Happiness Is...A Pill?: The Science: The Lure Of Ecstasy

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Ricaurte told TIME that "the vast majority of people who have experimented with MDMA appear normal, and there's no obvious indication that something is amiss." Ricaurte says we may discover in 10 or 20 years that those appearances are horribly wrong, but others are more sanguine about MDMA's risks, given its benefits. For more than 15 years, Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, has been the world's most enthusiastic proponent of therapeutic MDMA use. He believes that the compound has a special ability to help people make sense of themselves and the world, that taking MDMA can lead people to inner truths. Independently wealthy, he uses his organization to promote his views and to "study ways to take drugs to open the unconscious."

Doblin first tried MDMA in 1982, when it was still legal and when the phrase "open the unconscious" didn't sound quite so gooey. At that time, MDMA had a small following among avant-garde psychotherapists, who gave it to blindfolded patients in quiet offices and then asked them to discuss traumas. Many of the therapists had heard about MDMA from the published work of former Dow chemist Shulgin. According to Shulgin (who is often wrongly credited with discovering MDMA), another therapist to whom he gave the drug in turn named it Adam and introduced it to more than 4,000 people.

Among these patients were a few entrepreneurs, folks who thought MDMA felt too good to be confined to a doctor's office. One who was based in Texas (and who has kept his identity a secret) hired a chemist, opened an MDMA lab and promptly renamed the drug ecstasy, a more marketable term than Adam or "empathy" (his first choice, since it better describes the effects). He began selling it to fashionable bars and clubs in Dallas, where bartenders sold it along with cocktails; patrons charged the $20 pills, plus $1.33 tax, on their American Express cards.

Manufacturers at the time flaunted the legality of the drug, promoting it as lacking the hallucinatory effects of LSD and the addictive properties of coke and heroin. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was caught by surprise by the new drug not long after it had been embarrassed by the spread of crack. The administration quickly used new discretionary powers to outlaw MDMA, pointing to the private labs and club use as evidence of abuse. dea officials also cited rudimentary studies showing that ecstasy users had vomited and experienced blood-pressure fluctuations.