How Drugs Work

Ecstasy

With access to cutting edge research at the University of Chicago, we find out how ecstasy creates empathy in the user and how this could one day lead to the drug being used as a life-saving prescription medicine for use in therapy.

Cocaine

Once a drug exclusively for the rich and famous, but now the most popular class A drug in Britain, with more than 1.2 million people taking it in the UK in 2009. For some cocaine is the ideal addition to a night out, but for others taking it became a life-changing event, including the young man that needed a pacemaker fitted at just 17 after cocaine gave him a heart attack and a patient undergoing surgery to repair a nose torn apart by too many lines of coke.