DOSE:

repeated

oral

MDMA

(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

Okay, will try to keep this as impartial as possible.

I'm fairly new to the whole clubbing/ecstasy culture, having only dabbled the last couple of years, following the end of a long-term relationship (make of that what you will, psychiatrists!) and the appearance of several new friends who are quite into the whole gay scene, and all that goes with it. I will largely skim the various misdeeds committed on pills, except to say that good –if sometimes immoral – fun has been had by all. But not without consequences, as you shall see.

While the jury’s still out on whether it actually does cause brain-damage, my absolute conviction is that it does – IF abused. My personal eye-opener came a few months back, when for the first time my mate bought a stash of 30 good quality pills with the intention of selling most of them or storing them away for future use (yep, y’all know what’s coming next…)

We managed to have them sitting on his shelf for all of about 2 days before he came over all ‘Milky-Bars Are On Meeee!’, and we dug into them willy-nilly, handing them out to whoever, whenever. I’m not suggesting everyone is as weak-willed as us, but the whole point is they’re pretty fookin’ good, so it didn’t take long for a couple to be dispatched down the mouth of a curious housemate on her birthday. Eight hours and two-and-a-half pills later, and everyone’s having a great time. Housemate’s had a cracking birthday.

I roll into work fairly off my face, and spend a long time attempting to understand what’s going on with my computer screen and trying to look like I’m working diligently (actually, I did do quite a lot of work, though how that came to pass is anyone’s guess!) Me and Mike (the aforementioned ‘Milky-Bar Kid!) grab an hour’s kip at lunchtime, and in the evening meet our friends for further indulgence in the comfort of my house, having made the usual bullshit promises along the lines of ‘I’m taking no more than three this evening’.

After a time, while everyone’s getting cosy and lovely-dovey, I have to admit that, while I’m getting all the physical tingliness (my feet feel a bit ‘special’) and the jitteriness (the pills were cut with a bit of speed), there’s none of the emotional warmth that usually accompanies it and is, of course, the whole point. Not that I’m dissing the merits of tingly feet.

So – and this is the stoopid bit – instead of saying ‘okay, that’s me done!’, I take another one. And another one. And keep taking them throughout the evening till I must have done upwards of six – not that much by some folks standards, but a ridiculous amount for me, previously a three-a-nite girl, and clearly Not Healthy. Apparently there’s a saturation point after a relatively small amount of MDMA where your brain simply can’t release any more serotonin, so I was wasting time and pills, not to mention subjecting myself to the possibility of some really bad, gurny photos if some fool has a camera to hand – and Some Fool usually does.

My brain, probably not helped by the lack of sleep, clearly hadn’t restocked since the previous evening and there I was still clouting it with disco-biscuits like there was no tomorrow! What a twonk. But therein lies the ‘addiction’ – when I'm in the same social circle as regular drug-users, the desire to be ‘where they are’ over-rides my commonsense. Hence many nights that should have been a ‘quiet drink’ with your buddies turn into a veritable munt-fest once someone utters the magic words ‘Anyone fancy a half?’.

Anyway, as the Pillage intensified for everyone else, I remained quite disassociated. One of the highlights of the evening was seeing a group of matchstick men doing a little jig on the back of my hand. One of them was waving maracas like there was no tomorrow but, like the tingly feet, it was a poor substitute for that Ecstasy high. I appreciated his efforts, though, and his luminous green ribcage was nothing if not fascinating. At this point it’s worth pointing out that it was still a pleasant evening, but this is more a testimony to having good, understanding mates than anything.

We all wake up the next morning feeling not-too-ropey on the whole, and more pills are consumed that evening, though only two for me before I finally admit it’s a lost cause, and get stoned instead – what a waster!

Different people experience different comedowns from pills. Mike gets all weepy, another friend, Fi, feels utterly unable to move for 24hrs afterwards and thereafter is ‘right as nine-pence’, and I generally start feeling a bit physically run-down on the Monday evening, assuming I dropped on the Friday. That usually goes thru the Tuesday too if I’ve over-indulged.

As is the balance of things, that particularly ‘over-indulgent’ weekend brought a hitherto unimaginable level of ‘run-down’-ness. In fact, run-down is wrong, ‘Mentalism’ is a far more apt word – and it isn’t even a fookin’ word, THAT’S how mentalised I was feeling! It started off with the usual bouts of mild nausea on the Monday evening, interspersed with a pressing need to sleep. Me and Milky Bar Kid were treated to some powerful-strong bouts of sleep paralysis as we lay in bed that evening – not to mention his absolute conviction that zombies were about to burst into the room and make a meal of our innards.

Upon further sleep attempts, I was treated to a repeated vision of running round my junior school yard and coming face-to-face with a midget alien in a white mask – at which point that infernal head noise – the electric buzzing in your ears many ecstasy users know and bloody, buggeringly-well hate – kicked in and I jolted awake. Not that I was properly asleep in the first place. This sounds quite random and amusing, but it was pretty eerie at the time, and must have happened at least once for every pill I’d taken over the weekend (if *that* isn’t karmic justice, I don’t know what is!!). And when I did finally get some sleep, my dreams were odd, vivid and unsettling. It would all have made quite an interesting experiment in sleep-patterns, if it wasn’t such a fucking pain in the arse.

Things became even more confusing the next day when, sitting at my work desk I decided that the office wasn’t quite ‘the office’ anymore but had somehow subtly changed in a weird, perspective-altering manner. A bit like when you go looking for a flat to rent, end up living there for a year or two and realize that the way you see it at the end of that time is completely different to your initial perception of it in some way you can’t explain very well. And I’m not explaining very well here.

The upshot of all this is that I spent the rest of the week wondering why I appeared to be living in a parallel universe, physically unable to keep my eyes open for more than ten minutes at a time between the hours of 2-30-6.30pm (catnaps on the toilet floor? Classy! And a real winner with your department Head, for sure!!) and nearly keeling over every time I went to make anyone a coffee (dizzy spells – another joy of the Comedown!) Also attempted a jog mid-week which resulted in some sudden and interesting banking and veering about, like an Easyjet piloted by David Blunkett after a bottle of JD or two, only less competent. Good thing there wasn’t much traffic near where I was running.

Add to this a haphazard volley of vacuous words popping into my brain every couple of minutes..

‘HAYSTACKS!’
‘APRONS!’
‘PLUTO!’
‘ROCKET-LAUNCHERS!’

and you can imagine that I didn’t get much work done. I also feared for my sanity, was convinced the whole Pill thing was All Over for me, and thought I’d never return to Good Planet Earf.

Luckily this is not the case. Me and Mike both came out of that in tact, with a clear and valuable understanding of how People Go Fucking Mad as a result of drug abuse. Cos, much as we’d like to kid ourselves otherwise, abuse is exactly what 12 pills over one weekend is, even if it is near the bottom end of the scale, and indeed the norm for some people. Another friend was boshing upward of ten every single weekend for a year or two. After mistaking the same bloke for a shelf three times in one evening, he decided enough was enough, and quit them almost completely.

So, to sum up all that rambling in one neat cliché of a sentence:

EVERYTHING IN MODERATION!!

For misusing E can indeed mash your brainmeats – if not permanently then for a long, unhappy week at least, as the above demonstrates.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 44655
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 15, 2007	Views: 22,136
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