MDMA is an off-white crystal. It doesn’t exist naturally, it needs to be synthesized in a lab with some sort of decent chemistry equipment. The crystals can be broken down with a hammer into a white powder that is commonly called “molly”. Molly is too coarse to take up the nose like cocaine, so it’s most often put into an empty pill capsule and swallowed. The powder can also be mixed with a binding agent and colored dye then compressed into a pill tablet. The pressed pills are easier to transport and will often come in funny shapes like ninja turtles or branded with startup logos like Tesla or Snapchat. The pressed pills are commonly referred to as “ecstasy”.

Once MDMA is swallowed the high takes an hour to set in and it lasts for ~4 hours. The intoxication peaks 2 hours after swallowing the pill. A normal dose of molly can range anywhere from 75–200 milligrams. A standard pressed pill has around 100mg of MDMA in it, so most people will take two pills in a night, and stagger the times they swallow them at to make the high last longer. There’s no hangover once the high ends, you come down and feel completely sober afterwards.

MDMA was originally produced by the German pharmaceutical company Merck in 1912. After the ally victory in World War I, most of Germany’s patents were turned over to the allies as a spoil of war. The patent describing the chemical structure of MDMA was filed away in a back archive somewhere and forgotten until it was rediscovered by an American chemist named Alexander Shulgin in the 1970’s.

Shulgin was an interesting character that I think will become more well known over time than he currently is. He studied organic chemistry at Harvard when he was 16 years old, served in the Navy during World War II, before returning to Berkeley California to get a P.H.D. in biochemistry. He started working at the Dow Chemical Company after school, and created a new pesticide that made Dow millions of dollars. This bought Shulgin enough freedom to work on whatever he wanted to at the company. Inspired by an experience he had taking mescaline during the war, he decided to pursue the synthesis of psychedelic drugs for use in therapy, which Dow initially agreed was a promising research direction. Before the war on drugs, using psychedelic drugs as medicine wasn’t considered a crazy idea.

Shulgin went on to synthesize hundreds of new psychedelic drugs and tested them on himself and his friends. He kept detailed notes about the chemical structures, dosages, and effects of each compound. His notebooks cataloging the effects of each psychedelic compound is one of the most interesting pieces of literature I’ve come across. MDMA is probably the most famous compound to come out of Shulgin’s research. It was immediately clear that it could be therapeutically valuable at dosages that posed no physical risk to the individual, a sort of holy grail for this type of medicine. He began giving MDMA to a close group of psychiatrists for further research, and the preliminary results from therapeutic use were astounding. Doctors had never seen anything that could rapidly heal mental trauma as quickly as MDMA, likening it to a “years worth of therapy in 8 hours”. The drug took on a common moniker “empathy” in psychiatric circles.

Shulgin was living in San Francisco at the time, in the center of the hippie movement and Haight-Ashbury party scene. The empathy drug he was producing started garnering a reputation and quickly made it’s way into the party scene where it was was rebranded as ecstasy.

Although Shulgin was synthesizing pure MDMA and giving it out to his friends and colleagues, it was hard for any downstream partygoer to know that the new “ecstasy pill” they were buying was actually Shulgin’s MDMA. Many dealers would take advantage of the branding and sell other drugs under the label ecstasy. This was enough for an overzealous DEA to intervene. In 1985 the DEA placed MDMA under “emergency controls” and slapped a schedule I classification on it, issuing a decree that the drug had “no medical or scientific use”, and taking the wind out of the research Shulgin was conducting. Only 5 years after MDMA had been re-synthesized it was already illegal.

Despite the schedule I classification, ecstasy would survive. It became a popular club drug throughout the 1990s and has re-emerged into popular culture with the rise of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) in the early 2000s. Thanks to the ubiquity of computers and MIDI interfaces on instruments, a new wave of computer musicians spawned at the turn of the century and propelled EDM into a massive $10 billion/year industry. A sort of next-gen Woodstock that has signature events like Electric Forest and Burning Man but also has local shows and events going on all around the world all the time. DJs make music without words and put light displays behind them. An abandoned warehouse is a venue. People talk constantly about peace, love, unity and introspection.