The pharma company was trying to develop a blood-clotting drug, which fell through, but the compound was picked back up in the late 1950s as a potential energy supplement for fighter pilots.īy the 1950s, CIA agents working on MKUltra, the secretive and illegal human experiment program, were at least aware of MDMA’s existence. While the tale of two college kids trying MDMA they made themselves on a ferry ride is certainly a fitting origin story for a drug linked to youth culture, other people certainly tried MDMA before they did – those stories are just lost to time.Īs Nuwer writes, the drug was first created by Merck, a German pharmaceutical company, which filed a patent for methylsafrylamin on Christmas Eve in 1912. Still, the idea that molly is “purer” than ecstasy led to a boom in sales, bringing the decidedly 90s drug back in the new millennium. “Some regular MDMA users still swear that molly is different than ecstasy, but it’s not,” Nuwer said. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstockīut all of those nicknames refer to the same drug. The Studio 54 nightclub in Manhattan, New York City, in 1984. Ecstasy was rebranded by dealers in the US in the early 2000s as molly, and some users thought it was a different, or “better”, drug. Then came ecstasy, which was coined by the massively successful Texas distributor Michael Clegg. The first nickname for MDMA (or methylenedioxymethamphetamine) was Adam, a nod to its back-to-nature, lovey-dovey effects.
Through her research, Nuwer learned that many things most people think they know about MDMA – even hardened users – is actually false. Scientists called this “the great retraction”, and though the authors of the study blamed their error on mislabeled drug bottles, skeptics wondered if they were trying to cover up a laboratory theft of MDMA that led to the switch-up.
But, as Nuwer writes, that paper was later dramatically retracted after it was revealed that the scientists had mistakenly used crystal meth, not MDMA. Moral panic intensified after a paper published in Science in 2002 found that MDMA caused permanent brain damage in monkeys and baboons – two unlucky animals died from their doses – which did much to advance the stereotype of burned-out rave kids. (Most fatalities were caused by dehydration or combining MDMA with other substances.) It’s been a long journey for MDMA, once demonized by sensationalist media coverage that turned the rare ecstasy deaths into moral panics, often without mentioning the other factors that made the drug more dangerous. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Getty Images FDA approval for therapeutic use could come as early as next year.ĭifferent forms of MDMA available on the market. That cycle may have already started: three clinical trials have found that MDMA, which is also called ecstasy, can speed the recovery of PTSD. Nuwer believes that MDMA will “follow the path of cannabis”, becoming legal medicinally first, then decriminalized, and perhaps fully legalized for all types of use. This book is for anyone who’s interested in the drug, whether it’s someone who’s taken it 500 times on the dancefloor or who’s using it therapeutically for the first time.” “I wanted to bring together the history, culture, politics and science of the drug all in one place. “MDMA deserves its own story,” Nuwer said. While cannabis and psilocybin have undergone rebrands of late, going from countercultural tokens to the mainstream, she believes that the public is starting to open up to MDMA, too. Nuwer is a science journalist who covered clinical trials for MDMA use in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to Rachel Nuwer’s book I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World, Resnikoff and his girlfriend’s romp was the first-ever documented instance of people taking MDMA recreationally.
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