COUNTDOWN TO ECSTASY- PART ONE OF THREE

I Feel Love I'm sitting in one of the myriad coffee shops on Congress
Avenue -- slouching, actually; it's a sunshiney spring Saturday
morning, and the previous night keeps doubling back on me. Blending
with the almost imperceptible ambient babble from the shop's other
customers is the voice of the young man seated across from me. His
hair is jet black, cut close to the bone, accenting his crystalline
blue eyes. From his medium build to his flaming A.D. 1 trainers, he
could be any thirtysomething semipro something-or-other you see
crowding downtown Austin every day of the week.

Right now, though, he's reeling off his current lot in life: 32 years
old, University of Texas graduate, single, emotionally and physically
stable, successful in a Austin-based dot-com startup company making
God knows what.

"Utterly normal," he tells me.

We're here this morning, he and I, to discuss his former drug of
choice, Ecstasy, or if you're a chemical engineer,
3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. This guy, this normal-as-the-day-is-long
guy is flashing back to his first Ecstasy trip: May 1985, before the
drug went Schedule I, before "America's War on Drugs," before many of
the current crop of Ecstasy users were even born.

As he begins taking me back to that almost mythical first time, his
voice ratchets upward in tone, the words coming quicker, excited at
the recounting of such an obviously glorious experience. His body
language echoes his words. Between swallows from an oversized mug of
cappuccino, this is his story:

"Some friends of mine and I had gone down to the Lizard Lounge --
where that retro club Polly Esther's is now -- wanting to try some
Ecstasy. We wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The word was
that it was just, you know, very cool stuff. Very safe, not too
trippy. Fun. My girlfriend scored some pills, these large whitish
tablets, like horse pills almost, from some guy that was just selling
them right there on the street in front of the club. I mean right out
in the open -- $12 a pop.

"So we get the stuff and go into the club, buy some orange juice and
chew/swallow/chase. Nasty, nasty flavor. Horrible. After that, we kill
some time dancing, walking around, just sitting there waiting for the
stuff to do whatever it was going to do. We were nervous, too, but
everyone had assured us that this was a cool place to do it.

"After about half an hour or so, my girlfriend and I went outside to
the alley across from what's now the Alamo [Drafthouse] Theatre and
sat down. And I vividly remember -- like it was yesterday -- sitting
on a little, like, gas main that was mounted against the wall at the
mouth of the alley, with people going by, drag queens, students, and
suddenly being very, very conscious of my vision becoming amazingly
good.

"The street lights got brighter, I could see the stars, car lights,
even the shadows in this alley were, you know, moreso. And I felt this
tingle that began in my fingers and spread all over my body, coming in
waves, just this indescribable feeling of aliveness.

"It was if the nerves in my skin had been dormant all these years and
were just now waking up and stretching. Just like that. And after this
initial rush of pleasure came an overwhelming -- and I mean
over-fucking-whelming -- feeling of total and complete positivity. Any
and all fears I had harbored about doing my first drug were waylaid
instantly. It was pure bliss, but it didn't knock me off my feet, or
feel scary in any way.

"My girlfriend -- who was right there with me -- and I went back
inside the club and told our friends we were going for a walk. We
spent the next four, five hours just walking around downtown Austin.
We went to the banks of Town Lake and lay in the wet grass and watched
the stars and cuddled. And we talked. We talked for hours. We talked
about everything. Everything. It was probably the best, most open and
honest conversation I've ever had with anyone in my entire life.

"And then a few hours later we kind of plateaued out on this drug
experience, went home, and ended up staying together for almost our
whole college career. Which is not something you find too often in
freshman couples, you know? I suppose that wasn't due to doing this
drug, right, but it didn't hurt the situation at all.

"It was a life-changing experience. And I mean, like, for the
better."

Thrills, Pills, and Bellyaches

Those are heady words, ones that are repeated ad infinitum wherever people
talk about Ecstasy. There are more grinny, happy X-tales floating around
Austin than there are wannabe filmmakers. Sometimes it seems like everyone
here, at one point or another, has tried Ecstasy, "X," "E," whatever you
choose to call it, at least once. They've had the better part of two decades
to do it in after all. Ecstasy has been around Austin since it arrived from
New York, via Dallas nightclub the Starck, in 1984. And despite everything --
the DEA's war on drugs, rampant scare stories, and obvious misuse, overuse,
and outright abuse -- it's still very much here in the midst of the live
music capital of the world, fueling all-night parties, love-ins, and
clandestine husband-and-wife emotional therapy sessions.

