EXPERIENCING ECSTASY

MDMA is different from all the drugs that came before it -- which
explains why it has become the fastest-growing illegal substance in
America.

How Bad It Is to Be 20 Years Old

The pill was white and smelled like No-Doz. Although it had come to us
in the mail inside a tennis ball, it was legal then, fresh from a lab
in Texas. No rumors, no culture surrounding it. We took it on a whim,
on blind faith -- because it was Saturday and there was nothing better
to do. It was late afternoon, warm for November in New Hampshire.

Starting that day in 1984, and until May 1986, I ate Ecstasy, once or
sometimes twice a month. During that same time I realized that the
plan I'd made for my life (I was 20 years old) was useless. I kind of
woke up. I didn't start wearing flowers in my hair, but I got more
excited to live, made a new plan that felt freer -- a plan that sent
me in the right direction. And I still wonder what the drug had to do
with that. Maybe nothing. (How can a drug do anything for you?
Generally I hate drugs. I don't even take Advil.) It's impossible to
say. But because it was inside my noodle, I can't separate out the
Ecstasy.

I went to U.N.H., a crummy state school in the middle of some cow
fields. A guy named Kelly called from S.M.U. in Texas. He went to high
school with my friends Jim and Carl. Over the summer, S.M.U. had gone
dry. But the student body had found something to replace liquor, Kelly
said. The bars were full of people on a drug called Ecstasy. "I want
to send you something that's going to change your life," he said.

It was my junior year. I had a B-minus average and zits on my face.
I'd already moped halfway to graduation. I was majoring in philosophy
because I didn't know what to study. I didn't know what I'd do after
college; I had no plans other than a vague idea that I would be a
zillionaire by age 30. I spent most of my energy getting ready to go
out and party. I didn't find solace in school or books or sports. I
didn't have a trust fund or parents who pushed me to achieve. I had a
record collection and a floor clogged with dirty laundry. On Thursday,
Friday and Saturday nights I rubbed on a cologne called Drakkar Noir
and drank 10 beers. During the week I fell into such black moods that
friends steered clear of me.

Sigma Beta was my frat. At our house, intellectual stimulation was
subordinate to the pledge program. Do you know that you can pull
someone around on a wet floor using just a toilet plunger suctioned
onto his head? I spent my time demanding squat thrusts and smearing
mustard on the heads of blindfolded, scared freshmen. Alcohol-fueled
brawls were common. We had a black belt named Ray ready to jump in and
pound people. I'd personally been in two fistfights. Both times I was
bigger; both times I froze so they could punch me. I had nothing I
could imagine fighting for.

I had no hobbies other than weightlifting. (I could bench 240!) But I
had money from my summer job delivering auto parts, and because I came
from New York, I had cosmopolitan tastes that set me apart. I was
social chairman of the fraternity -- I ordered the kegs -- and was
popular, an outgoing member of the Greek system. I had a Nastassia
Kinski poster on my wall that blew everybody away. I was angry,
sarcastic, lost.

The first time I took Ecstasy, I was in my room in Sigma Beta
fraternity, second floor, facing the street. My girlfriend, Carol, and
a bunch of friends had gathered to try it. We put on the Beatles'
"white album" and swallowed the pills; after a while the effect
trickled in. The six or seven of us were talking as though we hadn't
had a chance to see one another in a year. I felt happier than I'd
been 10 minutes before. A half-hour later a feeling came over me
somewhere between the looseness that follows a good workout and the
euphoria of winning the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. I sat
there rubbing my arm and thought, "This is the softest sweater in the
universe." (In that first wave, as the drug comes on, sensory
awareness balloons.)

Inside the gerbil treadmill that is my brain, I stopped and blinked,
exhaled and looked around. My mind was clear. "I am so happy," I
thought. Although I wouldn't have rushed to operate heavy machinery, I
didn't feel stoned or daydreamy. Unlike classic psychedelics, MDMA --
or, as it's known to scientists, methylenedioxymethamphetamine --
doesn't disrupt your basic sense of who you are. You barely even feel
weird. Also, it doesn't scramble your external perceptions, except
that soft things feel softer, music sounds better. It was in no way
hallucinogenic. With Ecstasy, I had simply stepped outside the worn
paths in my brain and, in the process, gained some perspective on my
life. It was an amazing feeling.

Small inconsistencies became obvious. "I need money, I have a $500
motorcycle that I'm too scared to ride, so why not sell it?" So did
big psychological ones: "The more angry I am at myself, the more
critical I am of my girlfriend. Why should I care how Carol chews her
gum?" Ecstasy nudges you to think, very deeply, about one thing at a
time. (It wasn't that harsh LSD feeling, where every thought seems
like an absurd paradox -- like the fact that we're all, deep down,
just a bunch of monkeys.) I yawned once or twice, but it didn't
presage sleepiness. I felt like some reptile quadrant of my brain had
been soothed. My emotions, my memory, my sense of smell -- they were
all as accessible as a photo album on my lap. I stared at Carol,
transfixed by her eyes. I found myself in possession of this capacity
to accept all of her, and all human frailty.

