Last month at a club on Hongdae Street, Mapo-gu, Seoul.
When the sun descended and the neon signs lit up, young people in their 20s and 30s slid into an underground club in the corner of an alley.
Three ladies in their late 20s took seats, and a man drinking beer saluted them smiling.
The ladies, walking toward the stage, shouted out, Some holy water, here! The man orders three bottles of beer and drops a white tablet in each bottle. Holy water is the slang word for a drink with ecstasy in it.
The ladies, who work for a foreign design firm, say that a bottle of beer with ecstasy and dancing are the boosters needed when stricken with stress from work.
Ecstasy spread in the entertainment spots in Gangnam, Itaewon, and in the clubs on Hongdae Street in Seoul from the end of the 1990s, and is still flowing in the market, indifferent to the crackdowns of the judicial authorities.
A college student A (24), whose father is a high ranking diplomat, bought 300 tablets of ecstasy for 300,000 won while in Canada and smuggled them twice, once each in March and April, hiding the tablets in a cigarette case. He had been issued a diplomats passport because of his father, and this let him pass immigration after a slight investigation.
A refugee from North Korea who had immigrated through Southeast Asia was also caught by the police in April last year for smuggling in ecstasy. But his brother (25) had sold ten tablets of ecstasy in for 300,000 won in a night club in Gangnam.
They had been selling ecstasy in nightclubs in Cheongdam-dong, Seocho-dong, and around the clubs on Hongdae Street.
College student A sold his tablets for 50,000~100,000 won each to his acquaintances in clubs. With the 15 million won he saved, he bought a deluxe motor bike.
C (31, female) and D (32) are friends from a provincial medical college and are working in a general hospital in Seoul; C is an orthopedist and D is a family medicine practitioner.
They dropped by a club on Hongdae Street in February last year in order to relieve their stress and were offered some good pills by someone who approached them. They bought 11 tablets for 100,000 won.
Since then, they have been making a habit of clubbing to sip ecstasy water and have not been able to protect themselves from the lure of drugs.
F (28) is a lecturer at S university in Seoul who also became addicted to ecstasy after being offered some by an acquaintance of his.
The drug investigators of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency arrested A and B who sold the ecstasy they smuggled on July 5 for violating the drug law, indicted 21 people including C without detention for the same violation, and are expanding their investigation.
The police said, Having touched the drug once, they were unable to stop groping for more despite all the side effects such as headaches because they were soon addicted.