MDMA
Maybe it's all bullshit. Maybe it really is dangerous. Maybe it's a good thing. Ritalin for the tense adult, a medicine in my case.
But it's fucking dull to read secondhand how revelatory and amazing someone else's drug experience was. Still, from the first time I tried ecstasy I wanted to explain the effect.
And yes, I'm advocating the use of MDMA in case there's any doubt.
So let's start with the skin and work inwards. Skin and muscle together. Your skin gets warm and hypersensitive as you come up. Your muscles too warm and relax. It's a physical drug - horny. Your body feels good and you feel good in your body. Pleasure comes through the skin. Movement, dancing, is one way to satisfy that heightened physical sensibility. So is sex. Warmth, movement, sensation. Simple physical contact can be enough. So can pleasant textures and sensations - rubbing your arms, lying and looking at the world in a new perspective. It's most intense as you're coming up, but also consciously present as you start to come down.
It's a sensation I try and retain afterwards for as long as possible. When I'm not on ecstasy I'm physically tense, my right shoulder particularly. It's good to get away from that.
And next you have a feeling of wellbeing and benignity towards everyone else. You start to feel it's a waste of energy to try and protect yourself from every imagined hurt, embarrassment and insult. Why bother being afraid of or getting annoyed with people when you can just smile or walk away? You become aware how much of role you have in causing arguments. You feel warm and happy, relaxed and comfortable. You want to extend that feeling to everyone and it's not a quasi-religious agonised striving to serve or enlighten, you just feel good and want to share.
On the few occasions I'm in social situations the tension extends way beyond skin into the way I act. So afraid of offending, so self-loathing that I'm all barriers and protection. Can't talk, can't connect, certainly can't get close. So being high on MDMA is like being a whole new person for me, a much nicer person, albeit one who talks a fuck of a lot more.
Skin and muscle, attitude. And now it seems your brain loosens up. Faster, more spontaneous, sometimes more insightful. Occasionally bollocks too of course. It's easier to be in the moment, to be spontaneous, to talk without preparation or caring whether you make an important point. You don't even need to be the centre of things, it's comfortable to be peripheral, to watch other people. But this isn't quite true, it's both too specific and too general.
It's too specific because it's an attempt to summarise personal experience where it's clear that the loosening of the brain will affect everyone differently. To be crude it disinhibits you in what seems to be a harmless way, there's a kind of positive apathy and openness.
It's too general because these personal experiences have been simplified to try and make them recognisable to the widest audience. In doing so they end up the ugly unsatisfactory mush you see above.
I've left this abortive initial description and its deconstruction because it seems to say something about the state of your mind at the point when you're highest. There's a clarity, intelligence, insight and simplicity to your thoughts, combined with a confusion, a lack of short-term memory. You genuinely do see some things much more clearly in a way that you'll carry out of the experience. You seem to have a better grasp of abstract ideas and a broader view, combined with a corresponding loss of fine detail. In essence you forget about the minute worries of your life which enables new perspectives.
But even this doesn't come close to representing this state. You can't summon it in words, even remembering that you're warm and relaxed and horny and feeling benign. Worries are shrugged off, you care more about people, people you've only just met even. Everything's cool. Your senses seem to be heightened. And afterwards you can only remember it and describe it.
It seems to go on like this for a long long time, especially if you take another pill, and then maybe another, until you slowly start to come down. If you're lucky your come down can be real nice and have a long half-life.
The last word, the only recommendation I can offer, is that I like myself and see my good qualities on MDMA, and at the same time give less of a fuck about this constructed "self" and projecting it to the world than at any other time.
But it's fucking dull to read secondhand how revelatory and amazing someone else's drug experience was. Still, from the first time I tried ecstasy I wanted to explain the effect.
And yes, I'm advocating the use of MDMA in case there's any doubt.
