Article series on MDMA

X'ed out
July 30th 2003
By Larry Smith

Part 1 of a two part series

You're in a love puddle. You're smiling. You're high on Ecstasy. You touch your friend's hair. Wow. You can't stop touching it. Her hair is incredibly soft. You keep smiling. Now it's a few years later. You take E again. You grind your teeth, the hangover lasts a week. It's no fun. What happened?

Page 1

It's 1988, I'm 18 years old, a sophomore in college in Philadelphia, and I've just got my hands on two hits of something called Ecstasy. I got it from a friend, who got it from his friend, who got it from his girlfriend. She worked in a psych lab and had grabbed a bunch of government-issued, vitamin-C-coated, grade-A MDMA. Or so we were told.

I had first heard about Ecstasy a few years earlier in high school, back when it was still legal, back before the government classified it as a Schedule 1 narcotic, a class of drugs with maximum potential for abuse and no sanctioned medical use. I remember reading about young professionals in Philadelphia gushing about this new drug. Happiness in a pill. This was before there was much talk about Prozac. Or scary studies about MDMA-munching monkeys developing Parkinson's.

I have always had an affection for altered states. My mom tells a story of how I used to love trips to the dentist as a 6-year-old because the dentist let me go on an airplane ride (helloooooo.... nitrous!). In high school there was no greater joy than parking with my pals at what we called Rasta Road, smoking bowls, and playing Gene Loves Jezebel over and over and over. When a plate of mushrooms walked by in college, I waved it on over. Ecstasy was inevitable.

I spent that first night on E tripping with a girl I'd met when I was a teenager, adored at first sight, and a few years later began dating. That night, I took the train from Philadelphia to New York City and nervously handed her a tablet of MDMA. Over the course of the next 12 hours we had a psychological and sexual bond like none I'd known before. We were alive together in a singular and extended moment, at once engaged in our inner minds and outer selves. It was a dreamy swirl of conversation, sex, Diet Coke, and Rolling Rock. We felt what Ann Shulgin, a therapist and the wife of one of the drug's early researchers, Alexander Shulgin, calls MDMA's ability to offer "insight without fear." I later read that Ecstasy belongs to a family of drugs called "entactogens," which literally means "touching within." That's what we were doing. It was amazing.

Around this same time, all over the globe, strangers who would later become soul mates of one stripe or another embarked on their own E experiments.

Earlier that year, Vicki, a friend of mine from the school paper, took a hit of E with her boyfriend. They watched "Pink Floyd -- The Wall" all night. She had never seen or felt anything as fantastic in her entire 19 years of pleasure seeking. She later described it as "like having a six-hour orgasm." The next morning she awoke feeling refreshed and glowing -- and transformed. She had found God in a pill.

Meanwhile, Pippi, a brassy Southern girl studying English lit at Dartmouth, first popped a pill with "two chicks and a dude." She took the drug in the library, downing it with water from a little plastic cup in the bathroom. They walked around campus and waited for the sun to set. Then they made their way to someone's room, a room filled with candles, weed and good music. They sat up all night and talked. She loved E. She loved how it made her mind feel. She loved what it did to her body. She loved the $20 flat fee for entry, open to any and all. She loved that the feeling of E lived up to the expectation that was building around it at that time. But what she loved best was the "immediate, sincere feeling of being connected with the other people -- the raw emotions we shared without hesitation." She had visuals too. She saw the page of a novel, black words on white background. Suddenly, the commas all fell to the bottom of the page, collecting in a circle. She later turned that image into a painting, a painting that sits in her parents' home to this day. "And boy," Pippi says, "do they have no clue."

Across the pond at Oxford, Jordan (whose name has been changed), a teenager prone to depression and isolation, was at a club called Spectrum when he was first introduced to Ecstasy. Jordan remembers feeling the walls of his personality just crumble. "At first the experience was terrifying," he recalls, "a complete loss of control, like a descent into madness." But as he came down from the drug's peak and adjusted to the new state of mind, intense feelings of love, euphoria and compassion overwhelmed him. For several days afterward he felt like a sort of religious convert: While taking the drug he'd seen a completely different, utopian mode of being. At the time, this seemed and felt absolutely real.

This extended tribe of fellow MDMA monkeys would spend parts of the '80s, '90s, and 2000s playing with this drug, and each other, wondering what was real and what was imagined, true utopia or a land of make-believe. We weren't the first people to experiment with E, and we won't be the last. But as part of the first significant group of people to become recreational Ecstasy users -- a generation defined (for better or worse) as Generation X -- we've played a part in taking MDMA from its adolescence into adulthood. We've grown up with this drug, and it with us.

