Almost Everyone who has ever tried Ecstasy has had the same experience
Because it is so consistent in a way that previous psychedelic drugs have not been, Ecstasy is not frightening for most users. Ecstasy opens the doors of perception just enough to allow a little exploration, without the blinding, terrifying intensity of LSD, mescaline or even psilocybin.
The Ecstasy Experience can be very Spiritual.
For many, Ecstasy is a way to open up and express feelings for which they don't otherwise have the courage, nerves or words. For others it's just plain fun.
Most teenagers and young adults today take Ecstasy to rave. Raves are often all weekend events held in clubs, warehouses or outdoor settings and open fields. Most any music sounds great on Ecstasy, but all-night high-energy dance parties of techno, hardcore and trance music rules at raves. The atmosphere is usually friendly and peaceful, while the mood is well captured by the rave motto, P.L.U.R., or "Peace, Love, Understanding and Respect". In the dark clubs, the enchanting atmosphere is enhanced with lasers, strobe lights, glow sticks and artificial fog.
There are a lot of other slang terms for Ecstasy, which is really MDMA, for example you might also hear it called E, XTC, X, Adam, hug, beans, clarity, lover's speed and love drug.
Ecstasy pills bought at the rave typically cost between between 10 and 25 dollars. The tablets of MDMA are stamped with distinctive logos of unicorns, elephants, moons, stars or other trending designs. This is because MDMA manufacturers and dealers want to promote their brand and regular customers.
The History of MDMA - from Adam to Ecstasy
MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine), better known today as Ecstasy, was first synthesized in 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck.
MDMA's parent and longer-acting metabolite, MDA (3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine) was one of a number of agents used in clandestine US military research during the 1950s and in CIA's Project MK-Ultra, which was investigating new techniques of brainwashing, espionage and mind-control. It also became popular as "the love drug" in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Ecstasy first gained prominence in the late 1970s when the legendary Californian psychedelic chemist Alexander ("Sasha") Shulgin synthesized and taste-tested MDMA at incrementally ascending doses. The effects of a 120mg dose of MDMA are recorded in Dr Shulgin's lab-notes (Sept 1976):
"I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great or believed this to be possible. The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day and evening. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience..."
Later, in 1991, Dr Shulgin and his wife Ann published
Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story, which describes the synthesis and systematic testing on human subjects of a range of novel or neglected phenethylamine research drugs.
By the early 1980s, over a thousand private psychotherapists in the USA were using MDMA in their clinical practice. MDMA was commonly known as "Adam", an allusion to "being returned to the natural state of innocence before guilt, shame and unworthiness arose". MDMA was used discreetly; no one wanted a re-run of the 60s. Dr Shulgin himself reportedly felt MDMA came closest to fulfilling his ambition of finding the perfect psychotherapeutic drug.
Inevitably word leaked out. MDMA was profiled by the San Francisco Chronicle as "The Yuppie Psychedelic" (June 1984). In Newsweek, "High on 'Ecstasy" (April 1985) J Adler, paralleled his MDMA experience to "a year of therapy in two hours". Harpers Bazaar described MDMA as "the hottest thing in the continuing search for happiness through chemistry".
In the early 1980s, American production of MDMA beyond the research laboratory was effectively controlled by chemists known as the "Boston Group". Mass-production of MDMA soon mushroomed. Ecstasy was distributed openly in bars and nightclubs in Dallas and Fort Worth. It could be purchased via toll-free 800-numbers by credit card. The drug was even marketed via pyramid-style selling-schemes. Ecstasy could be bought in little bottles at convenience stores under the label "Sassyfras".
The DEA reacted by petitioning to have MDMA banned altogether. In 1985 the drug-warriors succeeded in having MDMA made Schedule One, the most restricted of all drug categories. MDMA had allegedly "no legitimate medical use or manufacturer" in the USA and it carried a "high potential for abuse". But by then MDMA's fame had already spread to Europe. MDMA had metamorphosed from "Adam", the psychotherapeutic tool, to "Ecstasy", the party drug.
Soon production and distribution of the world's leading empathogen-entactogen fell into the hands of organised crime. By the turn of the millennium, perhaps 80-90% of the world's MDMA was manufactured in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Early in the twenty-first century, an estimated several million people worldwide were taking Ecstasy and allied research chemicals each month on college campuses, in high schools and on dance-floors. Purity varies; perhaps 10%-15% of tablets consumed contain MDMA as the sole active ingredient. Illicit knowledge of the "penicillin of the soul" is spreading rapidly around the world, but in corrupt and contaminated form.
