ECSTASY- ONE TEEN'S STORY

I had just turned 18. It was prom night. I was with my boyfriend and another
friend at a party. It was sort of like a rave, but it wasn't that big. I
don't do parties, so I was ready to leave not long after we got there.

Then my boyfriend said we were going to buy some rolls, some ecstasy. I was
like, "I don't know." He said I was going to have to pay for my own, and I
thought $25 was an awful lot of money to spend on one drug. It took me about
five minutes to decide if I was going to do it.

I mean, it was a lot of money, and I didn't know what was in it. I had heard
that heroin and cocaine were in it, and I didn't want to do that. The boy
who was selling it was sitting on the ground next to the driver side of my
car, and I was in the passenger seat.

My boyfriend said to him, "Tell her she wants to roll." So the guy said,
"You want to roll."

I guess you can call that peer pressure. I went ahead and gave him the
money. It was a little green pill called a double-stack. I told him, "You
better hope I didn't just waste $25." The guy smiled and told me that I
hadn't.

We took it. Maybe 20 minutes later, I started feeling something. We had
already bought water because my boyfriend said that you get dehydrated when
you're on it, and that's how some people get sick.

The first thing that happened was I started getting sweaty hands.

And then something else happened. I'm a mean person, you know. If someone
looks at me the wrong way and I'm in a mood, I'll say something mean to
them. If they say something rude, I'm going to do something. That's just how
I am.

Well, we had gone to the bowling alley and I was looking for my friend's
boyfriend, but I saw his brother first. I grabbed him and asked if he knew
where his brother was. His brother's girlfriend looked at me mean and said,
"If she says one more word to you, I'm gonna slap the bitch."

Normally, I wouldn't have stood for that. But I just smiled and walked away.
I asked my boyfriend, "What did you do to me? Normally I would have done
something to her but I just smiled."

He just said, "It's OK. You're rolling."

it feels so good

When you're on ecstasy, if you're with the wrong people, you could get into
trouble.

When you're rolling, you trust people more. The people that you roll with,
you kind of bond with them.

It made me talk non-stop, about anything. I had so many thoughts running
through my mind.

It was my friend's first time, too, but my boyfriend had done it many times.
He said he didn't roll too hard that night and he wanted to buy another roll
but he didn't have the money. I think you build up a tolerance to it. The
more you do it, the more pills you need to actually feel the roll.

He said his roll was coming up and down. I felt the roll for eight hours
that night. I don't remember much about what I did because I sat in a chair
the whole time. I felt good. I was talking to people I didn't even know.

And massages feel so good. It's as if you've been working really hard all
day, and someone comes up and rubs your back, and gosh, it feels so good.

It's an indescribable feeling, really. I had heard that before I tried it,
but I didn't believe it.

You grind your teeth when you do ecstasy. You can't help it. I had cuts in
my mouth from doing it. I did ice cube after ice cube. My tongue felt burned
the next day.

When I was rolling, there was a lot of girls there, and they said, "Let me
brush your hair!" And they did, and it felt so good. So everyone was
brushing each other's hair and giving foot massages. And normally, I
wouldn't touch anybody's feet. But we all became friends.

I didn't see my boyfriend much that night. It was his birthday, and
everybody was giving him free stuff. He had done so much, he was all messed
up.

I remember telling my friend, "Oh, my God. I am going out with a junkie." Bu
t after that, we haven't messed with drugs again.

I don't even drink alcohol.

I didn't think I would ever do it. I don't do drugs. I don't even drink
alcohol.

It took a lot of convincing to get me to do it. My boyfriend talked to me
about doing it for three or four weeks before that.

I've tried marijuana before, and I didn't see what the big deal was. It just
made me hungry and tired. Every time I've tried to drink alcohol, it has
made me sick. And I don't like the taste.

It's not physically addictive, but it is a mental addiction. You want to be
in that state of mind again. I probably would have done it again if I had
had the chance to the next day or next weekend.

A couple of days after we did it, I told my boyfriend, "Let's do it again!"
But he said no, not this soon.

When your roll is gone, you get smacked out. You're not impaired, but you're
relaxed. It helped me stay up all night. You could stay up all night and
dance. The only thing I've heard about ecstasy, as far as people dying, is
that they kept dancing and didn't drink and they got dehydrated.