Writing in Rolling Stone in 1982, Marcelle Clements related her realization that marijuana was no longer fun for her and her fellow '60s smokers. What happened, she asked in a famous essay called "The Dog Is Us," to lead the people who glamorized a drug to decide to abandon it? A dog walking into a room full of pot smokers used to be the most hilarious thing in the world, she observed. Years later -- due to increased age, changing values, but mainly "ego-chewing paranoia" -- it was no fun at all. What happened? "'Why did you stop smoking' I asked people my own age, those I personally started smoking with in the mid-to-late Sixties," Clements wrote then. "Persons in this group, perhaps in part because they've been so often examined by the media (under the hideously titled category 'The Baby Boom Generation'), tend to be both articulate and self-conscious: they provide an unusually loquacious sample for this sort of inquiry."

A touch more than 20 years later, I look around at my circle of friends and realize that the drug has changed but the question hasn't. Through expert opinions, empirical data, and many conversations with the people I started taking E with, I looked for that answer.

This is our story.

Page 2 - Among its many other wondrous qualities, Ecstasy didn't seem to be addictive

What was in the amazing drug? I can't even remember the first time I bothered to ask. The rumor in the late '80s and early '90s that E drained spinal fluid caught my attention. But my main thought as a 21-year-old who had done the drug about three times was: It's worth it, whatever the cost to my body. (The truth was that some Ecstasy research in the '80s involved withdrawing fluid samples from users via a spinal tap, and thus an urban legend was born. A spinal tap is the only way to lose spinal fluid.)

As it turns out, Ecstasy was created by accident. In 1912 the German pharmaceutical company Merck was searching for a new anticoagulant and synthesized 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, as a part of that process of discovery. But the compound was never tested on people, and it lay dormant in the obscure pages of scientific journals. While there were reports of recreational use in the '60s (as well as military experiments testing MDMA's potential as a truth serum), the drug's breakthrough moment didn't come until the mid-'70s. In 1976 Dr. Alexander Shulgin, a senior research chemist at Dow Chemical Co. who had -- since the instant he received a shot of morphine while in the Navy -- been intensely curious about the effects of drugs on consciousness, resynthesized MDMA and then tried some on himself. Shulgin was amazed at the result. He found that MDMA produced an enchanting, mellow high, marked by a rich sense of emotional openness. He went on to become an outspoken advocate of the drug's therapeutic potential, coauthoring the first human studies in 1978 and suggesting that MDMA could help therapists unlock repressed emotions. The compound that started as an accidental byproduct was rediscovered as an "insight tool."

In the '70s and early '80s, a small circle of psychologists and psychiatrists, following Shulgin's lead, experimented with MDMA. They nicknamed it Empathy and conducted therapy sessions with patients under the influence. Apparently, the drug -- which causes your brain to release massive amounts of serotonin -- allowed these doctors to dig deeper into their patients' psyches, with less pain (described in detail in "The Secret Chief"). "To paraphrase the pioneering MDMA psychiatrist George Greer, psychiatrists felt as if they had gone from working in charcoal to oil paints," says Dr. Julie Holland, an attending psychiatrist at the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Emergency Room, an expert on street drugs, and the editor of "Ecstasy -- The Complete Guide: A Comprehensive Look at the Risks and Benefits of MDMA." "What's so infuriating is that when you make a drug illegal, it goes underground, the quality goes down, yet of course people will want it more."

Indeed, at the same time, MDMA attracted the attention of club promoters, who used it for their own commercial purposes. They called it Ecstasy and positioned it as a party drug. On July 1, 1985, in an effort led by Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who had heard that Ecstasy was being sold in Texas bars and via 800 numbers, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) ordered an emergency scheduling of MDMA, placing it into Schedule 1, reserved for the most restricted class of drugs, such as heroin.

The lines were drawn. "In essence the government said, since people are sniffing paints, therapists couldn't use the paint," Holland says. "The whole point of psychiatry is for the patient to explain what is going on in the mind. But because people were abusing this drug, a huge branch of medicine has been denied a powerful tool."

