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The Great Ecstasy of the Toolmaker Shulgin1

A squirrel-infested shack containing a chemistry laboratory lies at 1483 Shulgin Road, Lafayette, California 94549. Its grounds are strewn with cacti and fringed with greenhouses; the front door is rickety, its hinges rusted now. This is the unlikely epicentre of a global drugs culture. The products that have emerged from it, the methodology that produced these new compounds and the career of its owner make it, indisputably, the world’s most storied and influential drug lab.

For much of the last century Alexander Shulgin worked in relative obscurity. But in the mid-to-late 1980s, a new drug, MDMA, later known as Ecstasy, started appearing on the streets of the USA and Europe. This substance, a stimulant that prompted emotional openness, would change the world’s drug habits for ever, bringing the psychedelic experience to millions who, before its advent, would perhaps never have considered using drugs.

Alexander, or ‘Sasha’, Shulgin is, depending on your viewpoint, one of the greatest and most under-celebrated scientists of the twentieth century, or an irresponsible folk devil who has corrupted millions and killed dozens with the drugs he has created. He says he’s just a toolmaker. His most famous tool was MDMA, or 3,4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine; Ecstasy.

Born in 1925 to Russian immigrant parents, Shulgin had an unremarkable early life, dropping out of Harvard aged nineteen to join the Navy. In the 2011 documentary about his life and work, Dirty Pictures, he mentions, casually, that for the years he was at sea he decided to memorize an entire biochemistry manual, thinking it would be ‘a neat challenge’. Those years of unwavering discipline are curiously at odds with his public image – which he hates – as Dr Ecstasy, a wild-haired, archetypal mad scientist. ‘It brings an element of notoriety that does no good,’ he has said.

MDMA’s path from obscurity to ubiquity is so improbable as to sound fictional. Chemists at the German pharmaceutical company Merck could not have guessed, as they quietly synthesized the world’s first batch in 1912, that their work would one day be used first as a tool in psychotherapy – the discipline did not even exist at that time – nor that it would later surface as one of the world’s most popular recreational drugs. Referred to in the academic literature as ‘methylsafrylamin’, the new substance was designed to enable the company to make a clotting agent without having to produce it via a patented intermediary, or, to quote the firm’s papers, it was ‘a precursor in a new chemical pathway which was patented in order to avoid an existing patent for the synthesis of [a] clotting agent, hydrastinine’.2

The instructions for the synthesis – the chemical construction in the laboratory – of MDMA lay undisturbed in the Merck archives for decades. But the foundations for much of today’s chaotic international drug scene were unwittingly laid in that very laboratory. Shulgin resynthesized MDMA in 1965, after receiving a mysterious tip-off about the compound from a fellow researcher in the field of psychedelic drug synthesis. He has never revealed more than that.

MDMA is just one of the hundreds of psychedelic agents Shulgin synthesized and then tested – by ingesting them. After noting his experiences under each drug’s influence, he would carefully document his observations. Like a chemical Noah, he then carefully ushered his creations into safety, his chosen arks a pair of printed books containing dense and technical instructions on how to make them. His influence on generations of drug users is immeasurable yet mainly unknown; and his influence on the future of drug taking is only just starting to be correctly understood.

In common with Huxley, Mayhew and Osmond, Shulgin’s chemical career began after a dose of mescaline hydrochloride crystals in the early 1950s. He spoke of the intensity of colours he experienced, of a childlike wonder, of accessing long-buried memories: ‘I thought: “What it’s doing is allowing me to communicate with parts of me that I had not communicated with for a long time.”’ He was, he says, astonished that a small quantity of white powder had unearthed such memories. If the powder did not itself contain those memories, he reasoned, then the answer to the mystery must reside within his own mind: ‘I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyse its availability.’3

In 1954, Shulgin returned to his education, this time at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in biochemistry. He then worked for the Dow chemical company, where in 1962 he invented a biodegradable insecticide named Zectran. The product was so profitable that Dow gave him free rein to produce any compound he desired. He chose psychedelics, and set to work with the zeal of the convert, exploring all the possible variants of the mescaline form that had fascinated him so much.

His experiments were carried out using precursors, or chemical building blocks, and reagents that set off chemical reactions to produce hundreds of new drugs, compounds that, until he invented them, did not exist anywhere in the universe. The process of producing new drugs in this way is known as ring substitution.

