Two weeks after the decision, Fabric advocate Nathalie Wainwright welcomes me to her flat in east London, apologizing for nonexistent mess. A few days earlier, alarmed by the verdict, she had cut short her travels in southeast Asia to join the club’s sizeable resistance. We chat on the mezzanine, sipping Becks as the last daylight bleeds through the windows.

Born in 1983, Wainwright was the second child of middle-class parents. She grew up in North Lincolnshire with her brother, Jean-Marc, a promising artist. At school, she piggybacked on her sibling’s social cachet, despite their nerdy preoccupations: Jean-Marc buried in sketchpads, Nathalie in the ballet studio. “The thing with being a popular kid is you can do what the fuck you like,” Wainwright recalls, smiling, as she taps a Marlboro Gold into an ornate ashtray. “But he wasn’t like a mad painter—he made pen and ink drawings, things like that.” She rolls up her sleeve to reveal a floral tattoo based on one of her brother’s incomplete sketches.

On June 7, 1997, Jean-Marc and his friends descended on a happy hardcore rave at the Zoo, a nightclub in an amusement park roughly an hour’s drive from home. Like his friends, Jean-Marc dropped his pills early and kept going. Nobody is sure what happened in the club, or when Jean-Marc consumed an extra batch, but Wainwright believes, at around 2:30 a.m., he had taken eight pills and “a load of speed.” By that time, his friends were urging venue staff to call an ambulance, because he’d fallen ill after an apparent overdose.

There’d been a similar incident in the Zoo the week before, when Daniel North, a 16-year-old from York, collapsed after taking ecstasy and died 12 hours later. Local police, who had arrested nearly 50 ravers in a previous raid at the club, urged them to tighten health and safety. But the threat from law enforcement proved counterproductive. Wary of the Zoo’s image, staff refused to call an ambulance for Jean-Marc, reassuring his friends he’d recover shortly. Without cell phones, they had little choice but to trust them.

Half an hour later, as a friend cradled him in his arms, Jean-Marc had a seizure, then another. Alarmed, the friend noticed Jean-Marc had swallowed his tongue, which he extracted from his throat. Wainwright says the ambulance took 40 minutes to arrive. By the time he got to the hospital, Jean-Marc had suffered lung failure, which led to blood clotting. His cause of death was fluid on the brain.

Wainwright pins much of the blame for Jean-Marc’s death on the club’s amateurish health and safety protocol. “There’s no way that fluid would’ve developed if he’d been responded to straight away,” she says. “I know it must’ve been really, really bad, because—and I should never have looked but I did—when they returned his stuff to our parents, his jeans were cut all the way up here”—she points up her leg—“and his top was cut all the way up here”—she runs a finger along her stomach and chest, to her throat. “And it was covered in blood.”

While Wainwright fiercely fights for new drug policy, she’s sympathetic to bereaved families who rally against club culture. But she’s also found a community for whom losing loved ones prompted a conversion toward liberal thinking on drugs. Wainwright recently wrote a letter urging politicians to reconsider the Fabric decision, and her own dad offered testimony. “To shut down cultural institutions in the name of families like ours, who have lost loved ones in such a tragic way, is shameful,” he wrote. “You do not do so in our interest, you dishonour the names of those who have tragically lost their lives by no longer providing them with a safe space to enjoy the music and culture they love.”

The Zoo closed days after Jean-Marc’s death. Owner John Woodward, the millionaire behind several caravan and entertainment sites, invited press to photograph him smashing its quirky driftwood sign. The tragedy sparked a local press campaign against ecstasy, which police unquestioningly cast as the villain—despite claims from Jean-Marc’s friends that the club had switched off cold taps to sell bottled water. “Our message to the young people is that you are playing Russian roulette with a 50-chambered gun,” detective inspector Martin Bontoft told one paper. “How many more times do you have to be told about the dangers of the drug? If you take ecstasy you are dicing with death, you are going to die.”

Fabric, which employed two trained medics a night and a respected security firm in Saber, was held up nationally as the gold standard for club management. The club’s diligence could be seen in 2014, when a security guard found a student named Keith Dolling seven times over the limit for recreational MDMA use, with a life-threateningly high body temperature. The club’s medics packed his body with ice, suctioned his airways, monitored oxygen levels, and, when his breath shortened, ventilated him and prepared defibrillators. They couldn’t save Dolling, but the incident forced the Met to acknowledge Fabric’s above-average medical care. “I’m tremendously impressed by that,” senior coroner Mary Hassell told an inquest. “It was really quite advanced care. Care like that gives a person the best chance they could have. ... [It’s] quite extraordinary that a nightclub would have that level of expertise and would be delivering that level of care to the clubbers.”

When I read the report to Wainwright, her eyes widen. “That’s fucking incredible, if you ask me,” she says. “If Jean-Marc had been in Fabric, this would never have happened.”