Suddenly people all over the country are talking about "ecstasy" as if it were something other than what an eight-year-old feels at Disney World. Occasionally the trickle from the fringe to the heartland turns into a slipstream, and that seems to have happened with the heart-pulsing, mildly psychedelic drug called ecstasy. To get a sense of just how far and fast "e" has moved into American communities in the past year or so, talk to Mark Bradford, a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"I came to college in the fall of '97," says Bradford, 21, "and I didn't...