I must've been pretty clearly high as a kite, but the lesson I learned that night is that people generally are approachable, not that scary and we just want to have a good time. The negative side effects was thinking I had fallen in mad love with a complete stranger, and the extreme dehydration that caused me to drink about 5L of water over as many hours.
I haven't taken MDMA since, I plan to try it again later in my life when I'm content with my place in the world (no more than once a season, as Shulgin recommended), but it was certainly an eye opening experience I will treasure forever. This relaxed and optimistic view of the world and other people has been with me since that very night.
With the correct set and setting, MDMA is something everyone should experience once in their lives.
You'll get the full experience on 100. You can always take more, but never untake what you've had. My brother had a rough first time because he dropped with someone who was a bit of a warrior.
MDMA is a great drug, but best when used responsibly. I avoid alcohol with it these days too, makes for a much cleaner night and a better morning.
I agree with starting with 100–150mg, and my suggestion for harm reduction is to take 5-HTP for a few days after a trip to restore some of the depleted serotonin. The post-MDMA funk is real.
Also, never redose and never chase the dragon. You will never relive your first MDMA experience, so make it count and enjoy it.
TLDR do it around people who aren't going to mind that you're obviously on MDMA
But of course socialising sober is and feels better, though it does not come as easy.
I felt this odd urge to express myself towards everyone around me and was being very wholesome about it. I was aware that this was odd behavior for me, but I liked it and it felt like I was "letting go".
I noticed what I was feeling and how I was expressing myself and that it was ok. That was enough validation for me to keep on without taking mdma.
This happened just the once. I haven't felt the need to try it out more since then.
Note to readers, before you try it you should know the difference between ecstacy, molly/mandy and MDMA. The drug you want is MDMA. Do your research[0] and this drug will be safer than climbing a mountain or something (and way safer than alcohol). Very few people have actually died from this drug but you should understand why they died.
You have to also consider that people like me are essentially broken. Being completely unable to socialise with people puts you on a path of loneliness and misery. Maybe curbing some of my brain's "abilities" is exactly what I needed. I've often noticed that stupid people are happier.
I didn't become stupid, though. If I became stupider then it doesn't matter because that is completely offset by being more able to apply my skills properly. There's no point being a genius if you can't communicate with people.
I was incredibly closed off as a teenager and shy. Almost to the point of crippling social anxiety. I remember feeling anxiety even interacting with the cashier at McDonald's.
I was 19 when I went to a rave and took MDMA for the first time and it completely opened me up. I became incredibly social in that moment, talking to strangers, having a good time, and opening up emotionally. That enabled me to take more baby steps in social interactions and develop socially.
Magic mushrooms also seemed to allow me to open up. Both drugs have had positive lasting effects on me. I had stopped taking them in my early 20s, but have started experimenting with magic mushrooms again as someone in their late 30s. The shrooms renewed my openness to others.
Alcohol is a bigger killer over time.
I will also note that every substance comes with risk, and the best way to reduce that risk is to learn and know as much as you can about the substance and how it affects you. A lot of the general education around drugs is simply "don't do it", but there are plenty of reliable non-biased resources out there. A couple off the top of my head are:
I mean, can you imagine if McDonalds marketing budget was spent pushing meth instead?
Heroin and other opiates need to be available over the counter at a store. This is the only way to remove the black market and the fentanyl tainted supply. If you just decriminalize, people still won't be able to get it and will have to go through a black market.
The market doesn't need to be a free for all, we can choose to make advertising the compounds illegal but still make them available.
If you don't fully legalize, the problem never actually gets solved. Pretty much all drug problems are created by prohibition itself. Full stop.
Isn't the US opiod crisis (not heroin specifically) massively driven by the fact that it is fairly easy to get lavish subscription on legal pain killers?
I mean I give it to you that suburbian moms on Vicodin won't roll up to a gas station with a semi-automatic, but they still OD, and that's still a drug problem.
No. You can get lavish amounts of food and yet not every country is filled with obese people. Maybe life is a little more complicated than a one liner.
> but they still OD, and that's still a drug problem.