The connections between basic chemical structures, drugs and the brain’s neurotransmitters can be represented in a molecular triptych. First, here is the molecule for phenethylamine:

Phenethylamine

Starting from the left of the molecule, the hexagonal structure is known as a phenyl group, and each of its vertices represents a carbon atom. This illustration shows a hexagonal ring of six carbon atoms. If that ring were not connected to any other groups or molecules, it would be known as a benzene ring. A hydrogen atom bonds to each carbon in that ring, but for visual economy, it is not represented here. Bolted on to the right of the phenyl group is an ethyl group, consisting of two more carbons (each of which is also bonded to more hydrogens). Finally, the last structure to the right represents the amine group, which is made up of one nitrogen and two hydrogen atoms connected to a carbon.

‘Phen-ethyl-amine’ is naturally produced in our bodies and brains, especially when we first fall in love, and there are high levels of it in chocolate, cheese and sausages. It is a neurotransmitter – a molecule that passes around our brains and activates receptors that ultimately govern whether we are hungry, angry, elated or sleepy. Phenethylamine also modulates other neurotransmitters and can accentuate their effects upon our minds and bodies.

Second, here is a neurotransmitter that is related to and resembles phenethylamine, dopamine:

Dopamine

Dopamine is normally pumped around our brains when we are excited or sexually aroused, taking risks, or seeking or receiving rewards – or taking any one of dozens of other stimulants. It regulates muscle movement, the sensation of pleasure, and motivation.

And here is the third molecule in our triptych, mescaline:

Mescaline

The same basic phenethylamine skeleton is present in the second two molecules, but we can see that there are a number of other molecular groups attached to it. (These diagrams are, incidentally, 2D renderings of 3D objects.) The mescaline molecule fits into the dopamine receptors in the brain, and, in some way yet to be understood, affects our perception of reality in radical and unusual ways.

Shulgin took the mescaline molecule, and swapped the hydrogen molecules attached to each of the carbons on the benzene ring for other chemicals. He added sulphur molecules, or cleaved off an atom or two of oxygen here, spliced in an iodine or a bromine there, exploring the possibilities of chemistry.

Shulgin’s intense, rigorously academic study gave him pointers towards the likely effect and dosages of most of the new drugs he was inventing. But sometimes he simply added a chemical at various different positions on the ring and tested the drugs on himself to see what happened. He carried out the same process with both the mescaline molecule and with variants on the tryptamine skeleton, the parent structure for magic mushroom-like drugs.

Where mescaline most closely resembles the phenethylamine and dopamine neurotransmitters, tryptamine resembles serotonin. Drugs containing tryptamine work by entering serotonin receptor sites in the brain, and by some sub-atomic magic, triggering a release of it, which affects mood, social behaviour and impulsiveness. It limits other neural activities and changes our perception of reality in the process. How these substances achieve this in neurological terms is hotly debated, but the latest research suggests that when flooded with serotonin the mind dampens down brain activity, rather than increasing it, as had long been thought. (These descriptions deliberately and necessarily simplify the interaction between drugs and the brain, since each category of drugs actually acts on both systems at once, and each system is far too complicated for any non-scientist to describe – or read about.)

As the social taboos and moral panics around psychedelics started to build, Dow found itself the uneasy holder of patents for powerful psychedelics such as DOM – a designer drug created by Shulgin and popularized following the outlawing of LSD. This potent drug flooded the streets of Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and is said to have caused many traumatic episodes as tablets containing guaranteed overdoses of the chemical circulated in their thousands. Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd is said to have been profoundly affected by the drug in the years preceding his nervous breakdown and withdrawal from society.4

Shulgin left Dow in 1965 and set up his home laboratory in Lafayette, where he continued engineering new drugs from the basic mescaline phenethylamine structure. In the process he revolutionized our knowledge of biopharmacology, and set in motion, unwittingly, the global shift in drug use that has been witnessed since the mid-to-late 1980s. He worked for the DEA as an expert witness, supplying them with reference samples for use in criminal trials, and was otherwise left to his own creative devices.

Shulgin blurred the lines between the epiphanies of art and the harder edges of science. His career during this period can be seen, by those who are sympathetic, as a reinvention of the American pioneer spirit. He pushed the boundaries of his own mind, searching for a manifest destiny of his own, for an American expansionism anyone could believe in – but with no harm to others ever intended, and no presumption of ownership ever made. With his unruly beard, ready grin, colourful baggy shirts and loping gait, the endlessly punning chemist worked in his ramshackle garden shed laboratory, surrounded by thickets of glassware and dangling, vine-like tubing, the air thick with volatile gases and the thunderous chords of his beloved Rachmaninov.

