What Nobody Tells You About: Ecstasy

Ecstasy is a popular drug despite the dangerous aspects of it. It gives a euphoric feeling and makes you feel more connected with everyone and everything around you. Those are the good aspects but for someone that's never taken it that's about the most you're going to know about it other than what you hear in school. Here are some things you might not know about it.

1. How it works.

Ecstasy works along the serotonin pathway, a series of nerves in your brain. The serotonin pathway runs along the regions that control things like your mood, ability to sleep, your memory, emotions and appetite. It also runs along the spinal chord so when the feel good chemical serotonin is released it goes through your nervous system stimulating said regions of the brain and the nerves in your body. Without staying on the sciency stuff, this is why everything feels enhanced and you might see someone stroking another persons face for about twenty minutes. Their sense of time has gone out the window and they both really enjoy how it feels.

2. It's borrowed happiness.

After taking it there's about four or five hours of feeling great but as soon as it starts to wear off you begin the comedown. Seeing this from a sober perspective is a hard thing to understand. They've been talking for hours about complete shit but now their eyes have become glassy and dead and it's hard to get a word out of them. This is because their body has used up it's reserves of serotonin. Their body has essentially used up all of it's good feelings and now it's a slow descent into zombification.

3. The comedown is akin to depression.

Your body has depleted it's supply of a chemical that makes you feel good, most users report a feeling of extreme lows or depression after taking ecstasy. The time it takes for your body to replenish it's supply of serotonin and this feeling to end depends on a couple factors like how much they took, their diet, health and any existing mental health disorders. Depending on these factors it can take between two days and a week to return to normal. Regular users report that the feeling of depression can last a lot longer than that. Ecstasy is basically having an extremely fun time for a few hours in exchange for nearly a week of skaggy depression. It's basically this face and feeling for up to a week.

4. The first time is always going to be the best.

It's all downhill from there. There's only a certain amount of times people can take ecstasy before they become accustomed to the feeling, even if they are months apart. This leads to people taking more and more to get back to their initial high which doesn't come back. If you take it something important to remember is that it's not going to be as good, you'll come down faster and harder from there on.

5. The side effects.

Because your brain and nerves are hyper stimulated you get a couple of side effects you mightn't have known. Everyone gets a sore jaw from it, you can feel your teeth and you need to chew for a couple hours. It's not uncommon to wake up with a mouth cut to shit because you've been chewing your cheek all night. You'll sweat a lot more plus you'll really want to dance making it worse so you experience a lot of dehydration. It's common for people to throw up because of it. There's not much warning because you don't get a sick feeling and your gag reflex is suppressed so it comes on all of a sudden. Because the area affecting your memory and the rest of your brain is being fucked with you lose a lot of what happened while you were on it. It also drives your libido wild. When everyone feels so great, so connected and so in love with everything that's when shit gets weird. Because of this it's sometimes a good thing "pilly willy" exists. You'll be really horny but it's almost impossible to get an erection, especially to maintain it. Also oral is a bad idea on pills....ya know, cos of the uncontrollable chewing.

6. There's hundreds of different types.

Initially I thought it was all just one cut and dry recipe to make ecstasy but there's hundreds of different types of the drug that affect you in different ways. Some have a intense highs and gradual comedowns, others make you come up slowly and then drops to a comedown really harshly. All of them are named after some pop culture reference or have buzz word names, along with a little image pressed into them for some reason. This is where pills are dangerous because you have no idea what's gone into them and there's no form of regulation. Often in the drug taking groups you'll hear about a dodgy batch of monkey's or mitsubishi's etc. going around.

7. The addiction.

When you're hearing about it in school they tell you all about the effects of drugs and how addictive they are. What they don't tell you, and what's really hard to grasp about addiction is that it's a gradual process. After taking one for the first time the very last thing you wanna do is take another one immediately. Rather, it's a couple months down the line when you look back at the experience you had and decide to take another. You're taught to fear drugs because of their instant addiction ability. It's the wrong way to approach it, in reality you're going to find that you want one a couple weeks later, and the same after. You think because they're months apart and you can handle the skag the day after you have it under control. Instead your tolerance goes up and you can handle more at once. Eventually it's no problem to take them every couple days and you've become accustomed to the comedown, and stop having fun without them.