Ecstasy (the substance): C/D?

That's why you have to be doing something better than looking at Radio Times. I've only done it once and even I know that.

^ Yep. With great power etc.

The one time I did it it was with my girlfriend at Ghetto Gothik. The club became the most amazing place then we went downstairs and poured our hearts out to each other. A+

Yes - of course.

The first two times were in a club, and the third was at home..But somehow the home experience revealed E's limitations in a way that disappointed me. I like my drugs to at least have aspirations to be mind-expanding - not just a feel-good short-cut that feels too crude.

Pros: empathy for all fellow human beings, makes you a good dancer

Cons: listening to shit trance

lol tbqf i have many fine memories w/ shit trance as the soundtrack

if you have a secure relationship I would absolutely recommend it, so intense, lovely lucid post-club experiences

xpost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6120QOlsfU

^^^^

The one time I did it it was with my girlfriend at Ghetto Gothik. The club became the most amazing place then we went downstairs and poured our hearts out to each other. A+

<3

(never done it btw)

despite being a part of the era sonically , i have never done it.
in fact, i once went to a club doing my 'thing' and out of the blue an old school friend appeared :
him : 'what you on, cos it must be ace !!'
me : 'nahh .. cider and a few vodkas .. '
him : 'lucky you, wish i could do that shit you do after a few drinks'
turned out he was referring to my '15 sanctioned dad-dance grooves !
that said, now i am of an age whereby my responsibilities are somewhat reduced now, and so, i have begun to wonder :
"FUCK ! what did i miss out on ! "

with all due respect I feel like people who are hobbled by a sudden recognition of the artificiality of the experience need to level up

Level up by taking ecstasy?

you gain experience points each time

There are probably not a lot of people on the planet who have spent as much time in the company of people on ecstasy as i have and enduring that, along with finding music i don't like almost unbearably painful to listen when on it are probably the main reasons i have taken it so few times.

a few observations :

I have zero scientific proof to back this up, but based on experiential evidence am convinced that there is something in the female metabolism that results in prolonged and extensive taking of ecstasy over a long period of time potentially leading to a markedly increased chance of women suffering from problems with depression in later life.

Despite not taking it at all in the years 1990 - 1993, spending time in a club every week over that period where I'd guess 80% of the people there were taking it (people's use tailed off a bit after that as did the quality of the ecstasy), i frequently felt as if I was on it. Either it was some weird unexplainable phenomenon or i was literally absorbing minute traces off it from all the sweating people who would hug me.

People often talk enormous amounts of crap on it but also have genuinely life changing emotional breakthroughs. i can absolutely appreciate why it can be a useful tool in PTSD and psychotherapy.

A certain % of people are likely to lose their minds, sometimes permanently on it. I have seen people become hollow shells of their former selves and never recover. However, I'd add that the vast majority of people who use it "sensibly" appear to suffer no long term ill effects whatsoever.

If i had £1 for every time I heard someone say "this is the best night of my life" I'd have a huge pile of cash.

best post on ILM ever.

that said i am drunk.

"I remember looking at a copy of the Radio Times (tv guide) and feeling "Good old Radio Times - I've always loved the Radio Times"

loool

― marcos, Monday, August 3, 2015 3:37 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i am still lolling at this

So ecstasy has made a laughingstock of me once or twice. But that is not why it cannot be forgiven. Nothing that intense, nothing that genuinely profound, whatever it looks like on the surface, should be certifiably counterfeit. The letdown is not like the double drag of departing for, and returning from, vacation. Nor is the emotion itself unreal. Oh, no. It happened. I was, as I am sure you were (when you were), transported. What was illusory was the feeling that it--the trip--would do the soul some service. When we landed, we would be covered in moonglow. Like that worm. Well, it did make a difference to us, but without making a difference in us. Not even birth is a greater breach of promise. The world is the same dismal day-to-day wake-to-work regimen, the same work-to-eat, eat-to-shit cycle, the same sleep-to-dream routine, sharing in order to quarrel over the cut, the same old same it was before...

When I was a kid a friend of mine used to throw me a few wraps of speed if I let him store some of his gear in my bedroom. I stopped it off when it got too big and he did end up getting sent down. Long after I had stopped this thing I found a bag of his white powder in the bottom of my sock drawer and necked it thinking it was speed. It turned out it was the equivalent of about 10 ground up e's. I was sat like a bhuddist monk for about 10 hrs - absolutely fucked and convinced I was going to die!

2cb chaser lads

trust me

classic, have done it around 50 times. i was into stuff like Bauhaus and Siouxsie but then i learned how to dance because of this stuff. changed my life as the first experience was Happy Mondays' Call the Cops tour. for the next two years i roamed around Los Angeles underground Rave scene, when it really was setting up map point, promoters breaking into wherehouses and paying off cops in cash to keep the rave going. probably the best time for music in my life and sometimes because of the energy and DJ...have i said i have been drinking and now remembering and (probably not a good idea) sharing.

NOTHING feels as good as a good e but I haven't felt that feeling in probably a decade or more. Not that I search it out anything like as much as I used to.