Everybody opened up. Scott, my weightlifting partner, swung his arm
over my shoulder and squeezed me to him and thanked me for being his
friend. My roommate, Tom, brought me a glass of water, and his
thoughtfulness rocked me to my soul. We all just talked. Carol said
her mother was thinking of joining A.A. Tom realized he loved a
passage from a business-admin book so much he had to read it to us.
Dave's mom had recently been the victim of a violent assault; he'd
already told me about it briefly, but here he ran through the event
and his reactions to it un-self-consciously, letting go of the
humiliation and awkwardness. This was the beginning of a long night of
feeling uncharacteristically undefensive, comfortable and kind.

And: all afternoon, all night, I didn't hate myself.

People have turned to mind-altering substances since the beginning of
time in search of enlightenment. But while many other drugs, from
ayahuasca to nitrous oxide, produce euphoria, Ecstasy creates not just
a rush but a singular kind of emotional elevation -- you are launched
on a hot-air balloon ride that floats over the pitfalls of typical
humanity. The what ifs, the self-doubts, are knocked flat, and instead
a hunger for human connection and a desire to empathize firmly take
hold. No other drug produces this kind of feeling. That day I had a
tingling awareness that something important was happening inside me: a
bubbling birth of new wonder. The slate of lifelong guilt was being
gently wiped clean. I'd discovered something new, something that
worked, and I'd found it without adult supervision. All of my neck,
back, shoulder, elbow and knee pain from weightlifting injuries
vanished. Ecstasy's a powerful analgesic.

It's also a whopper of an antidepressant. Whereas Prozac-type SSRI
antidepressants keep your brain from emptying reservoirs of serotonin
too quickly, Ecstasy floods your brain with the stuff. Proponents say
it improves memory, which may explain why you feel so connected to the
continuum of your life. A subtle, purifying something descends like a
cool cotton blanket. You feel restored, energized. MDMA is chemically
related to amphetamines, so it raises your heart rate, blood pressure
and body temperature slightly. You're warm. You're not hungry. Your
mouth turns as dry as the dust on a Las Vegas rooftop parking lot.
Eventually, you start grinding your jaw so tightly you'd need a
jackhammer to open it, and your head is sore the next day from the
grinding. But at the time, you're not really aware of these odd side
effects. You have everything you need. Just breathing is really good
on this stuff.

My friends and I walked outside and sat out on the grass in front of
Sigma Beta fraternity and watched the sunset as the crowds from the
football game that had just ended flooded across campus. I felt
flawless love for my friends, down to their barracuda jackets and
college perms and bad New England accents.

I had nostalgia for the moment I was living. I experienced a kind of
wordless glory. This was the best I'd ever felt in my life. The static
passing of a Saturday afternoon had been broken.

You'll Never Forget Your First Time

Today Ecstasy comes in a hundred different colors and sizes, churned
out pneumatically from underground factories in the Netherlands run by
international criminal organizations. While consumption of drugs like
cocaine and marijuana among American teenagers has stabilized in the
last decade, Ecstasy's popularity has increased exponentially. Last
year, United States customs officials seized 9.3 million pills. In
1997, they seized 400,000 pills.

I live in Washington, and over the past several months I've met people
in this area who are experimenting with Ecstasy the way I once
experimented with beer: alone, at home, with chips and salsa on a
Tuesday afternoon. I've met 14-year-olds who took it on a bus ride to
the Everglades; college-age kids tripping in small groups at home;
ravers floating all night on Ecstasy at dance clubs; and a doctor and
a P.R. exec, both in their late 30's, married with children, who hired
a band and bought 40 hits for a friend's backyard barbecue. In the
last 15 years, Ecstasy has acquired a complicated history, becoming
the central ingredient in a huge underground movement. It has become,
variously, a kinder and gentler party lube, an explosive catalyst in
the search for meaning of life, as well as just another druggie escape
fantasy. It has ruined some people's lives.

There is a wealth of scientific evidence suggesting that Ecstasy, in
high doses, will alter neurons in the brain in the short term and,
potentially, for life. And though much more research is needed to
ascertain the functional consequences of these brain changes, in some
tests, heavy users demonstrated a reduced ability to solve complex
problems on intelligence tests and showed signs of short-term memory
loss. Scientists also suspect that Ecstasy messes with the
serotonergic nerve network to the extent that it might permanently
lower serotonin levels, thus harming a person's ability to feel
happiness. It's known among users that acute despair can follow the
days after an X trip. (That never happened to me, but for a couple of
hazy, happy days while coming down, I had trouble coming up with the
right vocabulary word, anything over two syllables.)

Almost universally, a better self emerges that first time you take
Ecstasy. But replicating that experience is close to impossible. The
impact attenuates over time. I recently spoke to a Hollywood filmmaker
who described his first Ecstasy experience as profound and
life-changing. It helped make him more expressive -- with friends,
with actors. But after chasing that initial high for a couple months,
every other weekend, he stopped. "Very quickly the highs were getting
more muted, and the comedown was becoming more evident and more
miserable," he said.