Eventually, sensing a change in the attitude of the DEA towards his work, Shulgin published his entire body of knowledge in two seminal works of psychedelic chemistry: PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved): A Chemical Love Story, in 1990 and, seven years later, TIHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved), which covered the other major class of psychedelics. Psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary has compared PIHKAL to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,5 and, while most of Leary’s grandiloquence can be safely disregarded, it’s arguable that on this he was right. The DEA did not share that view, and they raided Shulgin’s lab in 1994, accusing him of possession of compounds he was unauthorized to own. Shulgin was found to be in possession of various samples of drugs people had sent him, anonymously, to test, which was an infraction of his DEA licence.

PIHKAL reveals in practical detail the chemical synthesis and human dosage of hundreds of psychoactive substances, each of which are in the phenethylamine class. At the time of its release, many of the precursor chemicals, that is, the ingredients required to produce them, were not banned and were available without excessive governmental interference.

While it’s in no way comparable in terms of complexity and difficulty, drug chemistry is, to all intents and purposes, much like baking. Both aim to take one type of matter and use the physical forces of heat and chemical reactions to transform it. The cook and the chemist both need ingredients, techniques, equipment and expertise. Where a cook uses flour and fat and heat, a chemist such as Shulgin might use an essential oil, such as oil of parsley, or safrole, as a precursor, its similarity to pre-existing drug structures, such as amphetamine, making fewer chemical reactions necessary.

Indeed, in PIHKAL Shulgin identified ten amphetamines that were closely linked to essential oils and he deliberately chose precursors that were, back then, available without a great deal of trouble. ‘What are these relationships between the essential oils and the amphetamines?’ he wrote. ‘In a word, there are some ten essential oils that have a three-carbon chain, and each lacks only a molecule of ammonia to become an amphetamine.’6

Since their publication PIHKAL and TIHKAL have served as guidebooks to the new chemical terrain, their pages revealing in detail the doses of new and unknown drugs. But these are not orthodox academic manuals. The books mix chemistry and synthesis guides with wry asides, trip reports, and the story of the love affair between Shulgin and his wife, Ann, a counsellor and psychotherapist who has used many of her husband’s drugs in her practice, with, she says, great success. PIHKAL also contains an extended riff on the reasons behind Shulgin’s quest for psychedelic experiences. These drugs were for research, for exploration, and for the pursuit of spiritual and psychological insights, he writes:

I am completely convinced that there is a wealth of information built into us, with miles of intuitive knowledge tucked away in the genetic material of every one of our cells. Something akin to a library containing uncountable reference volumes, but without any obvious route of entry. And, without some means of access, there is no way to even begin to guess at the extent and quality of what is there. The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world, and insights into its nature.

Shulgin also reflects upon the unprecedented nature of the attacks made by governments upon those whom he sees as seekers of spiritual truths:

Our generation is the first, ever, to have made the search for self-awareness a crime, if it is done with the use of plants or chemical compounds as the means of opening the psychic doors. But the urge to become aware is always present, and it increases in intensity as one grows older […] This is the search that has been a part of human life from the very first moments of consciousness. The knowledge of his own mortality, knowledge which places him apart from his fellow animals, is what gives Man the right, the license, to explore the nature of his own soul and spirit, to discover what he can about the components of the human psyche.7

Shulgin argues passionately for free speech and the rights of the individual; there is no one less un-American than this chemist savant, yet he remains an outcast even today, in his old age. He asks: ‘One of the major strengths of our country has been in its traditional respect for the individual … How is it, then, that the leaders of our society have seen fit to try to eliminate this one very important means of learning and self-discovery…?’8

Luckily for science, Shulgin and his friends decided that their minds and bodies were their own dominion, and self-experimented with the new compounds he created. Shulgin would gradually increase his doses by minute increments until the desired effects were felt. He would report on the drugs’ efficacy and their impact on what he called ‘the erotic’ – he and his wife agreed that any drug that precluded their lovemaking was undesirable – and his research group would offer their findings on the drugs’ effects on music appreciation and their artistic sensibilities in genteel and discreet prose. Shulgin even pioneered the concept of the ‘museum dose’ – a quantity of a drug that he deemed appropriate for trips to interesting exhibitions. He and his group would measure each of the experiences according to an agreed scale and write up their impressions, from a ‘plus one’ up to a ‘plus four’. The ‘plus four’, he wrote in PIHKAL, was a ‘a rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a “peak experience”, a “religious experience”, “divine transformation” a “state of Samadhi” and many other names in other cultures.’9

Each entry begins with a densely complex synthesis for each drug. A typical entry, for TMA, a mescaline derivative, reads hus:

