The Lure Of Ecstasy

(4 of 5)

MARK RICHARDS/CONTACT FOR TIME

Bob Wallace, a Microsoft millionaire, funds DanceSafe, a prorave group that tests e pills for purity

Most therapeutic use quickly stopped. But Doblin's group has funded important MDMA studies, including Ricaurte's first work on the drug. Sue Stevens, the woman who took it in 1997 with her husband Shane--he has since died of kidney cancer--learned about the drug from a mutual friend of hers and Doblin's. She believes e helped Shane find the right attitude to fight his illness, and she helps Doblin advocate for limited legal use. Soon his association will help fund the first approved study of MDMA in psychotherapy, involving 30 victims of rape in Spain diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In this country, the FDA has approved only one study. In 1995 Dr. Charles Grob, a ucla psychiatrist, used it as a pain reliever for end-stage cancer patients. In the first phase of the study, he concluded the drug is safe if used in controlled situations under careful monitoring. The body is much less likely to overheat in such a setting. Grob believes MDMA's changes to brain cells are accelerated and perhaps triggered entirely by overheating.

In 1998, emergency rooms participating in the Drug Abuse Warning Network reported receiving 1,135 mentions of ecstasy during admissions, compared with just 626 in 1997. If ecstasy is so benign, what's happening to these people? The two most common short-term side effects of MDMA--both of which remain rare in the aggregate--are overheating and something even harder to quantify, psychological trauma.

A few users have mentally broken down on ecstasy, unprepared for its powerful psychological effects. A schoolteacher in the Bay Area who had taken ecstasy in the past and loved it says she took it again a year ago and began to recall, in horrible detail, an episode of sexual abuse. She became severely depressed for three months and had to seek psychiatric treatment. She will never take ecstasy again.

Ecstasy's aftermath can also include a depressive hangover, a down day that users sometimes call Terrible Tuesdays. "You know the black mood is chemical, related to the serotonin," says "Adrienne," 26, a fashion-company executive who has used ecstasy almost weekly for the past five years. "But the world still seems bleak." Some users, especially kids trying to avoid the pressures of growing up, begin to use ecstasy too often--every day in rare cases. In one extreme case, "Cara," an 18-year-old Miami woman who attends Narcotics Anonymous, says she lost 50 lbs. after constantly taking ecstasy. She began to steal and deal e to pay for rolls.

Another downside: because users feel empathetic, ecstasy can lower sexual inhibitions. Men generally cannot get erections when high on e, but they are often ferociously randy when its effects begin to fade. Dr. Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, has found that men in New York City who use ecstasy are 2.8 times more likely to have unprotected sex.

Still, the majority of people who end up in the e.r. after taking ecstasy are almost certainly not taking MDMA but something masquerading under its name. No one knows for sure what they're taking, since emergency rooms don't always test blood to confirm the drug identified by users. But one group that does test e for purity is DanceSafe, a prorave organization based in Berkeley, Calif., and largely funded by a software millionaire, Bob Wallace (Microsoft's employee No. 9). DanceSafe sets up tables at raves, where users can get information about drugs and also have ecstasy pills tested. (The organization works with police so that ravers who produce pills for testing won't be arrested.) A DanceSafe worker shaves off a sliver of the tablet and drops a solution onto it; if it doesn't turn black quickly, it's not MDMA.

The organization has found that as much as 20% of the so-called ecstasy sold at raves contains something other than MDMA. DanceSafe also tests pills for anonymous users who send in samples from around the nation; it has found that 40% of those pills are fake. Last fall, DanceSafe workers attended a "massive"--more than 5,000 people--rave in Oakland, Calif. Nine people were taken from the rave in ambulances, but DanceSafe confirmed that eight of the nine had taken pills that weren't MDMA.

The most common adulterants in such pills are aspirin, caffeine and other over-the-counters. (Contrary to lore, fake e virtually never contains heroin, which is not cost-effective in oral form.) But the most insidious adulterant--what all eight of the Oakland ravers took--is DXM (dextromethorphan), a cheap cough suppressant that causes hallucinations in the 130-mg dose usually found in fake e (13 times the amount in a dose of Robitussin). Because DXM inhibits sweating, it easily causes heatstroke. Another dangerous adulterant is PMA (paramethoxyamphetamine), an illegal drug that in May killed two Chicago-area teenagers who took it thinking they were dropping e. PMA is a vastly more potent hallucinogenic and hyperthermic drug than MDMA.