People burn themselves with kettles, that's still a kettle problem.
So, what?
> People burn themselves with kettles, that's still a kettle problem.
> So, what?
Soo I demand that my government thinks about this problem and regulates it, which indeed it does. I would guess that an average Western country has north of fifty regulations directly related to burn hazards of household appliances.
So yes, these are indeed very good examples of government regulation preventing hurt, pain and death.
The US opioid crisis has been caused by a multitude of factors, including endemic poverty in some communities combined with physicians being told by producers that the compounds they were prescribing were not addictive (that was a load of shit delivered to increase profits, obviously a bad thing and we need to train physicians better on basic pharmacology). On top of that, now that restrictions have been increased on prescribing people have shifted back to the black market where nothing is regulated and you might get fentanyl hotspots in your heroin which is definitely one of the big reasons for overdoses today. Overdoses were slightly lower when pill mills were operating because people knew exactly how much of what was in the pills they get from Walgreen's or whatever.
The issues I'm referring to are the ones that have been present for much longer. These issues include things such as lack of employment due to drug users having a record, discrimination against users in general stemming from the stigma and association with violent crime (even though 90%+ of users are nonviolent), stigma in treating addiction and mental illnesses, overdoses which almost always stem from a change in how the in regular d suppliers cut their products and change potency (people get used to a certain concentration of active and if that changes they may easily use too much), and the lack of drug education due to the "just say no" ideology which essentially lied to multiple generations about the dangers and mechanisms of psychoactive compounds.
When it comes to alcohol, there are socially learned ways of managing use of the drug (ethanol) in a responsible fashion. Only some small communities have learned how to use other drugs responsibly due to the stigma preventing spread of information.
We also don't have a lot of information on the intersection of these psychoactive compounds and mental illness. Its possible that there are people who have malfunction regulation of endogenous opioids (endorphins) or their receptors which a partial agonist could be used for therapy. There is literally not a single doctor who would prescribe an opiate agonist for mental health issues because the research on things like that is all but banned due to the DEA dragging their feet and refusing to give people licensing to study the compounds (MAPS has had to sue the DEA over this issue). Combine this with funding issues, where only studies looking at downsides of psychoactive get funded and now we have an extremely skewed/biased view.
There are even more issues than I've presented here, but these are the ones at the forefront of my mind when I consider the issues of drug use today. Almost all of these issues have their root in the prohibition of these substances. It would be far easier to not only study and understand drugs without prohibition, but people would also overdose less due to having a reliable, regulated, and affordable supply. The primary issue that feeds into this which isn't due to prohibition itself is poverty, and that's a whole 'nother thing.
I said this because McDonalds has already proven that they can do a lot of damage to people with just food.
This is to get in touch with your inner mojo. Also Vol. 8 is awesome.
I mean, it literally did, and I stated as such.
Obviously the drug itself was not enough. The scenario and the realization afterword also mattered. But without mdma my life would likely have been very different.
Also, unlike cocaine etc. mdma isn’t addictive - taking more and more of it just results in you feeling shittier for longer.
This isn’t a very good argument. Table salt is literally Sodium and Chlorine, both of which are extremely toxic to humans but that’s irrelevant to anyone who understands that molecules have different effects than other molecules that share part of the same name.
Again though, mdma can kill you even if it’s completely pure. This is especially true if you take MAOIs or drink not enough/too much water or take any other meds that mess with serotonin. Please research things carefully.
As an example, cocaine is a schedule 2 drug but magic mushrooms, which has the lowest potential for harm (even lower than caffeine), is a schedule 1 drug.
Ecstasy/MDMA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA
Meth: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine
Ecstasy(MDMA) was like magic for the first time. It certainly should be taken only on special occasions but having molly with your loved one is beautiful experience.
AFAICT, that is correct; why do you think it doesn't? Name-based intuition?
Every reference, paper, etc., I can find of MDMA metabolites does not identify N-methylamphetamine (“methamphetamine”) as a metabolite of MDMA, and every identified metabolite retains the two oxygens of the methylenedioxy unit (whether it retains the whole unit or not) that distinguishes MDMA from methamphetamine.
