by club owners to not allow anyone bring any containers – even lipstick – into their venues. And kids who’d taken the drug got into the habit of writing ‘g’ on their hand so the paramedics would know what to do when they found them passed out.

There’s never been a more hated drug in clubs before. There’s even a [MySpace site] (http://www.myspace.com/noghb) dedicated to its evils. We’ve all come along way from the humble smiley-face of pills.