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.

Recent Stories