CIA experiments, Mormon ravers and reformed racists: the untold history of MDMA
It was in 1975, when Carl Resnikoff and his girlfriend, Judith Gipson, took a bucolic ferry ride to Sausalito, a city located on the north end of Golden Gate Bridge, that a revolution in youth culture, music, emotion and imagination would take place. It was on that ride that the two undergraduates took capsules filled with MDMA powder for the very first time. Resnikoff, a biophysics major at Berkeley, had synthesized the drug himself. As the boat cut through the water of the San Francisco Bay, Gipson began to feel “a floating sense of euphoria … like some guy could come walking up to us asking for help and his guts are spilling out, and we’d be grooving on how beautiful it was.’”
According to Rachel Nuwer’s book I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World, Resnikoff and his girlfriend’s romp was the first-ever documented instance of people taking MDMA recreationally.
Nuwer is a science journalist who covered clinical trials for MDMA use in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While cannabis and psilocybin have undergone rebrands of late, going from countercultural tokens to the mainstream, she believes that the public is starting to open up to MDMA, too.
“MDMA deserves its own story,” Nuwer said. “I wanted to bring together the history, culture, politics and science of the drug all in one place. This book is for anyone who’s interested in the drug, whether it’s someone who’s taken it 500 times on the dancefloor or who’s using it therapeutically for the first time.”
Nuwer believes that MDMA will “follow the path of cannabis”, becoming legal medicinally first, then decriminalized, and perhaps fully legalized for all types of use.
That cycle may have already started: three clinical trials have found that MDMA, which is also called ecstasy, can speed the recovery of PTSD. FDA approval for therapeutic use could come as early as next year.
It’s been a long journey for MDMA, once demonized by sensationalist media coverage that turned the rare ecstasy deaths into moral panics, often without mentioning the other factors that made the drug more dangerous. (Most fatalities were caused by dehydration or combining MDMA with other substances.)
Moral panic intensified after a paper published in Science in 2003 found that MDMA caused permanent brain damage in monkeys and baboons – two unlucky animals died from their doses – which did much to advance the stereotype of burned-out rave kids. But, as Nuwer writes, that paper was later dramatically retracted after it was revealed that the scientists had mistakenly dosed the rats with crystal meth, not MDMA.
Scientists called this “the great retraction”, and though the authors of the study blamed their error on mislabeled drug bottles, skeptics wondered if they were trying to cover up a laboratory theft of MDMA that led to the switch-up.
Through her research, Nuwer learned that many things most people think they know about MDMA – even hardened users – is actually false. For one: the name itself. The first nickname for MDMA (or methylenedioxy methamphetamine) was Adam, a nod to its back-to-nature, lovey-dovey effects. Then came ecstasy, which was coined by the massively successful Texas distributor Michael Clegg. Ecstasy was rebranded by dealers in the US in the early 2000s as molly, and some users thought it was a different, or “better”, drug.
But all of those nicknames refer to the same drug. “Some regular MDMA users still swear that molly is different than ecstasy, but it’s not,” Nuwer said.
Still, the idea that molly is “purer” than ecstasy led to a boom in sales, bringing the decidedly 90s drug back in the new millennium.
While the tale of two college kids trying MDMA they made themselves on a ferry ride is certainly a fitting origin story for a drug linked to youth culture, other people certainly tried MDMA before they did – those stories are just lost to time.
As Nuwer writes, the drug was first created by Merck, a German pharmaceutical company, which filed a patent for methylsafrylamin on Christmas Eve in 1912. The pharma company was trying to develop a blood-clotting drug, which fell through, but the compound was picked back up in the late 1950s as a potential energy supplement for fighter pilots.
By the 1950s, CIA agents working on MKUltra, the secretive and illegal human experiment program, were at least aware of MDMA’s existence. Though the program may be most famously associated with LSD – agents dosed unwilling participants with the psychedelic in hopes of testing it as a truth serum against Soviet agents – they also used MDA, a close sibling of MDMA.
When Harold Blauer, a 42-year-old former tennis player, checked into a posh Manhattan hospital for depression in 1952, he had the misfortune of doing so at the same time the US army tapped the clinic to study the effects of mind-altering drugs. After four injections of MDA left him chilled, shaking and begging for doctors to stop, Blauer got a final, massive dose of 450mg of MDA. He seized, fell into a coma and died. Doctors tried to pass it off as a coronary attack, which was successful until the truth was revealed by a 1975 congressional inquiry. (Blauer’s family won a $700,000 wrongful-death lawsuit against the government in 1987.)
The incident seems to have cooled the use of MDA in army experiments, and the Controlled Substances Act of 1971 made MDA illegal. Shortly after, chemists tweaked the components of the drug to create a new one that skirted the ban: pure MDMA. While Nuwer says there is no record of who used this drug in the early 1970s, there is evidence of chemists producing it in Indiana, Chicago and New York.
Nuwer spoke to one retired literary agent, David Obst, who claims he took MDMA in the early 1970s before a pitch meeting with Simon & Schuster for the book All the President’s Men. The head of the publishing giant initially passed on Obst’s pitch, and the agent, feeling all the vibes, burst into uncontrollable tears. His emotions wore the publisher down, who finally gave him the green light. “So thanks to MDMA, we have All the President’s Men,” Obst quips in the book.
While experimental therapists quietly tested MDMA on patients experiencing extreme trauma and feelings of dissociation, it slowly became ubiquitous in clubs around the world. One of the first hotspots was the Starck Club, which operated in Dallas in the 1980s. “On opening night, someone