The Ecstasy Experience
Pure MDMA salt is a white crystalline solid. It looks white and tastes bitter. The optimal adult dose ranges from perhaps 75mg to as much as 250mg. Pills sold in clubs often contain less. There are gender differences in response; proportionately to body-weight, women are normally more sensitive than men to the effects of Ecstasy, so their optimal dosage may be lower. MDMA is usually taken orally as a tablet, a capsule, or a powder. More rarely, the drug is snorted, smoked or injected.
First-time Ecstasy users occasionally feel confused or anxious before dopamine-release kicks in. A slight hint of nausea is common when coming up. The user's peak experience or plateau phase after the
elating dopamine "rush" doesn't last much more than ninety minutes to two hours. Though MDMA's primary effects wear off after only three or four hours, there could be a lingering sleeplessnes that can continue as long as eight to twelve hours, depending on the amount and quality taken.
Central to the Ecstasy experience is a warm-hearted, loving, connected, live-and-let live feeling. It enables a person to open up socially, emotionally and spiritually.
Ecstasy has been described as a drug that "could be all things to all people" (Dr Shulgin). Even so, MDMA's primary effects on the user are surprisingly consistent, unlike the wilder psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, or DMT.
Ecstasy may feel mystical, magical or sublime; but it doesn't feel weird. The drug's influence feels highly controllable. It tends to enrich the user's sense of self-identity, not diminish it. Users feel they can introspectively "touch inside" to their ideal authentic self with total emotional self-honesty.
As well as acting as a "gateway to the soul", MDMA "opens up the heart". Taking Ecstasy induces an amazing feeling of closeness and connectedness to one's fellow human beings. MDMA triggers intense emotional release beyond the bounds of everyday experience. The drug also enhances the felt intensity of the senses - most exquisitely perhaps the sense of touch. The body-image looks and feels wonderful. Other people look and feel wonderful too. Minutes after dropping a pill, a lifetime of Judaeo-Christian guilt, shame or disgust at the flesh melt away to oblivion.
Ecstasy is sensuous and sensual in its effects without being distinctively sexual. Although once dubbed "lover's speed", MDMA is proverbially more of a hugdrug than a lovedrug: "I kissed someone I was in love with and almost felt as if I was going to pass out from the intensity", recalls one American clubber.
However, MDMA's capacity to dissolve a lifetime's social inhibitions, prudery and sexual hang-ups means that lovemaking while under its spell is not uncommon. Superfluous clothes tend to get shed.
To increase MDMA-induced sexual performance, many Romeos increasingly combine Ecstasy with Viagra. Calling it "Sexstasy," unless carefully premeditated this is not a recipe for safe sex, as MDMA may sometimes cause "inappropriate bonding". Caution should be exercised before taking it with ex-girlfriends, boyfriends or culturally inappropriate love-objects.
When Ecstasy is taken outdoors, the natural world seems vibrant and awe-inspiring, perhaps even enchanted. The experience of colour is gorgeously intensified. On MDMA, Dr Shulgin reported how mountains he'd observed many times before appeared to be so beautiful that he could barely stand looking at them. Ecstasy is not normally used by spiritual practitioners of widely diverse beliefs as a gateway to the divine like psylocibin or mescalin, but some Ecstasy users undergo life-changing spiritual experiences.
Nicholas Saunders, author of the book,
E for Ecstasy, writes about a Benedictine monk who finds Ecstasy "opens up a direct channel to God". MDMA may not be "Christ in (al)chemical form", but if it had been present in the Eucharist, then they would all still be devout Christians, possibly for ever. A minority of first-time Ecstasy users undergo what the inventor of the Shulgin scale named a "Plus Four."
Plus Four is a transcendental state often called a "peak experience," a "religious experience," "divine transformation," a "state of Samadhi" and many other names in other cultures. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of the same drug such as LSD or MDMA. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a Plus Four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of human suffering.
Plus Four experiences are rare, today. But on MDMA, even the most jaded and world-weary soul with a tin-ear for poetry may "see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour."
On pure MDMA, subjects feel at peace with themselves and the world. They discover an enhanced sense of self-worth, self-forgiveness and complete self-acceptance. Cynical thoughts and negative feelings disappear. Aspects of life normally too sensitive to talk about can be explored freely. Heightened feeling allows long-forgotten and repressed emotional memories from childhood to be retrieved with unusual ease. In some settings, painful, highly-charged and even hitherto unmentionable problems may be discussed with (rose-tinted) candour. On MDMA, a lifetime of accumulated psychological barriers and defence-mechanisms often go down, somehow magicked out of existence with the pill. Ingrained anger, irritability and fear dissolve if only for a few hours. Like LSD, psylosybin and mescalin users, Ecstasy users tell each other affectionately what beautiful people they are; and they do so from the depths of their hearts.