Since the early Nineties, with the birth of Austin's
electronica/dance, music/rave culture, the little love drug that could
has become a multimillion dollar illegal industry for its shadowy
manufacturers, who typically hail from south of the border,
California, and, you guessed it, Amsterdam.

No cultural group has been more closely identified with Ecstasy,
however, than the raver kids, those DJ-knob-twiddling wearers of
monstrously baggy trousers who run fun-riot over assorted local venues
on the weekends, dancing for hours on end to the sweaty, propulsive
rhythms of house, jungle, drum-n-bass, speed garage, and trance.

Yet while ravers as a cultural group are indeed very active in the
Texas Ecstasy community, they're hardly the only ones. It should go
without saying that just being a raver doesn't automatically mean a
person has ever tried Ecstasy, or ever plans to, or is anything other
than a model citizen with a wardrobe full of preposterously oversized
outerwear.

The spectrum of current and former Ecstasy users runs the gamut from
the above-mentioned anonymous urban professional and his friends to
nearly any type of person you might find on a Sixth Street Friday
night, from fraternity and sorority types to punks and upscale
clubgoers. Plenty of shiny happy people have crowded local 24-hour
eateries after 2am for years now than can possibly be explained by two
martinis and a quickie in a club restroom.

Naturally, it takes all types to fuel an ongoing movement like the
country's Ecstasy boom, though the majority of users spoken to for
this article tend to be college-educated, thoughtful, and well-spoken
individuals. Despite its current standing as a federal Schedule I
drug, which places it right alongside heroin and cocaine in terms of
illegality, Ecstasy attracts the intellectual, creative types who find
the idea of nodding off in a pool of their own vomit or jittering like
a nic-fit reprobate all night somewhat off-putting. It's a party drug
that's frequently shared by couples, alone and at home.

It's also the focus of an increasing amount of media attention these
days. Recent studies have concluded that long- and short-term use of
the drug may impede the brain's neural transmitters in charge of
releasing serotonin and dopamine, chemicals responsible for memory,
sleep patterns, and emotional highs and lows.

The story of Ecstasy and its arrival in Austin in the early Eighties
is an epic tale of late-night debauchery, high-flying club life, and
one very disgruntled Drug Enforcement Agency. It's also irrevocably
tied to this city's vital electronic music scene, though as before,
the tale of the tablet is less about dance-club culture than the
emergence of a whole new strata of cultural subgenres. And as befits
an age where the world appears to be on the cusp of a massive global
technological revolution, Ecstasy advocates (along with their
detractors) are becoming a noticeable presence on the Net.

Where did it all begin? Listen up. Class is in session.

Everything Starts With an 'E'

Germany, 1912: the Great War had yet to begin, Kaiser Wilhelm was still
looking flash in his pointed hat and epaulet combo, and the little
pharmaceutical company known as Merck was busily cranking out a new breed of
psychotropic drugs, having previously given the world the one-two sucker
punch of morphine and Dilaudid (and by extension, William S. Burroughs).
MDMA, the chemical abbreviation for Ecstasy, received patent number 274.350
one year later and then literally dropped off the drug map for a
half-century. There persists to this day an intriguing rumor of its use
during World War I as a battlefield stimulant. The story has it that German
and American troops, cresting on a euphoric wave of MDMA, laid down their
weapons for a little while and had a party. Wishful thinking, probably, but a
nice story nonetheless.

During the mid-1960s, a California-based biochemistry Ph.D. by the
name of Alexander Shulgin began investigating the long-dormant drug,
eventually severing his ties with the University of California at
Berkeley and his position at Dow Chemicals to study the drug and its
possible medical applications full-time. Shulgin remains the first
documented case of human MDMA use, which he nicknamed "Adam." Like his
pharmacological forerunner Aldous Huxley, Shulgin was never content to
test his theories on lab animals, instead using himself and later wife
Anna, close friends, and research assistants. What Shulgin discovered
during his 30-odd years studying the drug (he died in 1981 just as
ecstacy began infiltrating the counterculture) was that MDMA had keen
applications in the field of psychotherapy.