Users consistently describe that initial high as one of the greatest
experiences of their lives. Jennie, 20, is a college student who lives
in upstate New York. We met during a December visit she made to
Washington. She has the delicate features and fair complexion of a
folk-music princess. The first time she took Ecstasy, she told me, was
a year ago. It inspired deep reflections. "I decided that one day I'd
have children," she said, with striking frankness. "Before, I really
did not think I was going to have children. I didn't think I'd be a
very good mother, because I'd been kind of physically and mentally
abused by my father. But then I realized, 'I'm going to love my
children and I'm going to take care of them,' and my decision didn't
change afterward." She also says that on her first Ecstasy trip, she
began to forgive her father, realizing that "there's no such thing as
a bad person."

That first rush of empathy and understanding hit Jennie so hard that,
while walking across a park, she felt sorrow for anyone less fortunate
than her: her mother, her confused father, her brother struggling to
stay out of jail. "I even felt bad for the trees," she told me. "I
couldn't believe that we'd put the cement and the sidewalk there to
constrict their growth."

Jennie doesn't go to dance clubs. She doesn't like crowds. She has
never been drunk. She's a fragile young person struggling with a
difficult history. But starting a year ago, Ecstasy thrust some
revelations on her, and since then she has come to understand them
better, which has made her stronger. Maybe she would've stumbled upon
these realizations on her own. Maybe not.

Kyle, 21, a student in Florida and a friend of Jennie's, had heard
amazing stories about Ecstasy, but assumed they were exaggerated. And
he worried that the pills might be fake. Big cities are flooded with
substances sold as Ecstasy, and the difficulty in trying to assess a
specific pill is considerable. If people say the green ones are
supposed to be better, did they mean pale, solid green or flecked with
black? Is it imprinted with a Z, or is that an N? Last year, bunk
pills sold as Ecstasy killed nine people in Chicago and Orlando.

Kyle waited until his sophomore year, taking his first dose in July
1999 with a small group of friends, burdened with expectations. And
yet, he said, "that night I had a very incredible experience." He
explained to me that, before taking Ecstasy, "I had been feeling a
little bit suicidal." No one knew. "I wasn't hospitalized, or in
therapy, but the feeling was there. But that night kind of reopened my
eyes to the world, to see all these new things in it. I was really
excited."

That night Kyle had another epiphany. He had been so furious at having
his car repeatedly broken into that he contemplated sleeping in it
with a weapon so he could catch the next crook in the act and attack
him. But during that night, the anger passed. "I just figured whoever
would do that had no hope. And I let all that go, and it made living
easier." All from a $20 pill.

A potent drug that changes you immediately is a lot to handle when no
one in your family tree knows what the hell it is and society tells
you you're killing yourself and you're an outlaw for doing it.
Especially when you feel, in your heart, that you've stumbled on
something potentially good. You want to share its benefits.

"You know Batman, right?" Kyle said. "He has plenty of money and he
doesn't have to work, so he spends his life fixing the problems of the
world. I've started to think that a real Batman of today would become
a psychiatrist who dispenses Ecstasy. You go out when people are
having a real problem, you fix their problem. Then you go back into
hiding."

Kyle has a squeaky, boyish voice. He's enthralled with computers and
has always had an intuitive feel for them. He's got big plans for the
future and a new outlook. But lately, he's excited about the new
freedom in his head; using that techie mind that made him an adept
computer hacker as a kid, he's working on maintaining the perfect high
over whatever length of time, from six hours to three days. This isn't
exactly the spiritual-enlightenment thing. "I guarantee you, sometime
in the next two years, I will plan out an actual experience where it's
not just about fun," he promised. "It'll be about growing up or
learning something. But when I use it now it's just for
recreation."

For Kyle, Ecstasy these days isn't even about lazy self-reflection.
"Most of the time I stay at home and have a great time with friends,"
he said. "We don't talk much. We do things to each other to make each
other feel good -- not sexual things, but massaging or going for a
walk or dancing, stuff that doesn't do anything for you when you're
sober, but feels good when you're on Ecstasy."

There are similarities between Jennie and Kyle. Both encountered
Ecstasy while facing personal difficulties. Neither had sought the
help of a shrink or mentor or priest. But while Jennie's taking time
out -- six weeks between Ecstasy trips -- and heeding the process of
introspection, Kyle's just rolling. He's not trying to use Ecstasy as
a way of sorting out his troubles. He's trying to burn them away.

There's something about people like Kyle -- I've met a few -- who
happen to be into technology and drugs. They're still hacking, but
this time, they're hacking into their own minds. They're trying to
beat nature at its own game -- to eliminate personal pain without any
of the stigma or struggle associated with something like therapy. The
goal is on-demand enlightenment. It's about a coconut and a hammer and
a chisel. "With hacking," Kyle told me, "I liked the idea of being
able to do anything I wanted." Now his brain is a code he can break;
access bought cheaply, repeated as often as necessary.

