It seems strange to me that safrole should be difficult to obtain in the US, particularly as the climate in the US allows certain plants with useful levels of safrole to grow. Maybe it will become possible to synthesize safrole one day....
The sassafras trees in the southeast US -do- contain enough safrole in the root bark to be used for synthesis. Also, there are suppliers of sassafras oil in the U.S. whose oil contains 95%+ safrole. Sassafras oil that contains >90% safrole is treated the same as safrole by the DEA, but their threshold amount is a purchase of greater than 4 liters in a month. Not to say that one will never be investigated for buying less than that, but safrole is definitely not impossible to get in the U.S.
Also, MDMA can be synthesized by other routes than safrole, its just that safrole provides a very cheap and naturally-abundant starting material which is already pretty close to the desired product in structure.
