Ecstasy and its discontents: how a drug rolls through Yale

The ravers, the rockers, the partiers, the burnouts, and the curious discuss the pleasures and perils of experimentation.

Click here for a graphic of the chemistry of ecstasy, by Kushal Dave and Sarah England.

Hey kids! Have you heard about the latest sensation that's sweeping the nation? The just-can't-fail that's come calling on Yale? The drug of our generation, the sign of our times, the mind-taker and body-shaker?

SHAWN CHENG/YH

No? Where you been? I mean, damn! In the past few months, even the past few days, Time, 48 Hours, the Harvard Crimson, MTV, the New York Times, and even the Associated Press (that's right!) have picked up on the lurid new fad that's been here for years! Tales of wasted youth and shattered lives, high-flying decadence and gutter-licking depravity, anti-repression and stomping depression—scandale extraordinaire—abound.

It's ecstasy! (Duh.) A recent survey by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America found that 10 percent of teenagers have tried it. Ten percent! Stunning, ain't it? And among college students? If you'd believe some of my anonymous e-using sources, ecstasy's at Yale to stay. It's infiltrated every relevant social scenes: clubbers, partiers, stoners, soul-searchers, decadents, mystics, frat boys, rockers—they're rollers all. All!

What to make of these little white pills of MDMA (methylenedioxy-methamphetamine) that mess so thoroughly with your serotonin—and the people who use them? Was Julie,* a junior, right when she told me, "It's the one drug that everyone who's against drugs should try." Or is Alan D. Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, dead on when he writes, "Club drugs aren't `fun drugs'"? And so I set out to explore Yale's illicit ecstasy underground.

Groping for answers or...uh...groping

The story begins—as all sensationalistic drug stories must—in dim rooms filled with furtive goings-on. "There are a lot of ecstasy parties at Yale," Roberta, a junior, said. "Ten, 15 people sit around in the dark. People cuddle with people they don't really know." You know them—they're the kids you see out on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, dressed up nice and nicely soused, the party crowd. For Roberta and her jaded friends, e has become a new toy, one that makes for looser conversation and rolling waves of sensation. "You can go to a bar, come home, snort half a pill," she continued. "It's not a major ecstasy night."

But...wait! If we're talking ecstasy parties, why don't we really talk ecstasy parties? Maybe the tale of e at Yale should begin at a party attended by Lydia, a junior, on last year's Harvard-Yale weekend, by invitation only. "As soon as the guy opened the door, I knew the legends were true," she said. "He was wearing gold lamé satin harem pants and no shirt." She removed her shoes and entered a house of moral turpitude. There were theme rooms: techno and body paint, candles and roses, cartoons and Alice in Wonderland, paper-covered walls and crayons, futons and opium. And then, the suitcase filled with ecstasy was opened. "It was very ceremonial," Lydia said. "At midnight exactly, everyone popped the pills." There was juice, vitamins—"because of rumors that e hurts your brain cells"—and clay to knead. There was debauchery: "There were all kinds of multi-sexual hook-ups in every room in the house." There was sensation: "Eating a piece of orange was a peak experience."

But we don't want to leave out the spiritualists among us, do we? You know—getting in touch with the inner self and all that. "I use it the same way I use hallucinogens, " Julie said. She likes to walk around while rolling—once walking the length of Manhattan with a friend in the middle of the night, stopping in at all-night delis to refill her water bottle—and talk. Julie continued: "You say things or people say things to you that make you change your whole way of thinking. It sounds trite, but it changes the way you see the world. It's all true stuff. It's just not stuff you usually say. You don't normally tell someone you love them on a regular basis. You normally don't tell someone how much you like the way they tie their shoe. You love them unconditionally when you're on the drug." Touching, isn't it? But Dan, a sophomore, had an even better time on ecstasy. Sitting in a park and watching the sun rise through the fog and play around tree branches, Dan felt thoughts that had been jumbled around in his mind converging with a lucidity that the free-associations of psychedelics don't have for him. "I saw everything all at once and it seemed perfect to me," he said. "How the tree was taking all the randomness around it and converting it into itself. I felt very much a part of that. It wasn't like these ideas were anything new to me. Everything was integrated, everything made sense." And then? "I found the meaning of life."

Mind vs. matter

Ecstasy's "the rave drug"—or at least all those articles say so. Maybe, for tradition's sake, I should have started in a dance club filled with strobe lights like fireflies and bass as thick as heavy cream. For Paul, a senior, a DJ and clubgoer, ecstasy serves the same purpose as for Michelle—to amplify the sensations of dance music, not to unearth his own subconscious or to connect with friends and strangers. "I've never rolled outside a party, and personally I wouldn't ever because I don't see the point," he said. "I can't imagine cracking a joke on e. You need a degree of cruelty in humor and e takes that away."