What had Ecstasy become for Kyle? An agent for change, or a method for
escape, self-erasure, a way to annihilate ugly stuff? If he'd already
had a propensity to push uncomfortable feelings under the rug, what
would Ecstasy then become for him? An expensive way of getting blotto?

While Jennie has taken 7 Ecstasy pills over 14 months, Kyle, in the
same time span, has taken 150. "After the first time I did it, I
didn't do it for a month," he recalled. "That's supposed to be the
maximum amount of time you need to build your serotonin back up. The
next time was like three weeks and then was like a week and then it
was like every weekend."

The more aggressively you search for the most profound experience of
your life, the more rigid, narrowing, dispiriting and routine it
becomes. That's how a user like Jennie becomes a user like Kyle. In
his book "The Natural Mind," Dr. Andrew Weil writes: "The chief
advantage of drugs is that they are quick and effective, producing
desired results without requiring effort. Their chief disadvantage is
that they fail us over time; used regularly and frequently, they . . .
limit our options and freedom."

Every once in a while Jennie and her boyfriend, and maybe another
friend or two, take Ecstasy. They talk about fixing up the apartment,
going to grad school. While tripping, Jennie usually runs into those
hurdles from her past: the beatings, other insidious abuse. "Growing
up, I was one of those dorky kids people made fun of," she told me.
"Ecstasy helped me understand other people and interact across
boundaries I may not have otherwise." When we met, she cried for a
moment, telling me about it, and then sat up straight and winked, as
if to say she'd been through this before and survived.

During her time on Ecstasy, Jennie has ventured into some pretty dark
places. Despite that, she's been able to keep the drug at arm's
length, while using it to face the real world head-on. Kyle, who knows
the risk of dosing in an unventilated dance club, hasn't been so
lucky. He'll tell you it's not addictive -- though he takes three
pills in a night. For all those blissful weekends, he doesn't even
seem happy. He's alternately euphoric and agitated. He might be better
off seeing a counselor on campus to get some of that same feeling of
enlightenment. As for how MDMA has affected his brain, it's not clear.
There might not be any downside to taking it as much as he has -- or
he might be brain-damaged.

"There's no doubt," Kyle said, "that if you compare the first time you
take Ecstasy and the hundredth time, you're going to have had a better
experience the first time. Is it because you're doing damage to your
brain, or because of tolerance? Or is it that the first time you don't
know what's going to happen, and it blows you away because it's new?"

Does It Turn Your Spine Into Mango Chutney?

Scientists justify the criminalization of ecstasy by saying that it
kills, but given the massive amounts being ingested around the world
in what must be the worst environment possible -- a hot club with an
inadequate drinking-water supply can cause a user to experience
dehydration, organ failure, brain damage -- comparatively few users
end up in the hospital. In 1999, 554,000 people ended up in the
emergency room for problems related to cocaine, heroin and other
drugs. Fewer than 3,000 went to the emergency room because of Ecstasy.

Inspired by the fear of an epidemic, government and health
institutions have, since 1985, spent millions to pinpoint the
destructive action of the drug. In one series of studies, rats and
monkeys given large and/or repeated doses of Ecstasy showed a partial
loss of serotonin neurons -- specifically, the sites that reabsorb
serotonin after it has been transmitted. George A. Ricaurte, one of
the researchers involved in these studies, has concluded that even one
dose of MDMA can lead to permanent brain damage.

Such alarmist conclusions haven't exactly convinced users. "In the
beginning," Kyle recalled, "I would go to the National Institute on
Drug Abuse home page and read what they'd have to say about it and
then I'd compare it to my own experience. It's so far off that
basically -- and I think a lot of kids do this -- I lost faith in what
the U.S. government had to say about Ecstasy."

Back in 1985, false rumors of side effects from Ecstasy doing terrible
things to you were circulated. The first one I heard was that Ecstasy
liquifies your spine, an idea that impinged on my delight. The second
one was that it caused Parkinson's. Neither one has turned out to be
true (so far). But I remember waking up and thinking, "Hey, my spine
hasn't liquefied yet!" I remember touching my back to check, and then
making jokes about it at breakfast. "Watch out, my spine is still soft!"

I'm not saying that MDMA is good for your body. In high doses, it
clearly makes physical changes in the serotonergic nerve network of
the brain. But no one knows yet what such changes mean in terms of
human behavior. According to a recent study in Brain Research,
Prozac-style antidepressants produce some morphological abnormalities
in the serotonin nerve network of rats that resemble changes seen with
Ecstasy taken in high levels. Yet few people advocate the banning of
Prozac.

Meanwhile, no serious science has been done on the kind of periodic
dosages of Ecstasy I took, a little more than once a month. (In one
study, researchers gave monkeys and rats, over four days, an amount of
Ecstasy equivalent to what I ate in six months.) I heard rumors of
data from the well-known Ricaurte studies that may well be significant
- -- about a "no effect" finding in low-dose users -- but these data
have never been published, either because they're wrong or flawed or
who knows why.