Over in Europe, house music was taking off and Ecstasy use went with it. Inspired by the scene on the Spanish party island of Ibiza, the London-style warehouse rave scene was exploding and coming to America. "The drug was breaking down barriers in England's still rigidly class-stratified society," says Jordan, who grew up in southern England and moved to San Francisco just before the millennium. "And it was peaceful: no fights and broken bottles. Just dancing. And this exhilarating new music: house. Meanwhile, we'd just come out of the Cold War: Armageddon hadn't happened and for the first time in a decade we were free from fear of annihilation. So with the combination of the drug, the music, and the social and political changes, there was this incredible sense of something happening."

"Every modern music scene has been associated with drugs," says Douglas Rushkoff, a longtime chronicler of rave culture. "Big band had booze, rock 'n' roll had pot, psychedelic music had acid, disco's drug was cocaine. Raves first emerged out of a growing discontent with commercial club culture. Discos were dominated by the culture of alcohol and cocaine. Raves said: We can play with each other without intermediaries. We don't need to pay the mob-run disco and get past the bouncer to have fun."

I love talking with Rushkoff. The author of the novel "Ecstasy Club" and an expert on media, the Internet, and rave and other cultures, Rushkoff unfurls Talmudic takes on these topics, topics that my friends and I have ourselves yammered on about late into many an evening.

"If I were to guess the drug trajectory of you and your friends," he says between bites of a burger in a cafe in New York City's East Village, "I'd say it was marijuana, acid, mushrooms, Ecstasy, coke, and/or speed."

Pretty close. Yet this wasn't the trajectory on which my largely middle- and upper-middle-class friends and I envisioned ourselves. Our organizing drug principles were more organic. Pot and 'shrooms were natural. Even acid, though made in a lab, seemed to be more about the mind than the body. We didn't do nasty, "dangerous" drugs like coke or meth or heroin. That shit was evil. Deadly, even. But E was different.

Among its many other wondrous qualities, it wasn't addictive, at least not among the group who coalesced around this drug in and around San Francisco and at our "come one, come all to the desert" festival, Burning Man. We were a group of creative, smart individuals -- work hard, play hard, was what we did, in every sense of that overplayed expression. Our recreational drug habits were impressive, sure, but we also had our lives together.

"E built a tight connection to a community where we could trust or depend on one another," says Victor (not his real name), 34, a rocket scientist living in San Francisco. "We'd be in these love puddles, lying around with friends and making connections we'd otherwise not make. We could kiss one another, we could be physically intense without sexual predatorship or false expectations. It was fun and frivolous, but it really meant something. You were in a space where you could think no wrong and do no wrong and you could carry that head space with you to other situations when you were sober."

"Until this time, I was always an outsider," says Wren, 37, who grew up in California's San Joaquin Valley -- ranch country -- "a culture where you just didn't touch each other." She now lives in Missoula, Mont., where she's a large-animal veterinary assistant. "E cemented the group thing. You went to a party and you kind of knew each other and then you took this drug and there was that shimmer -- like a light above a lake. An incredible warm rush. Suddenly we were One."

So for a few years, a group of people who had first tried MDMA in other places --- in college on the East Coast, in high school on the West Coast, or as self-loathing youth in London -- came together. Extended friends as extended family. We were trying, in the words of Rushkoff, "to take an evolutionary leap, to add more people to our posse than we had in old caveman clans." E was the social lubricant for our new networked reality.

The E was kicking in.

Boys kissed girls, girls kissed girls, and boys who had just a few years earlier thought it would be really weird to kiss another boy found out that it wasn't. We did E with best friends and bosses, in bars and backyard barbecues, on hikes and in hot springs, with people we were sleeping with and people we weren't. We did E at bars, on beaches, at weddings, in Santa Claus costumes. All for E and E for all! We were shimmering, we were shammering, we were zigging, we were zagging. We were a collective Dionysian fantasy fueled by a little pill discovered by accident. We did E with elaborate planning, and on the spur of the moment.

We even did E by accident.

Once, after a particularly raucous weekend of partying that was to end in a quiet Sunday night with a couple of 5-HTP pills -- a popular pre- and post-E supplement -- William (not his real name), the 33-year-old owner of a Web services company in San Francisco, accidentally gave himself and his girlfriend Suzanne (not hers either) another hit of E instead of this serotonin booster. While that made William the butt of jokes for years, even then there were few regrets. "For the record, I have always found it great that William dosed us," says Suzanne three years later. A 28-year-old editor at an online music site, she was recently engaged to William. "One, our friends learned the mantra 'Mark your pills, people.' And it was especially hilarious at the time, once I convinced William to enjoy it. We spent that night talking, and it was the first time he said he thought we'd spend the rest of our lives together."

