The modern story of MDMA begins with its rediscovery in the early 1960s by Alexander Shulgin, widely regarded as ‘the stepfather of Ecstasy’. Shulgin was then a biochemist working for Dow Chemicals and pursuing an interest in psychedelics on the sly. Later in the decade, he opened his own government-approved laboratory in San Francisco dedicated to the synthesis of new psycho-active substances, all of which he tested on himself and his wife/co-researcher, Ann. Shulgin soon became a prime mover in America’s network of neuro-consciousness explorers. By 1976, the first reports on MDMA’s therapeutic potential were appearing in medical journals. In the late seventies and early eighties, MDMA – then nicknamed Adam, because of the way it facilitated a sort of Edenic rebirth of the trusting and innocent ‘inner child’ – spread throughout a looseknit circuit of therapists in America. Used in marriage therapy and psychoanalysis, the drug proved highly beneficial. Advocates claimed that a five hour MDMA trip could help the patient work through emotional blockages that would otherwise have taken five months of weekly sessions.
Similar arguments had been made in favour of LSD, although the accent was on acid as a tool of spiritual discovery. Just like the ‘serious’ psychonauts of the sixties, Adam’s evangelists hoped to restrict the use of the drug to clinically supervised sessions, while gradually campaigning for MDMA’s medical legitimacy. But the more ‘frivolous’ potential of MDMA – its euphoria-inducing effects – couldn’t be kept secret for long. By the early eighties, there was a fully fledged Ecstasy scene in Dallas and Austin nightclubs, and X (US slang for MDMA) was becoming an increasingly popular ‘legal high’ throughout America.
Inevitably the authorities clamped down. On 1 July 1985, MDMA was banned for one year. The DEA ignored the judge’s recommendation that the drug be put in Schedule 3 and instead put it in its most dangerous category, Schedule 1; this outlaw status was sealed by the Federal Court of Appeals in 1988. In the UK, Ecstasy was already a Class A illegal drug alongside heroin and cocaine; this was because the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Modification) Order of 1977 applied to the whole family of chemicals to which MDMA belonged.
MDMA’s therapeutic supporters protest that drug-war paranoia outlawed a miracle-drug with myriad benign applications. But the truth is that even before its illegalization, Ecstasy had already slipped decisively out of the custodianship of psychotherapy. Instead of being used as Shulgin and his allies had envisioned – in bonding sessions between couples, as a tool of personal discovery – Ecstasy proved to have other, infinitely more alluring applications. When large numbers of people took Ecstasy together, the drug catalysed a strange and wondrous atmosphere of
collective intimacy
, an electric sense of connection between complete strangers. Even more significantly, MDMA turned out to have a uniquely synergistic/synaesthetic interaction with music, especially uptempo, repetitive, electronic dance music.
All Loved-Up
In a quite literal sense, MDMA is an E-lectrifying experience, charging up the fantastically complex computer that is the human brain. The drug’s effect on brain chemistry is to dramatically increase the availability of dopamine and serotonin, neurotransmitters which conduct electrical impulses between brain cells (aka neurons). Excess dopamine stimulates locomotor activity, revs up the metabolism and creates euphoria; serotonin usually regulates mood and well-being, but in excess it intensifies sensory stimuli and makes perceptions more vivid, sometimes to the point of hallucination.
Although MDMA floods the nervous system with dopamine (like speed) and serotonin (like LSD), it’s more than just a ‘psychedelic amphetamine’; when profit-minded dealers try to make pseudo-E cocktails out of speed and acid, their dodgy wares lack MDMA’s famous ‘warm glow’. Trying to convey this special attribute of MDMA, the drug’s early therapeutic supporters coined new pharmaceutical classifications like
empathogen
(a feeling enhancer) and
entactogen
(literally ‘touching within’; a substance that puts you in touch with others and yourself). Ecstasy has been hailed as ‘penicillin for the psyche’, as ‘a stabilizer’ rather than an upper, and as ‘artificial sanity’ that temporarily quietens the neurotic self, freeing the individual from anxiety and fear.