I had to go to work the next day, and I had never gone to sleep. I had never
been late to work before. I always got there before my boss did. But I was
late that day, even though I was supposed to open up.

I was slack at work for probably a week.

I was supervisor, but I didn't feel like doing what I was supposed to do.
The next few days after that, I was talking about quitting my job. That
wasn't like me. I was my boss' favorite employee.

I don't see ecstasy as a big problem, health-wise anyway. But it does make
you get the "I don't care" attitude.

I had been thinking about going on to school after graduation, but rolling
made me think I didn't want to go to college. For the first few weeks after
I did it, I just wanted to do more.

lost ambition

My parents know one of my best friends who does it all of the time. My
parents are friends with her parents. Her mom has pretty much gone crazy.
She lets her daughter do ecstasy and trip on acid. She's even smoked
marijuana with her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend.

If my mom had ever offered to smoke with me, I don't know what I would have
done. I just couldn't respect that.

My friend tried it after I did. She tried it after I told her how good it
was. I feel kind of bad about that, but I'm pretty sure she was going to do
it anyway. She had been talking about it. Now she has a bunch of druggie
friends, and one of the boys is a powder head. He does coke every single
day. He does it with his parents.

Since my friend started doing ecstasy all the time and tripping on acid,
she's lost a lot of her ambition. She never was really ambitious, but she's
even less so. She's gotten forgetful with names and telephone numbers.

She took acid for the first time when she was 13, I think.

adults are doing it

I've always felt good about myself for not messing with drugs. Now that I
have rolled but I can say I won't do it again, that makes me feel good. But
my friend, I don't think she can stop.

I don't think I'll do it again. If it's outlawed, there's got to be a
reason.

But it's not bad for you, I don't think. I told my friend when we were
rolling that the only reason it was outlawed was because the people who make
the laws hadn't tried it. If everyone in this world had tried it, it
wouldn't be illegal. It just wouldn't.

I know there are a lot of drugs in Savannah. Half of the people you
encounter any given day probably do drugs. Half of the people in this
restaurant are probably doing drugs.

So many people smoke weed.

The people who are 15, 16, 17 and 18 are really doing it.

I didn't think that as many adults were doing it until my boyfriend got a
job at a construction company. They were having a little party and I went.
There were seven or eight old men, some of them big bosses, rolling joints
and smoking. They said, "You want some?" I told them no thanks.

Half of the people at my boyfriend's new construction job are crack heads.
And they deal it and smoke it while they're on work.

You'd be surprised who is doing it. We were at a club and I saw someone I
hadn't seen in a real long time, and I'd give them a hug and I'd say what
are you doing. And they'd say, "I'm rolling!"

It was surprising because they were so good in high school, so quiet. Pretty
much, I don't doubt anything anymore.

I know some people who are even younger than me and they've done it so many
times, they said they got tired of it. But I really don't know how you would
get tired of it.

The girl I was with when I did it, she's now a pot head. She gets up in the
morning, smokes weed, when that high wears off, she smokes it again. And she
just does that until it's time to go to bed again.

Even though she was never the brightest crayon in the box, I thought she
would go on and do something with her life. I thought she had potential. I
was wrong. She lives her life for marijuana.

And she would do ecstasy every day of her life if she could afford it.

I was talking to a girl who still goes to Windsor (Forest High School), and
she was telling me that there was a drug search at school, and she had a
roll with her. I have no idea why she'd bring one to school. So she took it
in a hurry. She rolled at school. I guess the drug dog doesn't hit on
ecstasy.

if I dealt

Ecstasy had only been big in Savannah for a year or so. My boyfriend talked
about selling it because he could make a lot of money. But I got scared for
him. I wouldn't want someone to beat him up so they could take his money.
When he was talking about selling it, I asked if that meant we could do it
whenever we wanted for free. He said yes, but it would eat into the profits.

Then he said he was afraid I would get addicted. So then he said he wasn't
going to do it. The whole reason he isn't doing it is because of me.

I've heard people say they used to deal it, but they'd get messed up on it
and give it all away. That would happen to me if I dealt. It just makes you
feel so good, and you want everyone else to feel good, too. I'd say, "I
don't know you, but do you want some ecstasy?"