We had good jobs, good friends, and an enviable lifestyle. We smiled and the world smiled back.

Page 3 - Forty-five minutes after my friend, a first-timer, took E he was flopping on the ground

It's probably 1998, though I'm not entirely sure, and I'm at Burning Man. When my friends and I first started going to this desert festival (an event that, despite articles like this, is not mainly about taking drugs), we might have taken Ecstasy once or twice over the course of four or five days. Now, we're popping E once or twice a night, almost every night, over the course of a week or more. Chemically, it makes no sense to do this -- once you've shot your serotonin wad, it just can't return to levels at which MDMA can affect it. (This is why people like Alexander Shulgin don't do the drug very often, nor advise others to.) More serotonin in your system means more happy and relaxed feelings, so you sort of want to keep serotonin around. But I don't know this yet. And if my friends do, it's not a hot topic of discussion.

My third day in a row taking E: It's still daylight when I take a pill and at first it feels pretty good. It's somewhat speedy, which is not ideal but also not surprising, given how the quality has been slowly but surely deteriorating over the past few years -- leading to a slippery slope of delusion. ("Maybe this time it will be good. Maybe if I just take two hits it'll work like it used to.") My girlfriend couldn't come this year, and at first the pill is kind of fun, liberating even -- "Look, Ma, no girlfriend!" Then I start to miss her. A lot. I feel lonely and sad and scared. And then sick. I puke all over the dusty desert floor. Others have taken this same batch and are fine. But my body didn't want MDMA, or whatever else might lie in this little powdered pill someone got from somewhere and at some point gave to me. Collecting my disgusting self, I drink some water and join some friends who are enjoying another perfect sunset. Nigel, a graphic designer I met during my first "real" job and the person who introduced me to the desert a couple of years before, notices that something's wrong. He puts his gentle British arm around me and asks me if I'm all right. I say I'm fine. He brings over a few more friends and tells them that he thinks I am missing my girlfriend and so they need to keep me company.

That wasn't the worst trip I've had, not even close. The worst experience on E was the night six of us decided to take it together, including one E virgin. We all took a pill that I had personally procured, and after 45 minutes it kicked in. But the virgin didn't really feel it. We decided to take another half each. A few minutes later, the first-timer had a seizure. He flopped on the ground surrounded by his terrified, panicking wife and a bunch of tripping, totally freaked-out friends trying to figure out what the fuck to do. A few minutes later, he came to, explaining that he had a history of seizures. That night it became painfully clear to me that a guy handing out drugs ought to be more acutely aware of its possible side effects. Days later, two clicks of the mouse taught me that people with a history of seizures aren't ideal candidates for E. Had he died, everything would be different. Among other life changes, there's certainly no way I'd ever take E again, and I would probably be traveling around the country telling high school kids about the dangers of drugs. But he didn't die. He soon felt better and stayed up most of the night happily talking. He'd done his last pill, sure. But the rest of us hadn't.

Few of the trips since then weren't what I'd call bad; they just weren't all that good. We were doing it too much, feeling it too little.

"When you do it twice a month it starts to get boring," says Pippi, now 35 and a marketing executive at a software company in Silicon Valley. "You get into an E rut, the same E friends doing the same E thing. You feel like hell. Why I am taking this and where is this taking me? That's the depressing side. I think it comes with age, too. You need to go to higher highs as with any drug to be happy with the high."

With each trip, the downside seemed to be getting more down.

"It stopped being all sexy and friendly," says Robert, a 31-year-old carpenter whom you could count on to do anything and everything, usually all at once. "It started being a hassle, an ampy, nasty feeling that had become more of a ritual than a choice. And by the way, I don't really like to dance. It's like, how come when I'm sober you can't get me on a dance floor, but when I'm all hopped up on the goof, I'm out there flopping around like Rerun from 'What's Happening?' That doesn't make sense at all, but I was trying to force it to work, force it to be fun again."

For Nigel, 39, it worked reliably for a number of years. Then it stopped working. "Not abruptly," he explains, "but over a period of a couple of years. I'm not sure if I've done too much, or if the X is too speedy, but often I feel depressed two days afterwards. More than that, while I still have a good -- though not great or mind-blowing -- time, I'm conscious of the fact that I can see through the artifice of the drug. While before I could easily suspend disbelief, nowadays I'm aware -- naggingly conscious -- of the fact that I'm being tricked into thinking I'm happy. My brain tells me: You're happy now. But that's 'cause you're on drugs. Just wait till tomorrow."

