Louise Williams, Jakarta – It's close to 3am and business is brisk behind the heavy velvet curtain shielding the back room from the jarring beat on the crowded dance floor of one of Jakarta's most expensive night clubs.

The night's offering is called "snow white", a name the users say refers to the soft landing this particular pill offers from a night of dancing on a frenetic high.

The music is an endless loop of repetitive "techno" rhythms matched by hundreds of bobbing heads, bodies swaying like seaweed in an aquarium of smoke and noise.

The curtain is more practical than anything else. There is little effort to conceal the drug trade. Regulars can order ecstasy tablets with bottles of iced water from the waiters. The club, a senior staff member says openly, pays off the police.

"When they want to come and raid us, they ring us first and we tidy up," he says.

Ecstasy is Indonesia's drug of the young and rich. Most have links to the ruling elite, and large allowances in their pockets from their parents. Others have businesses of their own, handed out to adult children like sweets by powerful parents.

In recent years ecstasy has become a significant problem among the affluent young. It is manufactured locally, and the industry is widely rumored to be controlled by a "princeling" with impeccable political connections.

The hedonism of the ecstasy set sits uneasily with a conservative, majority Muslim nation. But the rich kids believe they are above the restrictions that bind the rest of the population.

Token piles of pills are regularly burned publicly by police. But customers say most of the pills picked up during raids find their way back on to the market.

For police the most serious problem is that many users are children of the political elite. Few ordinary officers would be willing to arrest a "princeling".

"You can't say Indonesia is poor," 23-year-old Daisy says laughing. She is unconcerned that the economy is collapsing. The luxury cars pulling into the car park attests to the ongoing cash flow of the very rich.

That outside, the streets are filled with shanties and huddles of the homeless is irrelevant inside this bubble of privilege.

"Nobody here is worried about the political or economic crisis," says Abdullah, 31, on a day that the rupiah plunged another 12 per cent.

"The pills are produced locally, so they won't go up much."

A night out costs at least 100,000 rupiah ($A35), more than a factory worker can make in a week in the good times when he has work.

So serious is the ecstasy problem that many rich students at the elite universities are unable to keep up with their studies. Instead, they can buy their term papers and exam results in advance from syndicates.

By 6am the trippers are in full swing, passing pills from mouth to mouth as they kiss on the dance floor. It is a reckless abandonment of all the taboos in a society that demands chastity before marriage and has an Islamic ban on alcohol and drugs.

Sociologists and political scientists have been warning for years of the explosive nature of the gap between Indonesia's super rich and the poor. At no time has the danger been more apparent than now, as the economic crisis closes factories, the drought delays harvests and prices skyrocket.