During the mid-Sixties and throughout the Seventies, more than a
half-million supervised doses of MDMA were given to patients by their
psychotherapists. In tightly controlled, clinical settings, physicians
administered MDMA to a wide variety of patients. Whether their
subjects were afflicted with depression, marital strife,
post-traumatic stress disorder, terminal illness, or just general
mental unhealth, doctors discovered that the drug broke down barriers
to communication. By all accounts it appeared to be a wonder drug.

None other than than counterculture guru Timothy Leary sagely chimed
in on the possibility of the drug's future misuse, saying "no one
wants a Sixties situation to develop where sleazy characters hang
around college dorms peddling pills they falsely call XTC to lazy
thrill-seekers." Of course, that's exactly what eventually happened.
Leary, never one to discount the benefit of unproven pharmaceuticals,
married his wife Barbara in 1978 just days after their first shared
"XTC" experience.

By the early Eighties, both the American political climate and the
drug itself were undergoing massive changes. Jimmy Carter's folksy
ineffectiveness gave way to the rose-tinted, right-wing fervor of the
Reagan administration. Waiting in the wings, MDMA, commonly known by
the street name Ecstasy by now, was poised to enter mainstream drug
culture.

On the East Coast, in New York City and Boston, at such nightclubs as
the Saint, Studio 54, and the Paradise Garage, gay men took to the
Ecstasy that was being manufactured in city-wide bathtub operations in
numbers unheard of since hippies discovered LSD. For them, it leveled
emotional walls, created a deep, abiding sense of belonging, and
allowed them to dance and party all night long. The previous drugs of
choice, cocaine and poppers, paled in comparison. To top it all off,
it was legal.

And then X found its way to Texas.

The E's of Texas Are Upon You

At 41, Kerry Jaggers is an Austin legend -- his name precedes him wherever he
goes. Compactly built, with thinning, closely cropped hair and piercing blue
eyes, dressed in a tight black Lycra T-shirt and dark trousers, he could pass
for any other former clubgoer cautiously edging his way into middle age.
Calling Jaggers a "former" anything, though, is a mistake. The man who first
DJed Austin's legendary punk and new wave Club Foot, then moved on to help
establish countless other clubbing institutions -- among them Dallas' Starck
Club, Houston's Rich's, Austin's Backstreet, and San Francisco's 1015 Folsom
- -- is still hard at work, taking monthly red-eye flights to assist at various
club locales across the US and the UK. If you want to know when and how
Ecstasy came to Austin, Jaggers is apparently the man to ask.

The high-profile club consultant probably knows more than anyone in
Austin about the early days of the Ecstasy scene and what preceded it.
Back in 1980, while spinning vinyl at Club Foot, he'd fly up to New
York City on the weekends to hang out at a massive, planetarium-themed
gay club known as the Saint (www.thesaint.com), one of several gay
clubs in and around the Village that first danced aboard the Ecstasy
bandwagon.

"The first time I went to the Saint," he says, "everybody was on
Ecstasy. Pure powder. Everywhere.

"The thing about X back then was that it created this feeling that all
my little fears of what anybody might think about me, or what I
thought about them, the negative things -- all that was just gone.
Everybody was there knowing that they would be accepted totally. At
the time, it was legal, so there wasn't even any guilt associated with
it, no fear. It was just something that everybody did, and it was a
beautiful thing."

January, 1984: Jaggers had recently opened the gay club Rich's in
Houston when he was offered a job DJing at the soon-to-open New York
City club Private Eyes. The money was good, he would be close to his
beloved Saint, and the gig seemed rife with possibility, so he packed
up his records and flew to New York.

"Private Eyes was scheduled to open on Memorial Day 1984," he recalls.
"That very day I got a call from my friend Grace Jones, who was
appearing that night with Stevie Nicks at a new club in Dallas called
the Starck, and she promptly flew me down to DJ."

Before Jaggers left New York, he managed to wangle a few ounces of
Ecstasy to take with him to the as-yet-unecstatic state of Texas. The
rest, as they say, is history.

"That's how the whole thing with the Starck began," boasts Jaggers.
"Almost as an afterthought. I'm the man responsible for turning on
Dallas."