To a solution of 39.2 g 3,4,5-trimethoxybenzaldehyde in 30 mL warm EtOH there was added 15.7 g nitroethane followed by 1.5 mL n-butylamine. The reaction mixture was allowed to stand at 40°C for 7 days. With cooling and scratching, fine yellow needles were obtained which, after removal by filtration and air drying, weighed 48 g. Recrystallization from EtOH gave 2-nitro-1-(3,4,5-trimethoxyphenyl) propene as yellow crystals with a mp of 94–95°C.10

The remaining 600 words of chemical nomenclature and technique would make even less sense to anyone except highly trained organic chemists. But then the register shifts dramatically as users describe their experiences:

[With 225 mg of TMA] There was quite a bit of nausea in the first hour. Then I found myself becoming emotionally quite volatile, sometimes gentle and peaceful, sometimes irritable and pugnacious. It was a day to be connected in one way or another with music. I was reading Bernstein’s Joy of Music and every phrase was audible to me. On the radio, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto put me in an eyes-closed foetal position and I was totally involved with the structure of the music. I was suspended, inverted, held by fine filigreed strands of the music which had been woven from the arpeggios and knotted with the chords. The commercials that followed were irritating, and the next piece, Slaughter on Fifth Avenue, made me quite violent. I was told that I had a, ‘Don’t cross me if you know what is good for you’ look to me. I easily crushed a rose, although it had been a thing of beauty.

Of the hundreds of phenethylamines he explored or invented Shulgin identifed six as being particularly useful for the exploration of inner space, and for understanding reality in new and extraordinary ways. These were mescaline, DOM, 2C-B, 2C-E, 2C-T-2, 2C-T-7. The differences between each drug can be measured, prosaically, by descriptions of their dose, their duration and their chemistry. More poetically, members of his test group would discuss them as wine buffs might discuss a fine Pétrus, appreciating the finer points of their effects. Some approached it from a spiritual perspective, and ranked the drugs on the insights the compounds gave them into their own natures.

The phenethylamine that would catapult Shulgin’s work from academic and even psychedelic obscurity into the mainstream, though, would be MDMA, or Ecstasy. MDMA does not exist anywhere on earth naturally, but its synthesis can be arrived at in a couple of days by a moderately competent chemist, given access to the right materials and equipment. There are a number of different routes to the production of the drug, including isosafrole, MDP-2-P, piperonal and beta-nitroisosafrole. The easiest synthesis for MDMA, though, is from an essential oil, safrole, that acts as a natural pesticide for the plants that produce it. With a sickly-sweet synthetic smell somewhere between marzipan and aniseed, the oil is used legitimately in the perfume and flavourings trades; but buying it in any quantity will ensure your almost immediate presence on a police watch list, as it is a well-known and internationally banned precursor to MDMA.

In around 1965, Shulgin synthesized the drug using safrole as a precursor, and in 1967 he started to work with the new drug himself. Entry 109 in PIHKAL would prove to be the most revolutionary of the hundreds it contained. PIHKAL does not attribute authorship to its substance reports, and Shulgin himself never (publicly) rhapsodized about the power of MDMA, comparing it instead to a low-calorie martini. One of his test group, however, felt somewhat differently:

(with 120 mg) I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible. The cleanliness, clarity, and marvellous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day, and evening, and through the next day. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience …

(with 120 mg) The woodpile is so beautiful, about all the joy and beauty that I can stand. I am afraid to turn around and face the mountains, for fear they will overpower me. But I did look, and I am astounded. Everyone must get to experience a profound state like this. I feel totally peaceful. I have lived all my life to get here, and I feel I have come home. I am complete.11

What exactly did these molecules do to the human mind? What is the chemical process by which a certain arrangement of atoms can make a user experience bliss? How can a chemical make an instant seem eternal, or transform the banal into the transcendent, or turn a blinding spotlight on to ineffable universal mysteries, for a brief, possibly delusional moment?

Drugs hijack our neural circuitry and change the way we feel, how we see and hear and interpret the world, and in the case of some psychedelics, how we see ourselves. As we saw above, they work in this way, in the most basic terms, because their molecular structures closely resemble naturally occurring chemicals, or neurotransmitters, that are generated by our brains to regulate mood, muscle action, appetite and dozens of other important physical processes. Drugs act as chemical ‘keys’ that somehow fit into the transmitters’ ‘locks’ in our brains. These molecules circulate, and are received back into the site that transmitted them, much like hot water in a radiator and boiler system.