You can wreck your liver and die on a bottle of Tylenol. Too much
aspirin causes gastrointestinal bleeding. Too much lithium damages
your thyroid and kidney. The point is that it matters how much you
take of a drug. There's a saying in medicine: the difference between a
poison and a cure is the dose.

Can Ecstasy ever be a medicine, an aid to serious therapeutic
investigations? Some doctors think so. Richard Yensen, a Maryland
therapist who in the 1970's gave a drug similar to Ecstasy to his
patients, has written, "MDMA comes as close as possible to
psychotherapy in a pill." How much different is Ecstasy than legal
psychotropic drugs -- and would some mildly depressed people be better
off taking Ecstasy once in a while than Prozac every day for years? To
address these questions, a few human experiments with MDMA have taken
place. A government-approved study in Spain has just begun in which
Ecstasy is being offered to treat rape victims for whom no treatment
has worked, based on the premise that MDMA "reduces the fear response
to a perceived emotional threat" in therapy sessions. A Swiss study in
1993 yielded positive anecdotal evidence on its effect on people
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And a study in
California may soon begin in which Ecstasy is administered to
end-stage cancer patients suffering from depression, existential
crises and chronic pain. The F.D.A. will be reviewing the protocol for
Stage 2 of the trial; results are expected in 2002.

In general, two big problems with Ecstasy have been ascertained. One
is that Ecstasy is not always MDMA. Manufacturing MDMA requires a
stable laboratory condition, and impure samples can be lethal. The
other problem is hyperthermia, particularly for ravers. MDMA gives you
tons of energy to dance for five straight hours, raises your body
temperature and causes dehydration. Though you're not hallucinating,
you're so swept up in that terrific sense of well-being that you don't
feel as though you're overheating, even when you are. And if you drink
too much water to quench that terrific thirst, you can die from
thinned-out blood. This is what killed Leah Betts, an 18-year-old
Englishwoman, in 1995. She took just one hit of Ecstasy at home, then
over the next few hours proceeded to drink around three liters of
water. In effect, she drowned herself.

The Conversion Experience

For me, there was life before Ecstasy, and then there was life after
Ecstasy. I had more confidence and a sense of stability that I hadn't
had before.

First came little changes, like eating brown rice. Then came the big
ones, like making friends with a Franciscan monk from one of my
theology classes, sitting and talking with him on a Friday afternoon
where before I was too busy getting primed.

Over the next few months I began asking my professors out to lunch.
One of them gave me a book, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." I read
it, and then, like Malcolm X in solitary confinement, I read the
dictionary, beginning with "aardvark." The Ecstasy feeling stuck
around for the weeks between trips. My normal depressive responses to
life were ablated by this strong medicine, and it helped me function.

I applied to the Peace Corps, and explained why to my father. He
agreed with my logic, which was a major event. I went to films on
American involvement in El Salvador. I went to the Way of the Peaceful
Warrior Weekend Retreat.

One day, fumbling around my room, unprepared and late for class, I
smashed my funny bone on a bookcase. Every family has a chosen method
for self-destruction; the temper tantrum was ours. Stuff like this had
been happening to me all my life -- I'd smack into some inanimate
object, then lose control. This time, after losing it, I reacted
differently. I had known a better state of mind while on Ecstasy, and
it raised my standards. I untied my shoes, turned off the lights,
closed the shades and lit a candle. I sat there with my legs crossed
and breathed deeply and felt different.

Five months after my first trip, I made copies of an article about
Ecstasy and posted them on the bulletin board of my fraternity, above
a sign that read: "Any questions? Ask Klam." I bought a bunch of pills
to sell. It wasn't about making money. I was bringing my emotionally,
spiritually enfeebled fraternity brothers real love, better
friendships.

But I wasn't the only one saving the world. The drug had now swept
through college campuses all over the country. The fervor in Dallas
caught Senator Lloyd Bentsen's attention. He asked the D.E.A. to
invoke an emergency ban under the Controlled Substances Act, which
made headlines, and created the sense of a deadly epidemic. In June
1985, MDMA was put in Schedule 1, the most restrictive category ("no
currently acceptable medical use," "high potential for abuse"),
alongside heroin.

So now it was illegal. But I couldn't keep quiet about it. I made my
brother do it. He liked it, but I really wanted my parents to take it.
I loved them too much to leave them out in the cold.

My mom nodded, sitting at the kitchen table, a clownish smile of
disbelief. My sister stared at me. My dad laughed in my face. "How did
you go from suffering and miserable, before Ecstasy, to happy all the
time?" he asked.

That summer, with school out of session, I had no drug connection. I
lived in a tiny house by the water in Portsmouth, N.H., and waited on
tables during the day and meditated every night in my closet. I went
to an ashram in upstate New York and learned techniques for breathing.
I worked on my inner observer and reached points where waves of love
washed over me.