I had to ask, like Carrie Bradshaw tapping out another obvious yet irresistible column: Was the X getting worse, or were we getting too old for it?

Coming Thursday: Monkey gone to heaven: One primate expired during a landmark Johns Hopkins medical study. How are the four other monkeys -- and less furry Ecstasy users -- doing?

Part 2 of two is here

Click to expand...

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At an all-day conference on MDMA, ravers, researchers and anti-drug crusaders debate its pros and cons. Consensus? Just say maybe.
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The agony after ecstasy
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Click to expand...

Monkey gone to heaven
July 31, 2003
By Larry Smith

Part 2 of a two part series

In Part 2 of Salon's series on Ecstasy, a controversial study on E's effects on the brain creates fear; a breakthrough moment in MDMA's therapeutic use sparks hope; and Generation X ponders its drug days ahead.

Page 1

Was the X getting worse? Alexander Shulgin, one of the drug's pioneers, says the question is "clouded by the fact that over 50 percent of stuff called Ecstasy is not MDMA." What else could it be? Caffeine, amphetamines, ephedrine, PMA (an Ecstasy-like drug that's particularly dangerous) or other foreign agents that have masqueraded as the real thing for decades.

MDMA itself has been on a wild ride, as illustrated by a timeline that details milestones in MDMA research. (It appears in the appendix of Dr. Julie Holland's "Ecstasy: A Complete Guide.") In 1953, for example, the U.S. Army Chemical Center gave MDMA to lab animals at the University of Michigan (an idea soon abandoned). Then there's Sept. 8, 1976, the day Shulgin took MDMA for the first time (16 milligrams, with no effect). There's MDMA's Schedule 1 status in 1985, and the government's $54 million effort in 1999 to educate the public about "club drugs." But since Holland's book was published, there have been two MDMA tipping points that aren't included in that timeline. They're huge.

The first was on Nov. 2, 2001. What Holland calls the "biggest moment" in terms of MDMA research had the misfortune to be announced two months after 9/11. But it was on that day that the FDA approved the first psychotherapeutic study of MDMA on humans, to be sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, (MAPS), a nonprofit organization that aims to develop MDMA into an FDA-approved prescription medicine. MAPS will study the use of MDMA and psychotherapy for the treatment of patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Subjects in a Charleston, S.C., clinic will undergo two therapy sessions, three to five weeks apart, at which they will take a capsule of 125 milligrams of MDMA. Between the two capsules, patients will have three non-drug-assisted therapy sessions (pre- and post-administration of the MDMA). "What we're saying is that MDMA is not the therapy by itself, nor is psychotherapy the treatment by itself, but MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is the course of treatment," says Rick Doblin, who founded MAPS in 1986 and has a Ph.D. in the regulation of drugs from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "It's not 'Take the pill and then you're happy like a rave'; it's 'Take the pill and then go deeper into the pain,' which facilitates a cathartic process. In that sense what we are doing is the opposite of the way many people use the drug. One of the advantages of MDMA, why people really like it, is that it focuses on the moment. The idea is to work with post-traumatic stress disorder patients so that after the catharsis they can distinguish that the moment they are in is different from the moment they were traumatized -- that every corner they turn is not likely to hold the rapist or assailant."

The other major news in MDMA research was released last fall, blanketed the media, and scared a lot of people, including many of my friends. In the Sept. 27, 2002, issue of Science magazine, Dr. George Ricaurte, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins, published the results of a study called "Severe Dopaminergic Neurotoxicity in Primates After a Common Recreational Dose Regimen of MDMA ('Ecstasy')," aka the Monkey Study. Ricaurte, aiming to mimic human Ecstasy habits, gave five monkeys high doses of MDMA every three hours. He couldn't actually give all the monkeys three hits of E, because one monkey died, and another didn't look so good after his second hit, so they stopped giving the poor ape the drug. The drug damaged tiny branching fibers that allow the dopamine-secreting neurons to do their job. In other words, the monkeys lost dopamine cells, which affect thinking and movement. When you lose too many of these brain cells (a lot, like 80 percent), you may experience symptoms of Parkinson's disease (tremors and other body imbalances). "We know that it happens in monkeys and baboons," writes Ricaurte. "We don't know if it happens in human beings as yet."