Is there a schism? "I've always been surprised that people do it in clubs," Julie said. "I think there's a split between the physical aspect and the mental aspect. You use the energy one way or the other. You can't really use it for both." Carrie, a junior, ascribes the differences to the drug itself—or what it's spiked with (sometimes a hallucinogen, sometimes an upper, sometimes a downer, each almost invariably more dangerous than pure MDMA). "Sometimes I'll trip, and it'll be completely sensory," she said. "Sometimes I'll just want to talk. It depends on the pill." When it's been sensory for her, she's walked around New Haven barefoot, run naked through puddles, and played the violin in construction-site dirt piles at 4 a.m.

Dan doesn't believe in a schism either, but he thinks differences in ecstasy experiences have more to do with mindset than with pill brand. He's used ecstasy as a "social tool" to talk more intimately with friends and as a sensational tool to enjoy rock shows ("It makes every note fit together perfectly. You're overwhelmed. You want everything that's being given to you, and you want it all at once."). He has female friends who've used it as a sexual tool—"She basically sat down on the floor of the club and orgasmed until the concert was over"—but always as a tool that serves a particular purpose. "I'd like to say that ecstasy is a perfectly fine tool for whatever you want to see as good and perfect, whether you're a raver who wants to feel the music or you want to feel empathy with the other people you're with," he said.

An ecstasy underground?

Yes. No. For kids who party and carouse—her friends—Roberta said, "It's not that big a deal anymore. They'll do ecstasy a lot faster than they'll do acid or PCP or anything. It's a party drug." Michelle agreed: "When I got here, I had friends who said, `I haven't done it. I won't do anything that's not natural.' They'd do shrooms and acid and all that stuff. Now they all do ecstasy." Carrie was more cautious. "I see it a bit," she said. "It's mainstream to talk about it but not to do it. Though people would do it if you put it in front of them." And Lydia disagreed completely. "It's not very present at Yale at all," she said.

Given such a disparity of opinion even among those who use it, generalizations are difficult—terms like "friends" and "people," even "Yale," necessarily refer only to the speaker's social circle. Ecstasy use at Yale is an issue for a few small cliques, each with its own speci-fic, tautological use for the drug: ravers rave on it, partiers party, rockers rock. Overall though, it's relatively rare and difficult to come by, with most supply coming from friends in New York. "I know of maybe two or three dealers here, none of whom I'd buy off [of]," Paul said. "There was one reliable dealer in New Haven last year, but he left."

If anything else can be said about ecstasy's prevalence, it's that e has almost as little stigma as an illegal drug can have—less than cocaine, less then hallucinogens, if more than marijuana and certainly more than alcohol, making it the third drug down for people who get that far. At least, it would appear that way to a reporter unable to drug-test the entire student body. "I think coke is here maybe as much as e, but I don't think people would talk about it," Carrie said. "With e, you'd tell any of your acquaintances."

Aftershocks

"My problem is when it's used as a tool to make you feel better," Dan said. "I like the feeling of good to come from something. I like to cognitively know. A lot of people use it as an escapist drug, and that's an abuse." Julie was similarly unhappy with what she sees as ecstasy's empty pleasures. "It's a false drug in that it always makes you really happy," she said, no matter how you feel beforehand.

Jason, a sophomore, who did ecstasy nearly 30 times between the ages of 15 and 19, quit in January. "I'd stopped learning from the drug," he said. "The reason I do drugs is to learn from the experience. E taught me a feeling that I found I could find in real life anyway—I figured out how to do e without doing drugs. When I concentrate on the music and really let it get to me, I can roll."

For others, it's more than the flatness of the ecstasy experience. There's also the depression—Black Tuesday—which tends to get worse with every subsequent roll, as serotonin levels in the brain get increasingly altered. "After you use it, you're out," Dan said. "Orange juice helps. But there's always the day after. For some people, it's a week. A friend of mine rolled for 24 hours and he had nightmares for a week. For a week!" Michelle was concerned about her mental health, leading her to quit after a few months of "bang! every week." She continued, "It just wasn't fun any more. After a couple of months of doing a lot, it just got nasty. The comedown was the worst. It had more effect on me than the best high. I'd start worrying about the comedown before coming up, and get all quiet and paranoid." The comedown would last more than a day. "It'd take me 10 minutes to brush my teeth."

Despite the best efforts of the news media, nobody interviewed was scared about dying from ecstasy use. "At parties," Paul said, "the real danger drug is GHB [a sedative]. People use it as a booster over e. Because it looks like water, people drink way too much of it. Then they go into comas and choke on their own vomit. Every single OD case I've seen at parties has been GHB-related."

Finally, Yale's ecstasy users seem split over how worried to be about e in the long-term. Dan, for one, believes that ecstasy is "without a doubt more dangerous than any hallucinogen" because of its depressive serotonin effects. "I don't think ecstasy is worth its cost as a tool," he said. "People need to examine why they're doing it."

Carrie, on the other hand, is taking a self-consciously short-sighted view. "Do as much as you can until they prove it's bad, so you can say you didn't know," she said. "They can't prove that it affects you." After all, she continued, "E is a sign of our times. It isn't a universal or long-lasting thing. I don't know anybody who does e and wants to keep on doing it."

*Names have been changed.