In 1997 I went off to college, at an East Coast Jesuit school where everyone was really into athletics. The other students liked to drink and party, but no one really cared about the rave scene except me.
But New York City wasn’t too far away, and so by the second semester of my freshman year, I was driving down every weekend and hitting as many clubs as I could. My first year of college also happened to be my last year of college.
Pretty soon I started selling the nightlife drugs I was using, in order to afford going out that much. By that fall, when classes started up again for what would have been my sophomore year, I was full-on wheeling and dealing. Liquid acid, paper acid, acid gel tabs, ketamine, mescaline microdots. And ecstasy pills.
Ecstasy, or MDMA, all came from the Netherlands in those days. The pure “molly” that you’d hear whispers of—the kind that smells like sassafras, that’s been synthesized properly and will blow any pressed pill you’ve ever taken out of the water—was already over by 1998. But for a short time the pressed MDMA pills were still quality.
There were blue dolphins. Green RNs. Speckled crowns. There were so many kinds of the Mitsubishi-stamp pills it was getting out of hand. Mitsubishi GTs. Mitsubishi GT turbos. Double-stacked Mitsubishi GT turbos. Triple-stacked Mitsubishi GT turbos. They did stop after quadruple-stacked, since most people don’t actually want a pill that’s approaching the dimensions of a Big Mac.
Everything was advertised as MDMA, but often you’d end up with MDA, or MDEA, or some other amphetamine derivative. There were two kinds in particular—Yellow Sunshines, and the Skull and Crossbones—that were outrageously speedy; one pill could keep you up for three days, reminiscent of a different well-known amphetamine.
Often I distinguished MDMA from the speedier, more hallucinogenic MDA by just taking a pill and figuring the rest of that batch was the same. But for sales purposes I needed something a bit more reliable, because once I started picking up 1,000-packs there were way too many different stamps and color and shapes. I didn’t want to sell something if I couldn’t even tell the buyer what it was.
We’ve just released what is effectively an all-new reagent instruction pamphlet, as well as a fully redesigned heatstroke pamphlet! More info on our website, in the most recent article posted. pic.twitter.com/uKpJ2VLbTv
— DanceSafe (@DanceSafe) May 1, 2024
Nightlife harm reduction nonprofit DanceSafe had just been founded in 1998, and when they started selling drug-testing reagent kits I was all in. When the chemical reagents interact with different drug samples they change to different colors, which you then cross-reference with a corresponding color chart. This gave me a sense of whether a pill was MDMA-based or MDA-based, and allowed me to share the info with people who were buying.
Reagent testing wasn’t something most people were doing, but I wasn’t the only one; people who were really serious about MDMA, whether for personal use or for business purposes, were ordering the kits too. The results didn’t indicate anything about potency, but were still helpful in determining how much to take because we knew MDA was more potent than MDMA.
According to my test results at least, MDMA was fading away while more pills seemed to comprise MDA and things that reagent testing couldn’t identify. And then around 2001, the market shifted toward ecstasy pills people began producing domestically.
The new supply was a lot cheaper than what we’d been getting from Amsterdam—around $1 to $3 per pill when you bought 1,000 at a time, whereas before it had been $7 or $9 per pill. But the quality went way down, to the point that I stopped using them. And because of that, I didn’t feel comfortable selling them anymore.
Image (cropped) via National Science Foundation
Show Comments