"This is the first time anyone's shown dopamine reductions in primates, so everyone got really freaked out," says Holland. "What has never been proven is that there is any damage to the dopamine system in human MDMA users, even heavy users." What's more, Holland and many others argue, the doses used by Ricaurte were much higher than what people typically use.

What's clear is that no one -- not Holland, not Shulgin, nor any MDMA expert I talked to who feels the war on E is misguided -- thinks popping too many pills in one evening is a great idea. "Any drug has a recommended dosage," Holland says. "The reality is, the more E you take, the more you put your brain at risk."

"Nobody knows for sure if your brain would go to completely normal if you stopped taking Ecstasy after you'd been taking it for a long time," says Dr. Jean Lud Cadet, chief of the molecular neuropsychiatry branch of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). "There are now a lot of papers showing that people who have taken Ecstasy for an extended period of time can have sleeping problems, be depressed, and have memory problems. But we need to do more studies to study people who have stopped taking the drug for a long time to see if these symptoms go away completely."

Cadet, one of the country's leading researchers on the clinical effects of drugs on the brain, has a tasteful office at a branch of the NIDA on the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore. A photo of his handsome, dreadlocked 15-year-old son sits on his desk.

"What do you tell your son about Ecstasy?" I ask him. He proudly explains that he shares his research with his son, who in turn gives talks on the effects of E at his high school.

Right now, Cadet is studying the effects of MDMA exposure on prenatal rats, an area that is no doubt of interest to my ever-growing group of pregnant friends. Cadet found that the babies of pregnant rats who were given MDMA showed changes in some genes in their brains when compared to the genes of babies from pregnant rats that were not given MDMA. While it's still too early to know if the behavior of the baby rats who were exposed to MDMA will be affected, the brains of the little rat pups definitely look different.

I like Dr. Jean Lud Cadet. He's an inviting man. Wearing a hipster short-sleeved button-down, he's comfortable explaining his complicated research in layman's terms. I like that he says, "These drugs are not going to fry your brain like an egg, but research shows that they are toxic." I like that when I ask him if despite the toxicity, many people feel that the upsides of the psychological breakthroughs, the empathy and the intimacy, are worth the potential downsides, he thinks about that for a few seconds and says, "Well, that's a decision someone should make personally, but you can't ask the FDA to approve it." I like that he's working on building better models about how MDMA affects the central nervous system, so if the worst fears about what MDMA does to your brain are true, through his and other research we'll come up with restorative treatments.

Page 2 - Is E addictive?

The trouble with relatively new drugs is that the real trials take place outside of the lab -- in the love puddles, at the raves, in the desert.

"We test medicine for many years -- but with drugs, people often test themselves," says Mark Gold, chief of the division of addiction medicine at the University of Florida McKnight Brain Institute. He keeps a huge poster detailing Ecstasy use, abuse, emergency room visits and deaths on the wall of his office. "The research is really, 'How many people have become addicted or ended up in emergency room?' It's all done on the fly."

We do know that according to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) in 2001, the number of Ecstasy-related emergency room visits rose to 5,542, up from 4,511 in 2000 and 2,850 in 1999. To put that number in perspective, that's about 3,000 more E.R. visits related to Ecstasy than for LSD, and 88,000 less than for heroin. (There were 61,000 antidepressant-related trips to the E.R. in 2001, in case you were wondering.)

When I was in high school, I had heard of E, but certainly didn't know anyone who had taken it. That was the early '80s. Cut to 2002, when Monitoring the Future (MTF), an organization that tracks trends in teen drug use, found that the increase among 12th graders using Ecstasy was the largest jump of any drug in its 26-year history of tracking teen drug use (11.7 percent have tried E), though in the past year teen use has dropped a bit, to below 11 percent. SAMHSA reported 63 Ecstasy-specific fatalities in the year 2000, most due to heatstroke, and occasionally due to hyponatremia, which is death by drinking too much water. Overdosing on E, in the sense that we think of someone OD'ing on Oxycontin, coke or heroin, is extremely rare.

Victor, for one, has never ended up in the E.R., but he does think all this E has been bad on the brain. "I've suffered some permanent memory loss -- both long- and short-term. Yes, it has something to do with the fact that I am older. And yes, there's the fact that I have been doing recreational drugs for 17 years. But I feel like after I take E, my mind is worse."