See, I'd felt so good on Ecstasy, and I didn't want to go back to the
grimy old me with all my messy inconsistencies. But after my blissful
meditations I had no idea what to do with myself. I'd go get drunk and
eat a pint of ice cream and pass out.

I returned to college. Now that Ecstasy was illegal, the stuff we were
getting was in a capsule and sometimes not as strong. Despite that, I
was so happy when a new shipment of Ecstasy arrived, I would dance
around the house. (I had moved off campus, seven miles away, with some
other guys.) Countless parties followed, riddled with confessions,
blushing, closeness, everybody startlingly open and intelligent, giddy
to talk. We said things to one another we never would have said
without Ecstasy. We were an Ecstasy household.

I remember standing one night in the bathroom as the Ecstasy kicked in
- -- my jaw locked, my mind screaming through endless space, my heart
throbbing -- and brushing my teeth as if I were going to brush them
into diamonds. Scott walked in, bug-eyed, chewing on his lip,
wondering whether this batch of drugs was as good as the last batch.
"Are you psyched?" he asked. "Let me see if your pupils are dilated."

I continued to feed off the sense that my human side had been cured
and I could be cool and change the world. When the weather turned
colder I started knitting a sweater for Carol, because I didn't want
to consume store-bought garbage. I got a little arrogant about
everything. I'd taken a class on feminism that summer, and now I was
attending Take Back the Night marches to show solidarity. I joined
Amnesty International and wrote an article for the school newspaper
speaking out against capital punishment. I promised myself I'd learn
how to ski.

Over the next few months I took Ecstasy with a dozen friends at a
cabin in Maine, at a 10,000 Maniacs concert, on a camping trip. Of
course these subsequent trips didn't match the first time. We started
to keep some weed for the end of the night, to stop the feeling from
leaving, otherwise things might've turned awkward over how happy we'd
been all night. (You're glad but also sheepish the next day for how
warm and squishy you've been.) We'd drink Crystal Light and vodka as
the drug faded and drive to campus and have a whole second party. As
the highs became less intense, I realized Ecstasy wasn't going to be
enough to keep us from floating down to earth after all.

But I had other things to keep me happy. I made trips to the White
Mountains. I began writing poetry and keeping a journal. I bought my
first Laurie Anderson album. I did whatever I wanted, whenever I
wanted, because it was for my spiritual development. I broke up with
Carol, who'd graduated and moved to Boston, realizing it was time to
move on with my life. On the drive back from breaking up, I ate a hit
of Ecstasy.

I never had a bad time on it, and I never felt depressed afterward.
Ecstasy didn't turn bad for me. But it's not that simple.

The Rave

At a Korean restaurant in Annandale, Va., Legba stretched out on the
booth across the table. He's thin and wiry with the narrow, angular
face of a serious boy, a fast-talking, passionate young man eager to
embrace his adult ideals. We were making plans for the rave we'd be
attending a few days later.

Legba is a 21-year-old junior who attends college in Virginia. He grew
up just south of D.C. and has a good-natured disgust for suburban
values. He has an intimidating G.P.A. and talks so quickly he
sometimes swallows half his sentences. Before his first dose of
Ecstasy, he said, he was "a very alienated person." That has changed.
"Since I've started rolling I'm healthier," he said. "I don't smoke, I
don't drink, I exercise, I take vitamins. I've gotten interested in
meditation. This whole scene for me has been the best thing
personally. I've become a better human being. I've become much more
calm, much more considerate. I don't freak out about stupid things
anymore." It was a transformation that seemed to mirror mine.

He was dressed that day in a black shirt, gigantic Illig parachute
pants, dark socks and sneakers. Legba is small, and the pants dwarfed
him. "Back rubs, I love them. Glow sticks, it's all great. Ecstasy is
a very social drug. It's not something that you do and is only
relevant to you. It's like, you do the drug, but by doing it,
everybody else is doing it, too, somehow. It builds community."

Legba is a politically minded guy who says things like, "Founding a
country on a Protestant work ethic is a mind-crime of magnificent
proportions." He used to be an awkward teenager who dressed Goth, ate
too much candy and spent his afternoons spray-painting graffiti. Legba
was a computer hacker like Kyle, but he eventually grew bored with
hacking and got into animation. In 11th grade he got thrown off the
track team because he skipped a meet to attend an anime
Japanese-cartoon convention.

Legba has taken Ecstasy a half-dozen times. "The first parties I went
to were kind of life-changing events," he said, "because people were
totally accepting of everybody, however they looked or danced, and
that completely blew me away." While he said he loved the rave world,
he didn't seem deluded by it. "The rave scene can get a little too
PLUR-y," he joked. (PLUR stands for "Peace, Love, Unity, Respect" and
has become an overused rave mantra.)

Legba seemed to understand the danger inherent in losing himself to a
culture that surrounds a drug: "Some people think that if they take
Ecstasy they will ascend to some heavenly station and stay there for
the rest of their lives. It's sad." He didn't seem to overestimate the
power of it, either. "Ecstasy can't turn a wilfully ignorant mind into
a liberated one. It takes a hunger for liberation." He laughed. "But
I'm not going to lie: I don't do Ecstasy just for liberation. I also
do it to get twisted and have fun."

