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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
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?
Jul 30, 2003 | It was the best X of my life.
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.
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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.