MDMA breaks down into MDA, HMMA, HMA, DHA, MDP2P, MDOH.
Not sure why you have to insult someone in this discussion?
Meth will most likely ruin your life and you will want more and more.
MDMA is simply not very fun if you try taking it over and over again. It stops working and you just feel shitty for longer and longer periods without any feeling of getting high.
The problem is that a lot of molly that is sold today is full of things other than mdma. Meth is one of those things. You should absolutely use a test kit if you plan on taking anything.
Methylene Dioxy Meth Amphetamine
I’m sure that methamphetamine molecule just vanishes somewhere during digestion
Grandparent states: “and then realized that if I could do that with a drug then I could probably do it without a drug. (I haven’t done e in over a decade).”
If one is to take drugs for that purpose, LCD or mushrooms would be much better - insofar as safely realizing that your day to day cognition is not as static as you might assume.
It's tricky talking about drugs that are illegal and that can be harmful, but can also be highly beneficial and safe when taken under the right conditions. Let's try to avoid blanket condemnations and moralising; HN is meant to be a place for more nuanced discussions than that.
MDMA has for several decades been widely reported, anecdotally, to bring about profound, lasting, changes in people's emotional states, and to set them on long-term journeys of personal growth. And in recent years many governments around the world have green-lit medical trials into its benefits for various kinds of emotional/psychiatric conditions, though of course few people have access to these trials.
So, let's not be so dismissive of someone being open enough to share their personal experience.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190404094832.h...
Sorry to be blunt, but this is clearly the morally infused cliché of "healthy people do not take drugs because drugs are bad mkay.". Cliché which seem to automatically give people the status of the most responsible person in the room for some reason.
Well I'd like to give a rebuttal. Saying no to drugs is saying no to the risk of taking the drug, that is true. But it is _also_ saying no to the potential benefit.
If, for the sake of argument, someone took that risk at 20, but had some incredible epiphany and radically changed their life for the better during the 30 years following the experiment, you can't say in good faith that it was _bad_. You _have_ to take into account that a better quality of life was exchanged for that risk. And in my opinion, refusing to see that is not automatically the responsible position, even if it is always portrayed as such.
If mdma hadn’t helped me connect with people and get over my social anxiety, I would have killed myself by now and you simply would not be reading these words.
I am more aware of the costs of drug misuse than 99.98% of the people reading this but, still, I don’t think I’d be alive today without first fixing the problem of being so terribly unable to talk to people.
Oh boy, I guess you have never taken drugs or drank alcohol?
And if you read that without noticing the sarcasm then just stay away from drugs.
So in my particular case, these stimulants stretch out time. Literally. Like I think they improve the refractory period of my neurons, von Neumann talks about that in his book The Computer and the Brain, call it what you want, but I'll sit there thinking it's been over three hours since I sat down when it's only been an hour and fifty minutes. Guess what? You get twice as much time to figure out what to say and do in every single situation! Like the difference between chat rooms and telephone, almost. And there's much more to it than just the time dilation.
Pretty cheap lottery ticket if you ask me, just go to a real psych and ask, OK ask like this:
I am an awkward guy, and I want to screen whether I have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, because if I do happen to have that hand tied behind my back, I would like to untie it. Just tell me conclusively whether I have ADD--which is unlikely, but worth the odds--or not. It's just I've heard it's such a slam-dunk to treat this, from people who openly talk about their ADD, that I want to get to the bottom of this, conclusively.
They should oblige.
Amphetamines are stimulants.
MDMA is, apart from being a stimulant, an entactogen. This gives the positive social effects.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathogen%E2%80%93entactoge...
I had massive problems speaking with people. I ended up going to a rave with some friends, took some molly, had an amazing time talking to people and then realized that if I could do that with a drug then I could probably do it without a drug. (I haven’t done e in over a decade).
I still had some issues with public speaking so during my mba I forced myself to give every presentation possible. This largely solved that problem.
Note that mdma can kill you, especially if taken without experience. This is not an endorsement of drug taking.