A week later, Legba and I met up at a rave. Unlike the early
underground scene, this dance party wasn't being held out in a field
somewhere. It was at a Northeast D.C. club called the Edge. Outside
the club, college-age bodies poured out of parking lots, funneled out
of narrow streets. There was an unspoken dress code: huge pants,
goggles, funny wigs, Pokemon backpacks, fuzzy horseprint skirts. The
next generation was ready for the future in nose rings and halter
tops, wearing water bottles on their belt loops. I wondered if I was
the only person here not on X.

At 10:30, Legba and his friend Sarah arrived. They had taken hits of
Ecstasy in the car on the way over; it hadn't kicked in yet for either
of them, but Legba was already wired. He moved like a spring-loaded
marionette, displaying an insomniacal physical energy, dancing a
little. When he bounced, both feet left the ground.

The Edge was a rundown series of linked rooms with a patio in the
back. The front room had some scissoring lasers, black carpeting and
mirrors, and the party's promoters had installed art objects that
night made of skinny balloons and stretched Lycra sculptures with
funny lights moving across them. A long row of bench-seat bleachers by
the entrance was filled with people lying together, lolling and
talking and massaging each other. Across the room four legs emerged
from underneath a mountain of balloons. I looked under there. A girl
dressed like an angel squatted beside a guy's head and gave him a
chiropractic adjustment, twisting his head, cracking his neck, her
cigarette and angel's wings dangling over his face.

"I gotta go dance," Legba said. Under the colored lights he did a kind
of stand-in-place run -- a move I heard somebody describe as "Nordic
Tracking." Then the music sped up and he locked into the groove and
got serious. His ponytail cut through the air behind him.

I headed out to the patio area with its rock garden and Japanese maple
tree. The patio dance floor was where they played techno. I felt this
corny affection welling up for everyone as we danced to awful techno
- -- music that, incidentally, grows on you. We were having a great time.

When I went to clubs at Legba's age, I knew them to be saturated with
alcohol, and I never felt relaxed in one. Aggression and liquor and
cocaine went together and created an air of menace. Here, people were
absurdly nice. We bumped into each other softly. From the girl with
the thing in her nose to the runty boy with the lip ring, there was an
instant familial closeness, a crowd unity.

Up on the deck a bongo-drum circle had formed. Everybody was chatty
and everybody was nice to everyone. We stood up there for an hour and
watched the dance floor fill. Then the deck got more crowded. Along
the fence, and on the ground where earlier you could walk, people sat
cross-legged, knees against their chests. With nowhere to move,
everybody was still smiling.

Sarah made her way over to me. She wasn't crazy about her hit of
Ecstasy. It wasn't strong enough. "My dream is to go to Amsterdam and
get a bunch of pills at $5 apiece and get them back here and sell them
to all my friends," she said.

A young Sikh in a black turban and khakis offered to sell me Ecstasy.
A shirtless guy with long dreadlocks offered to sell me Ecstasy. A
thin white kid with a baseball hat, worn clothes and a burned-out look
offered to sell me Ecstasy.

Bodies poured onto the patio from inside the club. They pushed onto
the deck, and I started to wonder. The deck was made of wood. Maybe it
would fall on everybody underneath us. (Maybe, on Ecstasy, people
bounce?) In front of me, a guy with battery-powered lights attached to
his head bumped into a guy with battery-powered lights taped to his
his vest.

Since the days when I took Ecstasy, this is the third or fourth wave
of popularity. I've always secretly wondered if people ended up taking
Ecstasy at clubs because it cured the claustrophobia, that the club
created the need. But maybe it went the other way: they took Ecstasy
and then drove to a rave because, when the feeling hit, they didn't
want to be sitting in their living rooms having a conversation about
changing the world -- or themselves. Long, drawn-out philosophical
probings are difficult and boring, and you need patience and the
desire to look inside.

No one knows you at a rave. That's the idea. You merge, you're part of
the headless horde. You're certainly not talking about your family and
your hopes and failures. It's just weird dancing and music endlessly
looped in a collective rapture. Soaked with sweat, going till sunrise,
you don't have to listen to the subtle insights you get on Ecstasy,
those thoughts that come as soft as whispers.

Alan Leshner of the National Institute on Drug Abuse tried to warn me
that the spiritual-awakening experience that I had is an anomaly. "I
think it's a very small percentage, maybe 5 percent, who get the kind
of feeling you did," he told me. Of course people took it to get
buzzed, I didn't disagree. But I thought it a spiritually flavored
buzz.

A Web site I consulted called Bluelight.nu has a feature called "pill
reports" and is supposed to be a place for people to gather
information on drugs for the sake of harm reduction. It has hundreds
of entries exhibiting a state of grace, thoughtfully thanking the
makers of MDMA. But it also has a lot of entries that read like this:
"Dropped the first one at 4:20 with my man jimmy kradel. i was rollin
my face off for 4 hours. then I took some right up the nose and it hit
me like mike tyson. we were smokin weed all day too. what a incredible
roll. i smoked 2 packs of newports."

