I LOVED MY "X"

When I say I loved my "X", I'm referring to ecstasy, the designer drug. Ecstasy's main ingredient is MDMA (methylendioxymethamphetimine). Ecstasy is a synthetic, psychoactive drug. The main ingredient, MDMA, affects the neurons in the brain that uses serotonin. Serotonin directly affects things like mood, sleep patterns, sexual urges, and response to pain as well as aggression.

If you've ever been on it, or around others who are "rolling", you can see how "touchy-feely" people became and how easily aroused everyone can become. After a night of eating about ten pills of Ecstasy, I asked a boy, Timmy, to move in when I had only known him for about twelve hours. Whew! What a night! It turned into three crazy years that I wouldn't trade for anything. But the majority of our relationship was spent using Ecstasy.


It was virtually impossible to get the same "high" from Ecstasy two days in a row. We used about three or four nights a week. When we were on it, we seemed to perform the same rituals. For example, we always listened to techno music. Everything becomes so heightened on Ecstasy that music transcends you to another realm, or so it seems. Because, MDMA, in high doses, affects the body's temperature, we'd need it very cool in the apartment. Sometimes we'd take a shower or bath. Wow, I struggle to accurately describe how incredibly altered sensations to the skin become. A soft touch on your arm can be felt through your whole body as if angels are kissing your skin with lips of velvet.

Sex is out of this world. It's no wonder this drug was designed to be used to aid couples with counselling issues. Psychiatrists used it for couples in small amounts to help them be more open with one another.

This amazing state of euphoria came with a cost! It wasn't cheap at all. Because Timmy and I had such a tolerance, we each ate at least ten per night. So twenty pills per night at three nights a week was sixty pills weekly; eqivalent to six hundred dollars per week. Doing more calculations, this was $31,200 each year! Buying whip-its, gum, pacifiers, Vick's vapor rub, orange juice, vitamin C, bubbles,black lights, laser lights, body paint and music was all part of our "rituals" and expenses.

Not only did this fantastic state of being cost dollars, it came with a price we paid in health. Let me go over some of the physical effects of Ecstasy: increase in heart rate and blood pressure, muscle tension (massages are given for hours), teeth clenching (pacifiers are used to aid with this), nausea, blurred vision, chills, sweating, liver and kidney problems, confusion, anxiety, brain over-heating, even death. I'm sorry to say I have lost friends to Ecstasy related deaths.

Somehow, when faced with the potential "scoring" of Ecstasy, we were willing to chance death.

There are serious psychological effects of ecstasy and MDMA as well. From personal experience, depression is imminent after use. Occasionally I would crave it the next day, but after trying to use it a couple times, I discovered it was better to wait in order to attain the desired affect.

I spent from age twenty-nine to thirty-one using Ecstasy every week with my boyfriend at the time, who was, incidentally, eighteen years old when we met. Once we stopped using ecstasy our relationship fizzled out.

MDMA, after prolonged use, does impair judgement and reasoning up to seven years after use. Also, brain neurons are damaged for years. I never met a drug I didn't fall in love with. Ecstasy was no different. However, I deal with the residual effects on a daily basis.

Again I say, it's just insane to put a drug in your body that ultimately is going to destroy your health and metal well-being. It catches-up....I'm living proof.