Prozac, the antidepressant, works on the brain’s levels of serotonin, the chemical that is triggered when we experience stimulus that results in joy, but the effects of this and the dozens of other pharmaceuticals in its class are gradual. They work more on inhibiting the synapses’ reuptake of naturally circulating serotonin, rather than triggering unusually large quantities of it. When we take MDMA, serotonin floods the brain, and our synapses’ regular pattern of release and reuptake are dramatically changed by the presence of the drug.

There are also serotonin receptors in the heart and the stomach, which goes some way to explaining the concept of gut instinct, or feeling lovesick when missing a partner, the sensation of butterflies when meeting a loved one after an absence, or the real and physical trauma of a truly broken heart.

MDMA also produces a flood of dopamine, the neurotransmitter pumped around our brains when we are excited, or sexually aroused, or seeking or receiving rewards. And finally it also leads to the release of norephrenine, also known as noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter released when we are frightened or angry or edgy, which increases respiration and heart rate.

The magical ratio of serotonin-dopamine-norephrenine release and reuptake prompted by the presence of MDMA in the human brain is not produced by any other substance. Other recreational drugs come close, but the charged, empathetic, transcendent, peak-MDMA experience has yet to be matched by any designer drug. It’s called Ecstasy for a reason.

This fascinating, mysterious collision between the physical and the intangible, between the flesh and photon, reframes all human consciousness as a chemical reaction. That’s the science of it, but human emotion and the mystical experiences some drugs afford users cannot be so neatly quantified.

MDMA was used initially in the 1970s by psychotherapists in the USA excited by the drug’s therapeutic potential. One such was Leo Zeff, who had been introduced to the drug by Shulgin in 1977. The California-born practitioner was so thunderstruck after his first experience that he cancelled his retirement and travelled the country dosing thousands of willing users with the drug, whose extraordinary qualities of personal boundary dissolution he believed would help therapists to discover the root of a sufferer’s problems. Zeff claimed that a single MDMA-assisted therapy session could accomplish as much as six or more months of traditional therapy. Therapists say the drug first helps patients to open up and discuss their problems honestly, and then enables them to engage in objective analysis without self-judgement, and finally allows them to generate solutions.

Shulgin hated the term Ecstasy, preferring the stark chemical nomenclature of MDMA. The name Ecstasy was popularized by an ex-priest-turned-MDMA-propagandist, Michael Clegg, whose E-triggered epiphany was so utterly damascene when it came that he started to press the pills himself and give them away for free. But this was the yuppie era, and by 1984 the ‘Texas group’ – a loose conglomeration of dealers – was selling 500,000 pills a month in that state alone. When he was warned that if he carried on selling it so openly the drug would be banned, Clegg is said to have responded: ‘Yes, and then I’m going to get very rich.’12

In the mid-1980s, designer Phillipe Starck’s eponymous Dallas, Texas, nightclub was a hotbed of early public, hedonistic MDMA use, a tactile bacchanal with unisex bathrooms, playing kitschy synthpop and frequented by patrons with prominent cheekbones and heavily moussed hair. The pursed lips and swinging hips, the primped pomp and sexual display, the high-sheen finish and conspicuous consumption could not have been more removed from a therapist’s sofa: it was an orgiastic, consumerist 1980s riot with guest star appearances by imperious Jamaican diva Grace Jones. Fittingly, a CD compilation of the music played at the Starck club sold in 2007 for over US$14,000 on eBay.

Like a dandelion in the wind, the seeds of Ecstasy were blown randomly out from these small pockets of enthusiastic early adoption, finding root wherever they landed. With each blooming came fresh converts who themselves became evangelists for the new drug.

Some say the drug first crossed the Atlantic in the pockets of the sannyasin, or followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The orange-robed ascetics, whose guru drove a Rolls-Royce, were evicted from their Oregon commune in 1984. Among Rajneesh’s followers, drawn from many New Age disciplines, were psychotherapists who had encountered the drug in the therapeutic communities. A former bodyguard to the guru, Hugh Milne, has claimed rich donors were spiked with the drug – perhaps explaining their beatific view of the charlatan, and their altruistic responses to his requests for money.13

In 1984, some of the sannyasin were involved in one of the world’s most serious bio-terror attacks, when devotees laced food in salad bars with salmonella bacteria in an attempt to incapacitate voters in the Wasco County elections, in the hope that a lower turnout for the opposition would enable them to install their own candidates. Over 700 people became sick, though none died. The sannyasin left and some of them landed on the hippy island of Ibiza, the freak-zone safety net for Franco-era Spain, a blinding white Balearic haven that later attracted a ragtag gang of refugees – hippies, artists, liberals, discontents, leftists, gay men and women, and the rich at play.

