Keith McElligottPILLS! Ecstasy, Gary, Disco Biscuits, Doves, E. Whether you're rolling in the club simply rolling over in your parents basement. Coming up or coming down cheeky lines, double drops, bombing, bumping, banging, crunching, sniffing cutting or keying. This is the most talked about club drug on the planet and this article is for you. MDMA.* Methylenedioxymethylamphetamine. It’s a bitch to write but its far easier and (more fun) to talk about. Whether you’re a regular user and abuser or simply curious about what's available on your planet, this article may have something for you. So stop refreshing your Facebook homepage and lets talk about ECSTASY.
First of all.... What is it?
Ecstasy is the street name for what we’re really after which is MDMA. MDMA comes in its natural state as a white powder sometimes consisting of small crystals. It usually comes in a capsule to be taken discreetly on the dancefloor but can also be purchased in its raw form as powder to be sniffed far less discreetly on some flat surface of your choosing. For those of you scientifically minded readers it falls under the family of phenethylamines. It was first discovered in 1912 by a scientist whose name you will probably forget so I won’t bother. The drugs original intention was as a dietary suppressant however was shelved for about 60 years until a very brilliant scientist whose name you SHOULD know (Alexander Shulgin) saw potential in the already patented drug and decided to test it on himself. After taking the drug he noted its effect for the first time in history.
“I experienced some of the feeling one has after the second martini,
that one is discoursing brilliantly and with particularly acute analytical powers.”
Advertisement
Even though Dr. Shulgin was tripping balls, MDMA had indeed stepped out into the harsh glare of the public where the media was waiting. To help this, his dear friend and physiotherapists began shipping large amounts of the new drug to offices all over the country. Its intended use was couples therapy. Anyone who has tried MDMA or Ecstasy can probably agree that this was an appropriate use of its potential. It was so successful that the growing populous gave it its own slogan. “Penicillin for the Soul.” Of course it didn’t take long for some clever person to have the idea of using this medication outside the doctors office. And so MDMA began filling the street corners and living rooms of family households across the nation. Ecstasy, as it was newly dubbed, became wildly popular in the early 80’s. It was legal, which of course was fuel to the fire of its impending doom. As with all things that sky rocket in popularity it was not long before the media brought unwanted attention. Ronald Reagans “War on Drugs” in 1985 saw an emergency banning of the drug saying it “had no medical use” and had “potential for abuse”.
While this was an outrageous blanket movement typical of most governments on anything popular, the majority of the scientific and medical community soon took to the streets in an attempt to get the wonder drug ok’d for medicinal experimentation. While this gained some movement in 2002 a bogus experiment linked MDMA with Parkinson’s disease in monkeys. This was found false due to a labeling error in the lab where the monkeys had been given SPEED by mistake. Later research even discovered that MDMA actually had the potential to REVERSE the deadly disease. Alas it was too little too late and the miracle drug was lumped in with the likes of heroin and cocaine among other unfavorable characters. Not long after however the U.S. government allowed a pilot study into post traumatic stress syndrome where it showed truly remarkable results for people suffering traumas, rape victims, and those with fatal diseases deal with there anxiety and depression. MDMA was the club drug that longed to lead a straight life....
Part 2 coming soon.
*College Times does not advocate nor encourage our readers to consume illegal substances.