The Ecstasy trip divides into three distinct phases. Depending on the emptiness of your stomach, it takes approximately an hour to ‘come up’: the senses light up, you start ‘rushing’, and for a short while the experience can be overwhelming, with dizziness and mild nausea. Then there’s the plateau stage, which lasts about four hours, followed by a long, gentle comedown, and an afterglow phase which can last well into the next day.
What you experience during the plateau phase is highly dependent on ‘set and setting’ (the early LSD evangelists’ term for the mindset of the drug taker and the context in which the drug is taken). In a one-on-one session (lovers, close friends, analyst-and-analysand), the emphasis is on the breaking down of emotional defences, heart-to-heart intimacy, the freeflow of verbal and tactile affection. The first time I took Ecstasy was in a romantic, private context. The experience was so intense, so special, that I felt it would be sacrilegious to repeat it lest it become routinized, and it was over two years before I did it again.
At a rave, the emotional outpouring and huggy demonstrativeness is still a huge part of the MDMA experience (which is why ravers use the term ‘loved-up’), but the intimacy is dispersed into a generalized bonhomie: you bond with the gang you came with, but also people you’ve never met. Anyone who’s been to a rave knows the electric thrill of catching a stranger’s eye, making contact through the shared glee of knowing that you’re both buzzing off the same drug-music synergy. Part of what makes the classic rave experience so rewarding and so addictive are the ‘superficial’ but touching rituals of sharing water, shaking hands, having someone a tad worse for wear lean on you as if you were bosom buddies.
The blitz of noise and lights at a rave tilts the MDMA experience towards the drug’s purely sensuous and sensational effects. With its mildly trippy, pre-hallucinogenic feel, Ecstasy makes colours, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations more vivid (a classic indication that you’ve ‘come up’ is that chewing gum suddenly tastes horribly artificial). The experience combines clarity and a limpid, soft-focus radiance. Ecstasy also has a particular physical sensation that’s hard to describe: an oozy yearn, a bliss-ache, a trembley effervesence that makes you feel like you’ve got champagne for blood.
All music sounds better on E – crisper and more distinct, but also engulfing in its immediacy. House and techno sound especially fabulous. The music’s emphasis on texture and timbre enhances the drug’s mildly synaesthetic effects, so that sounds seem to caress the listener’s skin. You feel like you’re dancing inside the music; sound becomes a fluid medium in which you’re immersed. Rave music’s hypnotic beats and sequenced loops also make it perfectly suited to interact with another attribute of Ecstasy; recent research suggests that the drug stimulates the brain’s 1b receptor, which encourages repetitive behaviour. Organized around the absence of crescendo or narrative progression, rave music instils a pleasurable tension, a rapt suspension that fits perfectly with the sustained pre-orgasmic plateau of the MDMA high.
These Ecstasy-enhancing aspects latent in house and techno were unintended by their original creators, and were only discovered accidentally by the first people who mixed the music and the drug. But over the years, rave music has gradually evolved into a self-conscious science of intensifying MDMA’s sensations. House and techno producers have developed a drug-determined repertoire of effects, textures and riffs that are expressly designed to trigger the tingly rushes that traverse the Ecstatic body. Processes like EQing, filtering, pannning, phasing and the Aphex Aural Exciter are used to tweak the frequencies, harmonics and stereo-imaging of different sounds, making them leap out of the mix with an eerie three-dimensionality or glisten with a hallucinatory vividness. Today’s house track is a forever-fluctuating, fractal mosaic of glow-pulses and flicker-riffs, a teasing tapestry whose different strands take turns to move in and out of the sonic spotlight. Experienced under the influence of MDMA, the effect is synaesthetic – like tremulous fingertips tantalizing the back of your neck, or like the simultaneously aural/tactile equivalent of a shimmer. In a sense, Ecstasy turns the entire body-surface into an ear, a ultra-sensitized membrane that responds to certain frequencies. Which is why the more funktionalist, drug-determined forms of rave music are arguably only really ‘understood’ (in a physical, non-intellectual sense) by the drugged, and are only really ‘audible’ on a big club sound-system that realizes the sensurround, immersive potential of the tracks.