‘Sannyasins enjoyed parties, participated heavily in the nightclub life, and introduced various New Age techniques for self-development brought from the USA, including the use of MDMA for meditation and body-therapies,’ wrote author and academic Anthony D’Andrea in the island’s Cultura magazine of summer 2001.14 The drug soon found its way onto the dancefloors, and into the mouths and serotonin receptors of the wealthy, the famous and the bohemian.

Journalist Peter Nasmyth’s series of articles for style and fashion magazine The Face in 1986 discussed the pharmacology of the drug,15 but even at this stage, it is revealing that the interviewees included progressive British psychologist R. D. Laing and nameless pop stars rather than everyday users – for there were almost none. But from 1988 onwards, young British men and women would change that.

The drug was already illegal in Britain at that time, added to the Misuse of Drugs Act in a Modification Order in 1977 after a clandestine chemist had been caught emulating Shulgin’s efforts. The Modification Order cleverly specified the mechanisms of ring substitution – molecular replacements of the kind that Shulgin was carrying out – that would make each related compound illegal. This banned most, but not all, of PIHKAL in the UK before it was even published.

In the summer of 1988, the drug was discovered by a group of English clubbers while they danced to the hotch potch of Balearic sounds spun by DJ Alfredo Fiorito in the open-roofed, palm-tree strewn Amnesia nightclub in Ibiza. These suburban Londoners brought the culture, the attitude and news of the new wonderdrug to the UK. Supplies followed soon after, produced by Dutch, Belgian and American chemists, and smuggled in by organized crime gangs from Manchester, London and Liverpool.

When Ecstasy first started to be used in significant quantities in the UK, it felt like being a member of an amusing cult. You could spot fellow members on most high streets not just by their floppy fringes and ponytails, their loose-fitting, easy-to-dance-in clothes – their dungarees and Wallabees or Timberlands – but by the unexpected urban eye contact between strangers, the flash of recognition from ten paces. Many British high streets warped into live-action Keith Haring dayglo cityscapes. For one or two brief summers before the utopianist culture was appropriated, gobbled up and spat out like flavourless gum, there was a strange magic at work, as a whole section of the nation’s youth seemed, as one, to chill out.

Even the concept of ‘chilling out’ is an old Ecstasy meme, the phrase borrowed from jazz-era hep-talk originally, and referring to the re-entry period at home after the club with good friends, or the lounging on bean bags in the back rooms of nightclubs by E-heads overwhelmed by the drug, taking time to relax into the rush and cool down, as psychedelic jazz and other layered sample madness careened around the speakers.

For the uninitiated to understand the singular love felt by some British drug users for MDMA, or Ecstasy, there’s not a lot they can do except take it. Preferably, they would dose just as they jumped out of a time machine into late-1980s Britain where the nation’s youth self-medicated, rejecting the strictures of a drab, individualist puritanism, Thatcherism’s dreary, market-obsessed world view, unemployment, heroin, nuclear paranoia, a dirge-like indie-rock alternative scene, and a pop chart dominated by trite, brilliantly bubblegum pop, choosing instead the intense collective euphoria of Acid House.

The emergence of a global dance and drug culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s has left us with what could be argued to be the principal model of illegal youth culture in most of the world. Every town now has a nightclub where you’ll find people taking Ecstasy and dancing, from Reykjavik to Buenos Aires, and Bangkok to Moscow. True, its popularity has waxed and waned along with the quality of the product on offer, but MDMA is now undeniably an integral element of all late-night entertainment venues playing music to dance to, at festivals, parties, pubs or prison cells.

Use increased on a hockey-stick graph from 1988 onwards, partly because the prurient and sexualized reporting about the drug delivered a clear and concise message to most young readers: there was a new drug in town, a new scene, and a new beat, and there was tremendous fun to be had. But it also increased because of the drug’s convenient routes of administration: orally, via branded tablets stamped with trustworthy logos, making them look much like regulated pharmaceuticals, which took away the fear associated with the needles and powders of heroin and cocaine, the dangers of disease and addiction.

Crucially, Ecstasy did not cause hallucinations of the kind associated with classical psychedelics, such as LSD and mushrooms. The fear many people associated with psychedelics – of losing control or being unaware of their surroundings – dissipated the first time they felt the benign psychic slam delivered by a dose of Ecstasy. The main thing they wanted to do was dance and hug people. This made the experience accessible and popular with many who would never have considered taking drugs, and guaranteed its proliferation.