NOTHING feels as good as a good e

people who get really into smack do it because NOTHING feels as good as being on heroin to them, right? but you can be on a good e and be thinking "this is the BEST, why don't I do this more often, or ALL the time, I'm feeling GREAT and the music sounds SO GOOD" without, the next day, having to sell everything you own and start stealing or sex work to keep feeling that good feeling. you might just go "what a great time, nothing feels as good as that... maybe we should do it again for new year's or something?" idk, insert actual point here

making someone pretty laugh a lot is also a p good feeling but doesn't last nearly as long

i hadn't done anything in about 2/3 years until going to ibiza, i think that combined with the quality gave me what i thought was long gone, something close to the first e feeling. having said that, when it became the 6am chatting on the beach etc, even though it was real talk with real friends, in the back of my mind i felt like we were all oversharing or like there was something unpleasant about all fences between people being removed by this powerhouse mental chemical, railroading over all our individuality. perhaps not in those exact words at the time! more like a sense of deja vu...

it is a v strange drug - i saw dj harvey play on monday and it was definitely one of the best parties i've ever been to (i've done e enough times that i can tell you the best five nights of my life and prob the best 10 and they aren't the last 5 or 10 times i did an e!) - i think maybe harvey was the pinnacle for me - amazing music but also a crowd of my age or older, even before getting high nearly everybody at the party had introduced themselves and we were all having a really good time. i think the parties and back at houses etc lack the element of strangers, you need to be meeting new people while on e.

that was a real throwback for me - i'm quite shy, which may seem ridiculous but i know now via years of mental health probs and counselling that i am a quite reclusive person in lots of ways. i realised that the removal of all barriers in a communal setting with strangers, and the kind of equal playing field it creates between the sexes is something i miss a lot. like i was talking to some scot who lives in london, v attractive, pretty etc, and her husband, and i had a big long chat with this person for an hour - then at various points i'd be on the dancefloor and get a big hug or like i'd flick her ear or something. i mean that can be flirting or that kind of thing but i guess when real goodwill or commonality is boosted by e it can be amazing. and this was a party high in the hills above san antonio in this beautiful picturesque hotel.

if i could go to parties like that in london maybe i'd still go out to hear music, but i very very very much can't - most dance music parties are so fucking terrible and full of identikit rude morons with no interest in talking to others and no personality to share with them if they did...

i'd say there's a decent chance i'll never do it again tho after the last week. the gaps are certainly getting longer and longer anyway.

"Just took an acid blotter this weekend for the first time in ages, Interesting experience! I became incredible physically aware of how hyper-tense I am all over my body and how much I need to relax."

really wish i needed to do acid to come to this realization

most dance music parties are so fucking terrible and full of identikit rude morons with no interest in talking to others and no personality to share with them if they did...

sadly very true in london and one of the main reasons i'll almost always take a gig in a smaller venue there (where there is an increased likelihood this won't be the case) over a better paid big room gig. oh, and i'm glad you had such a good time in ibiza!

it's a pretty awful place, ibiza, apart from the sun and the parts outside the main hives, but the harvey gig was amazing. very strange as it was just a guestlist you emailed for but the hotel it was in was beautiful and guests were treated like they'd paid to check in, really classy. i dunno how it wasn't overrun and crazy.

should probably make more effort to go out in london though, especially when you guys are playing. there is the occasional good smaller party but a few years ago i would end up just walking straight back out of clubs i'd paid into, i had to stop lest i ended up hating the music rather than the clubs. i do go to bodyhammer down here when it's on.

That's such a great story really LG. Summed up everything about what I (used to) love about it. Like you say, the chances to do it are getting waaay further apart, but I haven't resigned myself to not doing it - it wasn't so much a conscious decision, rather a situational one where the opportunities arise less often.

for me it's more just where once it was an automatic yes when someone produced a class a, now it's an automatic no. the why and how of that would be like the why and how of youth's passing itself :)

these days all i ever see at parties is chaz, which I can never honestly say i've had a wonderful time on. sometimes mandy powder, but it's also rare these days. my friends don't really go out to clubs or raves any more and i can't really remember the last time i went to a decent house party that wasn't hosted by me, so.

ibiza is really beautiful and wonderful if you stay away from certain places. i stay in Talalamca when i go and i'd really recommend it. There are hardly any brits there at all.

Realized tonight that my last tablet would be old enough to drive.

Would love to do it again but I can't imagine the right crowd coming along - my friends and peers are married/parents, in bed by 10pm types.

I heard this year that the drug was synthesised way earlier than one might expect and probably before its usage could really be what it became. & that it was popularised about 60 or 70 years later. After some clinical usage which itself was like 50 years after its initial synthesis.
So wondering what it was initially synthesised for and how they came upon later usage.

However, in these documents there were no indications for plans to develop an appetite suppressant. MDMA was mentioned only casually and without being called ‘MDMA’. In the patent specification, MDMA appeared only as a chemical formula and in the annual report it was referred to as ‘Methylsafrylamin’. The accurate back- ground for the first synthesis of MDMA was that Merck wanted to find and patent pathways leading to haemo- static substances, not appetite suppressors. The company tried to evade an existing patent for the synthesis of a clot- ting agent called ‘Hydrastinin’ held by the German com- petitor Farbenfabriken Elberfeld und Decker or Bayer/ Elberfeld, as stated explicitly by the head of Merck’s labo- ratory, Dr Walter Beckh (1870–1915) in the Annual Report for 1912.

A good thoughtful, and open, thread. Particularly enjoyed this description of the human condition:

Well, it did make a difference to us, but without making a difference in us. Not even birth is a greater breach of promise. The world is the same dismal day-to-day wake-to-work regimen, the same work-to-eat, eat-to-shit cycle, the same sleep-to-dream routine, sharing in order to quarrel over the cut, the same old same it was before...

That's a passage from the tunnel by William Gass, he is writing about ecstasy (not the substance) but I guess I thought it was fitting