I made my way back to find Legba. After everything I'd read, all the
mountains of warnings against hyperthermia -- overheating on Ecstasy
- -- I was shocked when I got to the jungle room and the temperature
was, easily, nine hundred million degrees. Kids were lying on the
floor, either because they'd died or fainted or because they hoped it
might be cooler down there. The entire club was now a Tokyo subway car
packed at rush hour. You had to put your arms over your head to
squeeze through. In the matter of two hours, this place had become
really uncomfortable -- no place for a spiritual awakening.

Legba and I fought our way back outside and up the stairs to the
wooden deck to get some air. He asked, "How many hugs did you get tonight?"

"None."

"In the old days did you guys used to give each other face massages
and hand massages?"

I tried to explain to him that this was before any massages. We were
six guys living in a house, comfortable with our homophobia; no one
was giving anyone massages. And though there were women who joined us,
we didn't do any touchy-feely stuff. In a moment of empathy, Legba
gave me a hug. I wondered if it was sincere or drug-induced, then felt
rotten for wondering.

He complained that he'd been stalling, stopping and starting, on his
roll, all night. He joked about wanting to becoming an "e-tard," one
of those kids who rolls around on the floor drooling. Maybe his pill
was bunk. He decided to buy another pill. If the stuff was legal, he
complained, this wouldn't happen all the time. I agreed.

But it occurred to me later that Legba had raved the night before. The
problem probably wasn't with the Ecstasy. Scientists argue about how
long it takes the brain to restore normal levels of serotonin; it's
somewhere between three days and seven years, but the problem here
wasn't with shabby Ecstasy manufacturing. A person needed some time to
recover between trips. The problem that night was in Legba's brain.

A joint was passed. After Legba took a drag the passer mentioned that
it had been laced with PCP.

"Oh, great," Legba said. For the next hour he had blurred vision and
felt like his head "was encased in aluminum" before the drug's
short-lived effects wore off.

He took another hit of Ecstasy at about 2:30 a.m. I went
home.

On the street outside the club I saw three boys in plaid shirts. I'd
noticed them on the way in. Theyy were moving slowly now, hands in
their pockets, their heads down -- nothing moves more slowly than a
perfectly healthy young man with no girl and no more ideas at the end
of the night. But there's community in that, right? In being miserable
together. One guy leaned over, his shoulder sagging, and stared at
something on the sidewalk for a long time. You learn a lot about life
when your dreams don't come true, when nothing works out the way you
planned.

I thought of how the summer after I graduated from college, I gave
Ecstasy up for good. After that I quit drinking alcohol. I'd gained
total control over my politics, my body, the New Hampshire mountain
ranges, my own rapture. I remember the last time I did take Ecstasy, a
few weeks after graduation, a fellow house painter gave me a free hit.
I went to a Harrison Ford movie that night. I don't remember the movie
or the feeling of the drug. By then, the novelty had worn off.

As I drove home from the rave, this song by Nine Inch Nails, called
"Broken," came on the radio. It's an amazing song. It's enlightening
and at the same time it's terrible -- it assaults you with sounds, as
though you'd put a conch shell up to your ear to listen to a jet
engine warming up. As you listen to it, it undoes all the music you
ever heard before. It erases it. Every once in a while it's good to
listen to "Broken"; it's hypnotic. But if you listen to it over and
over again, you'll fry your listening gene. Built into the
enlightening quality of it is this power to remove the ability to hear
it.

Legba left the Edge at 4:30 a.m. He'd forgotten his key in Sarah's car
and had to ring the doorbell when he got home. His mom let him in. It
was so late, but maybe the Ecstasy was working a little magic because
at the threshold there Legba insisted that he and his mother hug. She
told him to go right to bed. He demanded. She pulled rank and ordered
him to get moving.

Legba grew up in a small, lovely red house surrounded by trees, beside
a church. Now, after being buffeted for hours by hurricanes of
throbbing techno bass, shuddering astral hisses, a monsoon of sound
amid a deluge of bodies, kids grinning into their shoes that they'd
found it, the nirvana Tim Leary dangled in front of another generation
- -- now, after a long night on the cusp of revelation, at 5 in the
morning, the house was awfully quiet in comparison. Legba didn't need
to go to bed yet, and like any good evangelist at sunrise, he kept
reaching out, this time to the only living thing that would let him
near -- the family bird. He tried to talk to the cockatiel, Chippie.
Dr. Doolittle opened the cage door and tried to grab it. He felt that
love, undeniable, universal, blind. Legba tried to hug Chippie, more
gently now, so as not to scare it. The bird screamed. It thrashed at
him, it tried to bite and claw him. There was nothing left, nothing
else to swallow or smoke or love, there was nowhere to go now. He gave
up, there in Mom's kitchen, and went to bed.