Most information about Ecstasy at this time was mediated by newspapers censorious about the new drug. Before the net gained mass appeal in the mid-1990s, one of the earliest and most level-headed sources of information on the chemistry and action of MDMA was Nicholas Saunders’s book E For Ecstasy, published in 1993. The book offered a calm and information-rich analysis of the history and use of the drug, and opened with the author’s account of the first and subsequent times he took the chemical. Saunders was a member of London’s squatting counterculture through the 1970s and 1980s, and his self-published 1970 guide to living in Britain’s capital at minimal or zero cost, Alternative London, was essential reading for the British hippy underground. An alternative entrepreneur, he opened Neal’s Yard in Covent Garden, turning derelict warehouses into one of central London’s first whole-food shops.

In E For Ecstasy, Saunders described his first experiences with the drug in 1988 with the rhapsodic tone that was so commonplace at the time:

When we got off the train I took deep breaths and the air felt wonderful. It was good to be alive. But the intellectual part of myself asked ‘What is different to normal? Why isn’t life always like this?’ I deduced that I was simply allowing myself to enjoy what had always been there. I realized that I had got into the habit of restraining myself. It was not this drug-induced state that was distorted – it was what I had come to accept as my normal state that was perverse. I then realized that over the past few years I had been mildly depressed. And, what’s more, I could see why: some years before I had felt cheated in a business deal, and had carried a resentment like a burden ever since: instead of hurting the person involved, I had been grimly taking it out on myself. This realization and the experience of a few hours ‘freedom’ was just the tonic I needed; I let go of the resentment and started afresh with new enthusiasm.16

After his experience, this driven man gathered every scrap of research he could find on the drug and dedicated the years until his death in a car accident in South Africa a decade later to preaching a message of harm reduction, and telling people how to use drugs more safely.

For his book, Saunders interviewed a wide range of figures about their experiences of taking the drug, including a rabbi, a Rinzai Zen monk, a Soto Zen monk and a Benedictine monk who said the drug gave him similar effects to some of his most profound religious experiences. Saunders also detailed the drug’s darker, more negative sides in an honest appraisal that was sorely lacking in mainstream coverage. As you expect with a prohibited drug, supplies at that time were not always pure or safe, but Saunders spread the news of contaminated pills as fast as he could, in the era when words and information were bound by the gravity and solidity of printed matter.

In 1992, a huge batch of pills known as Snowballs came into mass circulation in Europe. They had been synthesized in Latvia, an Eastern European country emerging from communism, in a bid to generate some foreign currency. But instead of MDMA, the pills contained a similar, equally illegal outpost in the methylenedioxyamphetamine family tree, MDA. That year, the music mutated away from the hypnotic house sounds that had characterized the previous years and sped up, becoming darker and more fractured, the clattering breakbeats of hardcore tumbling across cartoony vocals, as sub bass boomed through ever more improbably huge sound systems. Europe was awash with these strange pills that made the atmosphere and users edgier. The once-peaceful rituals of the E-generation started to vibrate uneasily with an outlaw, renegade menace that was reflected in harsher policing.

The lab that synthesized the Snowballs also unleashed a wave of extraordinary hallucinations across the UK and Europe that year, since the chemists had inaccurately dosed the pills with almost 200 mg of the active substance, which is generally enjoyed at 100 mg or below. Many clubbers at that time reported hitherto unseen phenomena on the dancefloor, such as the sudden invasion of thousands of masked, bearded or bespectacled dancers; ornate baroque sofas disappearing into puffs of dried ice and glitterball trails; ancient hieroglyphics swarming across the walls and faces all around them; indecipherable Mayan technological artefacts materializing for an all-too-brief instant before reconstituting themselves as cigarette machines; antic, merrie maypole scenes; dancing Madonnas beckoning seductively with laserbeam hands as the room exploded in rhythm – plus an awful lot of projectile vomiting.

Saunders unpicked this story, and others, in his book:

Snowballs, a notorious brand of Ecstasy, consisted of very strong pure MDA which came from a government laboratory in Latvia … Latvia needed western currency and had the advantage of no drug laws, so they joined up with a German businessman to produce MDA for export as Ecstasy. This went well for a couple of years until a consignment of 10 million tablets was intercepted in Frankfurt airport, since when MDA has been rare.

Saunders’ book was published a full year after the Snowballs first appeared. In the intervening period users had no idea that they were taking a drug other than MDMA, and even in the immediate years after publication the news was shared only among those who had read Saunders’ book. Rumours often circulated when strong new batches of pills came on to the market that they were cut with ketamine or even heroin, the latter a particularly bizarre and unlikely choice considering its high price. Even the basic action of MDMA was widely unknown; the drug can be overwhelmingly sedative during onset if dosed incorrectly high, or if purity is greater than that to which users have been accustomed.