"I think I was one of the few voices in the group in the early days who was suggesting that we exercise some moderation," says Sarah (not her real name), a 32-year-old who works in the natural foods business in Northern California. "I knew many people who complained of mild depression the week following a particularly indulgent weekend, and one person who went into it hardcore and basically battled depression on a big scale. Eventually, he wound up going on multiple and varied hardcore antidepressants, with very little success. I think the initial reaction of the group when I brought this stuff up was that I was harshing their mellow."

That attitude has changed. Now we're very curious: Does Ecstasy cause irrevocable brain damage? Will we get Parkinson's? Will we become depressed? Will our kids be fucked up? Empirically, there is an answer. We just don't know what it is yet.

In the short term, the $20 question is whether it's addictive. Here, the experts disagree. "The answer to this is a definite yes," says Dr. Cadet. "Ecstasy can influence the same feel-good systems that drugs like cocaine and speed stimulate."

Dr. Holland disagrees. "I don't believe a physiological addiction has been demonstrated," she says. "I work in the psych E.R. where I routinely treat people addicted to alcohol, cocaine or heroin -- and I have never seen a case of Ecstasy addiction. But I will say that people can become psychologically addicted to any activity, from surfing the Internet, to compulsively having sex, to using Ecstasy."

Experts always disagree; that's why they're experts. In the end all you can do is hear them out, add in your own experiences and those of people you know and make your best guess. Talk to anyone who does the drug regularly and there's a good bet you'll hear something like this: When I'm on it, I really want to stay on it. This can lead to compulsive -- and chemically pointless -- pill popping in order to stay high. Bottom line: It may or may not fall under what is considered a physical addiction, but many people still have a psychological jones for it. In the many conversations I had with my friends about Ecstasy for this story, I could almost feel their heart rates increase when recounting the great early E experiences. E remains exciting stuff -- even when it worries us.

Checking back with the four monkeys who survived Ricaurte's über-doses is one way to find out E's long-term downsides, if any. Of course, the doctor's subjects will still be overdosed monkeys, not humans. Checking back with my friends in another 15 years -- when many of us will be celebrating our 50th year on earth -- might be a more natural laboratory in which to observe the drug's long-term effects.

Hawkeye from "M*A*S*H" liked to say: Nothing exceeds like excess.

The Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts famously wrote: When you get the message, hang up the phone.

For the past few years, my Ecstasy club has been teetering in between these two notions. We're beginning to realize that drugs are many things, but in the end they are just that: drugs.

What, after all these years, are we trying to cure? And how will we continue to do the work of self-medication as the E wears off, whether through total abandonment of the drug or tapering?

Ecstasy showed up at a time in our lives when our need for intimate human connections was bigger than our desire to be independent -- Rushkoff's post-caveman clan theory. Now, with most of us over 30, many closer to 40, we've got real jobs at real companies, and are in committed relationships with partners with whom we share real mortgages and may even raise real families. "When the order of business is no longer how to lose the self," says Rushkoff, "that's not the moment you take E."

Page 3 - The younger generation of E users is trying to keep their brains intact

For my friends who, I believe, represent a cross section of the adult recreational E user, there's something of a split. Some are going to slip further into the self, retreating into one version or another of a happy domesticity, full of fond memories of their roaring 20s and 30s. Whether their minds have learned all they can from MDMA, or their bodies have simply had enough, they've gotten the message: Recreational drugs are best left to the young.

"It seems so stupid to me now, to keep trying to get what she's having or what they're having or what I remember having, only to be reminded an hour into a session of chain-smoking and teeth-grinding that X just doesn't cut it for me," says Robert, the carpenter, who now lives in Sweden. "I'm not saying that I have not had good times on the shit. But on the whole, I have trouble rationalizing its use based on a few isolated incidents of pure wonder."


Others will keep moving down the buffet line. "I find myself drifting to pharmaceuticals," says Victor. "You can trust the quality, you can trust the effects, and you don't feel that bad afterwards. It feels like a more sustainable activity."

Probably so. What worries me is not the weekend Vicodin warriors, but my friends who might go deeper and deeper into harder drugs -- speed, coke, ketamine and worse -- drugs that have the ability to mess up their lives in a way that E never did. I fortunately don't know too many people going down those roads. And the government's much-repeated "gateway" effect -- each drug leads to a harder drug -- was recently discredited by the RAND Drug Policy Research Center.