Beyond its musical applications, Ecstasy is above all a
social
drug. It’s rarely used by a solitary individual, because the feelings it unleashes have nowhere to go. (A friend of mine, bored, once took some left-over E at home on his own, and spent the night kissing the walls and hugging himself.) In the rave context, Ecstasy’s urge-to-merge can spill over into an oceanic mysticism. Rave theorists talk of tribal consciousness, ‘morphic resonance’, an empathy that shades into the telepathic. Writing about his memories of London’s most hedonistically crazed gay club, Trade, Richard Smith came up with the brilliant phrase ‘a . . . communism of the emotions’. The closest I’ve had to a mystical experience occurred, funnily enough, at Trade. Borne aloft in the cradling rush of sound, swirled up and away into a cloud of unknowing, for the first time I truly
grasped
what it was to be ‘lost in music’. There’s a whole hour for which I can’t account.
That night, I was on MDA, the more hallucinogenic parent drug of MDMA. With real Ecstasy, the psychedelic component of the experience is gentler, taking the form not of perceptual distortion but of a numinous glow. There’s a sense of hyper-real immediacy, cleansed perceptions, the recovery of a child-like amazement at the here-and-now. This feeling of gnosis – being in the
know
, living in the
now
– can launch some Ecstasy-initiates on a journey of spiritual discovery beyond recreational drug use. Others return again and again to MDMA’s enchantments, only to discover that the ‘magic pill’ has a dark side.
Ecstasy on Trial
In neurochemistry, there’s no such thing as a free lunch; MDMA comes with a plethora of costs and catches. Most of MDMA’s physical side-effects are merely irritating: dry mouth, jittery nerves, slight nausea (usually during the rush phase, then wearing off quickly). Most notable of all is jaw-tension, which results in ‘bruxism’ (teeth-grinding) or, with excessive intake, face-pulling. Ravers deal with this by furiously chewing gum or sucking on dummies. Although in the short-term Ecstasy has the opposite of a hangover (a delicious afterglow that lasts into the next day), the major repercussion of doing the drug is the comedown a few days later. Symptoms can include fatigue, emotional burn-out, irritability, and moodswings between elation and desolation that are comparable to heartbreak.
Dopamine (the speedy component of the experience) is more rapidly replaced in the brain than serotonin (the loved-up part). It takes about a week for serotonin levels to normalize. Taking Ecstasy is like going on an emotional spree, spending your happiness in advance. With irregular use, such extravagance isn’t a problem. But with sustained and excessive use, the brain’s serotonin levels become seriously depleted, so that it takes around six weeks’ abstinence from MDMA to restore normal levels.
If you take E every day, within a few days the blissful, empathetic, serotonin glow wears off, leaving only the speedy, dopamine buzz; this in-built diminishing returns syndrome is one reason why MDMA isn’t considered physically addictive. The honeymoon period with Ecstasy that most ravers enjoy can, however, create an emotional addiction, in so far as normal life seems dreary compared to the loved-up abandon of the weekend. This is when Ecstasy’s potential for abuse enters the picture. Because the original blissed-out intensity of the early experiences never really returns, users are tempted to increase the dose, which only increases the speediness and amplifies the unpleasant side-effects. Serious hedonists get locked into a punishing cycle of weekend excess followed by the inevitable brutal midweek crash. As well as compulsive bingeing on E, many get drawn into compensatory polydrug use – taking other substances to mimic the effects originally achieved by MDMA alone. Alongside the physical attrition wreaked by such a lifestyle – weight-loss, frequent illness caused by sleep-deprivation in tandem with the virus-fostering nature of hot, sweaty clubs – the long-term abuse of Ecstasy can also result in psychological damage: anxiety disorders, panic attacks, paranoia and depression.
Although MDMA may actually be far more dangerous for its psychological side-effects (some experts worry about a generation that will grow up to face higher rates of depression and suicide), the case against Ecstasy has mostly been pursued in terms of its physical risks. There is some evidence that Ecstasy affects the axons (containers in the brain that hold serotonin), but since no deleterious effects have been detected in long-term users’ behaviour or neurology, talk of ‘brain damage’ is premature. The truth is that most problems associated with Ecstasy seem to be caused by the
way
it is used. The psychological costs stem from recklessly excessive, long-term intake; the physical dangers are almost all related to its usage in the rave context, where over-exertion and dehydration can lead to heatstroke.