One commonplace belief among Ecstasy users at this time was that the drug caused the spinal fluid to drain away, leading to mass paranoia on comedowns when users were suffering from nothing more than a stiff back caused by hours of hectic dancing. The drug caused Parkinson’s, it was rumoured, and left gaping holes in the brain: both untrue. Misinformation was rife, with Ecstasy users having, in the pre-web era, no simple way to research the drug or share any information they had. Such a situation would not and does not happen today. At the same time, pill manufacturers started to cash in by copying previously popular and clean logos and selling fake or tainted products, making the market even more dangerous.

Nevertheless, a new, hedonistic hegemony took root irresistibly in Britain, the US, Europe, Australia and Asia. The Face magazine in 1990 dedicated a twelve-page feature to clubbing in Europe, as the whole continent fell in thrall to the new groove.17 From the shrink’s sofa to the dancefloors of Dallas, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Ibiza, Manchester, Blackburn, Liverpool, Nottingham and London, and then the whole world, Ecstasy became the drug of choice for millions of people who had never got high in their lives before.

In comparison to binge-drinking and street-fighting, Ecstasy seemed to be an almost healthy and active lifestyle choice, with ravers turning away from alcohol as they sipped on energy drinks and dressed in leisurewear. The sensations those chemicals elicited in users, too, along with the glorious rush of unified, rhythmic euphoria, seemed less than harmless; they actually felt beneficial. Excessive use of the drug, as well as the adulterants that unscrupulous or unskilled chemists used to pack out the tablets, offered less of a tonic, and an extremely small percentage of users of the drug died from it each year. There were five deaths in the UK in 2011 from MDMA, according to the Office for National Statistics.18

But the drug has been used by many millions of people for decades now, and no long-term damage has been noted. Indeed, if a pure, dose-measured supply were freely available, many of the problems associated with excessive use would be wiped out instantly.

The market has behaved in ways predictable under classical economic theories. In 1988, when the number of consumers was relatively small, a tablet of Ecstasy cost fifteen to twenty pounds, and quality was generally high, with few ‘brands’ of tablets available. Chemical nostalgists will smile at the mention of Yellow Calis, New Yorkers, White Burgers, White Doves or Disco Biscuits (so named for their huge size and muddy, digestive-like colour). These drugs were expensive, but they worked: one or two pills kept users dancing for a whole night. Taking into account inflation over the last twenty years, the same pills today would cost around fifty pounds. But in the latter half of the last decade, around 2005, by which time the market had grown enormously, reasonably good-quality Ecstasy pills could be bought for as little as two pounds each, even in small quantities. The laws of supply and demand elegantly brought the price down, as quality dropped only slightly.

The arrival of Ecstasy in British drug culture has had a series of long-lasting and wide-ranging effects, but some of these are only really being felt today. Some revolutions occur in slow motion. In his social history of post-punk music, Rip it Up and Start Again, writer Simon Reynolds details the long-term impact of punk on the American and British musical scenes:

Revolutionary movements in pop culture have their widest impact after the ‘moment’ has allegedly passed, when ideas spread from the metropolitan bohemian elites that originally ‘own’ them and reach the suburbs and the regions. For instance, the counterculture and radical ideas of the sixties had far more currency in the mainstream during the first half of the seventies, when long hair and drug-taking became more common, when feminism filtered through to popular culture with ‘independent women’ movies and TV shows.19

The parallels with the way Ecstasy has infiltrated mass culture are striking. Initially the drug was the preserve of a well-connected metropolitan clique of pop stars, photographers and other creative people. After 1988, Ecstasy, an extraordinarily powerful drug, for all its hugged-up frivolity, colonized the leisure culture like a bacterial bloom in a petri dish. Ecstasy ushered in a completely new era of drug use in the UK, the US and Europe. Normal people with regular jobs were now routinely taking the most extraordinary chemical concoctions at weekends. More than ever before, the counterculture became the culture. In the UK an estimated 500,000 people use MDMA – when they can get it – every week. And when they can’t, they’ll just take something else. The aftershocks of the MDMA cultural invasion can now be witnessed in the contemporary rise of new and largely untested drugs such as those mentioned in the post by Clapham Boy in the introduction to this book.

Ecstasy was not the only thing to produce a dramatic cultural shift in the nineties and noughties. Just as Ecstasy use developed from the niche interest of an illicit underworld to become the dominant culture, so too did the internet. And the drug culture and the technology not only nodded across the dancefloor at each other, they shook hands and embraced.