Still, Dr. Holland reports that for the first time at the Bellevue Psychiatric emergency room, she's seeing people who are on crack, heroin and PCP, who are also using E. "The fact that Ecstasy is now another drug of abuse to the Bellevue crowd is a major change from the last two years," she says. "When people start smoking it or shooting it up is when you really run into trouble." No, those people aren't representative of the vast majority of recreational E users, but when a drug has gone from the dance club to the crack house in just a few short years, there's cause for concern.

Most of my friends think they will continue to use Ecstasy in moderation. "There's been a learning curve in a certain milieu of people who were taking E all the time," says Pippi, now pregnant. "The two-pill nights are way behind me -- with a child it has to be. The occasions in the future will be very, very special." Before we get off the phone, she mentions that she can't wait to stop nursing because she has two hits of really good stuff that she's preserving for a special weekend with her husband.

"I don't do it much now, but I still love X," says Vicki, 34, recently married and living in Los Angeles where she works as a copywriter and volunteers at a suicide hotline. "Even being currently pregnant and drug-free hasn't stopped me from advising every adult who mentions it to try E, just once, to see for one night what it's really like to open your heart to the people around you -- or to your desk and doorknobs, if you stay home -- and feel truly blessed."

"I may be one mischievous middle-aged babe who sneaks in the occasional candy-flip [Ecstasy and LSD together] just to keep me spry," says the still 20-something Suzanne. "I think people will grow nostalgic for their E days, especially the group dynamic. I can see it as a reunion thing."

While Dr. Cadet doesn't waver from his opinion that MDMA is a deadly drug for monkeys, rats, humans, and other creatures, he's optimistic. "What's going on with Ecstasy may be similar to what's happening with HIV. A lot of older gay men saw their friends dying and changed their behaviors regarding sex. As people get older and more papers come out about the clinical effects of drugs like MDMA -- memory loss, serotonin depletion -- the hope is that some of the people who have been using the drug will say, 'I don't want these things to happen to my brain.'"

Organizations like Dancesafe are a good sign that the next generation of Ecstasy users want to keep their brains intact. A peer-based nonprofit that runs on volunteers and donations, DanceSafe works to educate the buzzing world about nightclub safety, but in a way that the rave and nightclub community (and others who are young at heart) can relate to, rather than via scare tactics or egg-frying PSAs. For the past four years, its volunteers have set up tables at clubs where they test pills (so E users know if what they are about to swallow is actually MDMA), handed out ear plugs, pointed out fire exits, and generally worked to decrease the number of E.R. visits among young people. The organization's excellent online slideshow "This is Your Brain On Ecstasy," details exactly how the drug works.

Time will ultimately tell my friends and me how our brains did on E. MDMA pioneer Shulgin concedes that "there may indeed be some changes in the brain that are slow to recover," while at the same time he regrets he hadn't encouraged more MDMA-using therapists to publish their findings. With the MAPS study on the drug's psychotherapeutic properties moving forward, the history of MDMA, interestingly enough, loops back on its beginnings. Shulgin himself is working on discovering another, perhaps less controversial potion with similar upsides. For now, he hasn't had much luck. "There are many compounds with fascinating psychedelic properties," explains a man who has discovered or rediscovered more than 200 mind-altering chemicals in the past 40 years, "but none with the unique magic of MDMA."

MDMA and I have ridden the bell curve: Curiosity led to a little experimentation, then lots of use, some great times, and then too much teeth-grinding. Now, my best guess is that I'll continue to use it with extreme discretion; I'm probably closer to my last pill than my first. My adventures in MDMA have taught me a few things about myself. Although I am someone who for years found nothing more tedious than talk therapy, the lengthy conversations and connections I've had with intimates old and new have been life affirming and important. I tend to stay guarded, yet there's an expansive and emotional person who springs out like a jack-in-the-box after popping a pill. Fortunately, I'm beginning to understand that if you can't incorporate what you learn from a positive drug experience into the waking life, but rather need to endlessly repeat it searching for that same high, it's a useless experience. There's that and the fact that (to paraphrase Clements' "Dog"), despite all this talk about consciousness-raising, much of our time was spent simply lolling about in a love puddle. One can only loll so long.

The woman I first took E with 15 years ago remains a close friend. After a couple of margaritas, we've been known to get a little nostalgic for that first perfect night, with that first perfect hit. Although I no longer pine for it, or her, when I look into her eyes, I can still see traces of that unique magic. I suspect I always will.

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