The Lure Of Ecstasy

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SCOTT HOUSTON/CORBIS SYGMA FOR TIME

Most users don't have access to DanceSafe, which operates in only eight cities. But as demand has grown, the incentive to manufacture fake e has also escalated, especially for one-time raves full of teens who won't see the dealer again. Established dealers, by contrast, operate under the opposite incentive. A Miami dealer who goes by the name "Top Dog" told TIME he obtains MDMA test kits from a connection on the police force. "If [the pills] are no good," he says, customers "won't want to buy from you anymore." It's business sense: Top Dog can earn $300,000 a year on e sales.

As writer Joshua Wolf Shenk has pointed out, we tend to have opposing views about drugs: they can kill or cure; the addiction will enslave you, or the new perceptions will free you. Aldous Huxley typified this duality with his two most famous books, Brave New World--about a people in thrall to a drug called soma--and The Doors of Perception--an autobiographical work in which Huxley begins to see the world in a brilliant new light after taking mescaline.

Ecstasy can occasionally enslave and occasionally offer transcendence. Usually, it does neither. For Adrienne, the Midwestern woman who has been a frequent user for the past five years, ecstasy is a key part of life. "E makes shirtless, disgusting men, a club with broken bathrooms, a deejay that plays crap and vomiting into a trash can the best night of your life," she says with a laugh. "It has done two things in my life," she reflects. "I had always been aloof or insecure or snobby, however you want to put it. And I took it and realized, you know what, we're all here; we're all dancing; we're not so different. I allowed myself to get closer to people. Everything was more positive. But my life also became, quickly, all about the next time I would do it...You feel at ease with yourself and right with the world, and that's a feeling you want to duplicate--every single week."