So let's start with the skin and work inwards. Skin and muscle together. Your skin gets warm and hypersensitive as you come up. Your muscles too warm and relax. It's a physical drug - horny. Your body feels good and you feel good in your body. Pleasure comes through the skin. Movement, dancing, is one way to satisfy that heightened physical sensibility. So is sex. Warmth, movement, sensation. Simple physical contact can be enough. So can pleasant textures and sensations - rubbing your arms, lying and looking at the world in a new perspective. It's most intense as you're coming up, but also consciously present as you start to come down.
It's a sensation I try and retain afterwards for as long as possible. When I'm not on ecstasy I'm physically tense, my right shoulder particularly. It's good to get away from that.
And next you have a feeling of wellbeing and benignity towards everyone else. You start to feel it's a waste of energy to try and protect yourself from every imagined hurt, embarrassment and insult. Why bother being afraid of or getting annoyed with people when you can just smile or walk away? You become aware how much of role you have in causing arguments. You feel warm and happy, relaxed and comfortable. You want to extend that feeling to everyone and it's not a quasi-religious agonised striving to serve or enlighten, you just feel good and want to share.
On the few occasions I'm in social situations the tension extends way beyond skin into the way I act. So afraid of offending, so self-loathing that I'm all barriers and protection. Can't talk, can't connect, certainly can't get close. So being high on MDMA is like being a whole new person for me, a much nicer person, albeit one who talks a fuck of a lot more.
Skin and muscle, attitude. And now it seems your brain loosens up. Faster, more spontaneous, sometimes more insightful. Occasionally bollocks too of course. It's easier to be in the moment, to be spontaneous, to talk without preparation or caring whether you make an important point. You don't even need to be the centre of things, it's comfortable to be peripheral, to watch other people. But this isn't quite true, it's both too specific and too general.
It's too specific because it's an attempt to summarise personal experience where it's clear that the loosening of the brain will affect everyone differently. To be crude it disinhibits you in what seems to be a harmless way, there's a kind of positive apathy and openness.
It's too general because these personal experiences have been simplified to try and make them recognisable to the widest audience. In doing so they end up the ugly unsatisfactory mush you see above.
I've left this abortive initial description and its deconstruction because it seems to say something about the state of your mind at the point when you're highest. There's a clarity, intelligence, insight and simplicity to your thoughts, combined with a confusion, a lack of short-term memory. You genuinely do see some things much more clearly in a way that you'll carry out of the experience. You seem to have a better grasp of abstract ideas and a broader view, combined with a corresponding loss of fine detail. In essence you forget about the minute worries of your life which enables new perspectives.
But even this doesn't come close to representing this state. You can't summon it in words, even remembering that you're warm and relaxed and horny and feeling benign. Worries are shrugged off, you care more about people, people you've only just met even. Everything's cool. Your senses seem to be heightened. And afterwards you can only remember it and describe it.
It seems to go on like this for a long long time, especially if you take another pill, and then maybe another, until you slowly start to come down. If you're lucky your come down can be real nice and have a long half-life.
The last word, the only recommendation I can offer, is that I like myself and see my good qualities on MDMA, and at the same time give less of a fuck about this constructed "self" and projecting it to the world than at any other time.
Comments
My personal take on the legality is that I think it's better to decriminalise all drugs. That would enable legitimate distribution, quality control and monitoring, as well as making treatment easier to manage.
I could go into the whole thing about how most deaths from MDMA have been from either dehydration or from taking on too much water. Or how while you can overdose and die on depressants it's harder to kill yourself with stimulants (it kind of needs cumulative strain, or pre-existing heart problems). Or how alcohol is probably the most dangerous substance available for recreational use (a heroin addict going cold turkey will be very uncomfortable - a serious alcoholic going cold turkey can die). But I don't have the data immediately to hand.
Oh, the other reason decriminalisation could help is what is called set and setting. That is the people you take drugs with, and the place you take them. These are important to your experience. I think it's fairly obvious that it's better to be somewhere safe with people you trust than somewhere either strange or possibly unsafe with people you don't really know, or don't trust.