From Dallas, it was just a sprint down the I-35 corridor to Austin,
which was soon flooded with the drug. The progressive, party
atmosphere of Austin in fall 1984 was well-suited to Ecstasy's
euphoric high. The drug quickly swept through the already-knowledgeable
gay community, and the club Halls at 404 Colorado St. -- currently
home to Polly Esther's -- became Austin's E nexus. On Thursday nights,
Halls hosted the mobile Club Iguana, and it was here, around the
corner from Voltaire's Bookstore in the heart of Austin's current arts
district, that the Austin Ecstasy scene exploded in one huge grinning
bliss-out.

"You have to remember: There were no ravers in 1985," reminds Jaggers.
"Most of them were in the act of being conceived at the time."

Who were all these people taking the oversized, speckled Ecstasy
wafers?

"At Halls, it was trendy kids, frat rats, and students from UT," he
says. "A lot of yuppies would come by in their BMWs. Halls had been
intended as a gay club, but the gay community didn't take to it as
fast as the owners had hoped, which is why Club Iguana -- this club
within a club -- was started."

Whatever else it may have done, Austin's initial Ecstasy boom
thoroughly warped any and all preconceived gender issues the drug's
newfound audience may have held.

"Frat boys would go out with their girlfriends early in the night,"
recalls Jagger, "do some X, and then at the end of the night, they'd
drop their girlfriends off at home, take another X, and come back to
Club Iguana where they'd then either pick up or get picked up by a
guy. I've heard that story more times than I can remember. Ecstasy
brought down a lot of barriers between a lot of groups."

There are also the persistent apocryphal tales of legions of
forethinking UT chemical engineering and MBA students reaping huge
profits on their Jester Center dorm-bathtub X-manufacturing
operations. There was so much legal Ecstasy around during the spring
of 1985 that well-dressed student dealers were literally hawking their
pills in the street outside Halls, undercutting each other's $12 price
tags, and returning home each night more ecstatic than their
customers, Dockers swollen with cash.

At this point, the Texas state capital might as well have changed its
name from Austin to Super-Happy Fun Town, but already that atmosphere
was doomed. Anyone with half a brain not split from ear to ear with
one huge ridiculous smile could tell that anything this popular --
legal or not -- wouldn't be around much longer. They were right.

The Drug Enforcement Administration had been aware of Ecstasy since
Dr. Shulgin's experiments took off in the early Seventies, but it
wasn't until the drug spilled over into popular use that the agency
began to take real notice. In July of 1984 the DEA opted to begin
proceedings that would place the drug in the Schedule I category of
the Controlled Substances Act, effectively making possession or use --
even within the medical community -- a felony.

Predictably, this didn't sit well with the yuppified street users and
dealers, but more interestingly, the movement toward impending
criminalization of the drug was challenged in open court by a raft of
medical and psychiatric professionals, a move which caught the DEA
completely off guard. The pleas from the medical community to keep the
drug available to licensed therapists and medical professionals were
many, impassioned, and very, very vocal.

Due in no small part to the open-air-market feel of Ecstasy dealing in
Austin and other cities, however, the DEA rushed MDMA into Schedule I
on July 1, 1985, using the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984,
which allowed for "emergency scheduling of any substance deemed to be
a significant threat to the public."

The DEA issued a statement justifying the emergency scheduling, which
mentioned the "open promotion of MDMA as a legal euphoriant through
fliers, circulars, and promotional parties," and noted the almost
certainly lowballed statement that "30,000 dosage units of MDMA are
distributed in Dallas each month."

By all appearances, the party, here, there, and everywhere, was
over.

It's Great When You're Straight ... Yeah!

Appearances can be deceiving, though. In the months after the drug went
Schedule I, an unknown number of Texas-based manufacturers began tinkering
with the molecular structure of MDMA in hopes of bypassing the law by
inventing a new, albeit similar, chemical offshoot. The resulting hybrid,
MDE, was tagged with the street name "Eve" and failed to take off.
Recreational users of Ecstasy found Eve's trippier, mellower high to be a bit
of a letdown, and hardly worth the bother. Like the Edsel, Eve just wasn't
what people were looking for at the time. What they were looking for -- MDMA,
the real deal -- was in short supply. The collegians who had been Austin's
chief source of street-level dealing had returned to their classes at UT once
it became apparent any money they may have made from clandestine
manufacturing would likely be used to hire pricey lawyers once the APD caught
wind of their operations.

Halls and the Lizard Lounge dried up and eventually packed it in,
though this was due as much to changing musical tastes in Austin
nightlife as it was to the sudden lack of the party people's favorite
Scooby Snack.

Part Two: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n817/a02.html