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How bad is ecstacy?

Ecstasy is horribly, horribly bad for you because it produces an enjoyable experience.

Clearly, you people need to understand the importance of self-denial morality in determining human health. If God had intended for man to enjoy life, He would not have made His followers feel so thoroughly anti-pleasure.
 
I bet any drug that induces feelings of pleasure is going to be bad for you in the long term psychologically, if taken frequently enough.

With all those periods feeling fantastic, everyday life must seem really crap for habitual users.

It may sound terribly old-fashioned, but perhaps the best way to experience pleasure is to work hard at something and get your enjoyment from the successes along the way?
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
I bet any drug that induces feelings of pleasure is going to be bad for you in the long term psychologically, if taken frequently enough.

With all those periods feeling fantastic, everyday life must seem really crap for habitual users.

It may sound terribly old-fashioned, but perhaps the best way to experience pleasure is to work hard at something and get your enjoyment from the successes along the way?
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Agreed. Mostly.

I agree with you that there's danger for users of psychedelics in the fact that whatever rubbish they're thinking at the time feels really good.

I think that it is really interesting for some of us introspective types to "screw on a new head" temporarily--to quote eminent NIDA researcher Joni Mitchell*--because if you've never done it, you simply have no idea that it's possible.

I think changing your mental function can give you some compassion for the mentally ill--that's the old Kesey thing from the 60's, but I still believe it. (Not that Kesey produced another novel worth a damn past Sometimes a Great Notion)

I don't think the "insights" produced by psychedelics have any more value than that. And they take their toll.

MDMA may have completely different long-term neurotoxic effects from LSD. My bet would be that it's worse for you, but I'm just talking out my 8.
But some of the subjective issues are the same.

For me, the usually pleasurable sensations involved with listening to music on LSD became incredibly intensified, and my already obsessive attention to sound became even more so, with a feeling I can only describe as "oceanic".

But I never had any really new ideas on the drug that I wouldn't have had otherwise...

eta: that last sentence seems to contradict what I was trying to say: I mean insights of a straightforward factual nature, such as: the relationship of the overtone series to musical structure, or something like that.

*not.
 
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Ivor the Engineer said:
With all those periods feeling fantastic, everyday life must seem really crap for habitual users.
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"Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-colored houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth."

SH, he da man!
 
beige-man said:
...

Stand at the window here. Was there ever such an average, normal day? See how the beige fog swirls down the street and drifts across the beige-colored houses. What could be more..ok?"
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Sherlock should come over to the bland and inoffensive thread.
Everyone's welcome, if they speak softly, and blandly, even SH.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
I bet any drug that induces feelings of pleasure is going to be bad for you in the long term psychologically, if taken frequently enough.

With all those periods feeling fantastic, everyday life must seem really crap for habitual users.
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Well, more anecdotes...
But, the thing about MDMA is, it just quits working after a while for a whole lot of people. Everyone I've personally known who's used it, never did for long, because it just quits being effective after a while. And most people aren't willing to just start taking larger and larger doses. Unless you have an extremely addictive personality, you know that drug overdoses do happen and do kill people. So most people do it for a short while, and then it's over.
Which is radically different from something like pot, which people do become accustomed to as a preferable state of mind.

Honestly, I've never actually known an MDMA "habitual user". I know they exist, but I've never actually met one. And I used to hang out with a pretty rough crowd. I've met lots of coke-heads and meth-heads, but never an actual MDMA junkie.
 
http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/122/drugtablefullve4.jpg

Say it with me kids: soda does not cause obesity. It is perfectly normal to get half your RDA of calories from a drug-laced sugar. There is no such thing as caffeine dependence. Obesity is not a physical problem. Government sponsored drugging of children is not a social problem.

On the "badness" of MDMA:

http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/
http://www.hoboes.com/Politics/Prohibition/Drug_Guide/
http://www.hoboes.com/Politics/Prohibition/General/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylenedioxymethamphetamine
 
I've sampled a cornucopia of drugs, some I've liked, some I don't care for. I have always said I would do any drug except a.) anything I had to inject or b.) ecstasy.
Why not ecstasy?
Because everyone I knew in high school did it and it made them act like total morons. While they were on it, they acted stupid and the more they did it, the more it began to affect them when they weren't on it. E-tards, we used to call them. I lost several friends to E, not physically, but mentally. One friend lost his driver's license because he started having seizures while driving. About half a dozen dropped out of school. Another half dozen got sent away to rehab camps.
I finally tried ecstasy a couple of years ago, I was at a concert, some cute guy in a kilt offered, and I thought, "Well, I might as well try it. Once." It was either a dud or I just don't have the personality for it. It did nothing for me at all except make me a little bit giggly and aware of the softness of my own hands, but I can get that without drugs.

End verdict for my personal experience (and this goes for all drugs): Meh. It's fine, just be safe and don't overdo it.
 
Ecstacy can cause overheating

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.0953-816X.2004.03453.x/abs/

And I know of at least two users who died of water intoxication. In these two cases, MDMA was not the cause of death...but it did make the users feel ravenously thirsty--many users do not know that you can die from water intoxication. There also seems to be some long term effects on memory in chronic users. It floods the brain with serotonin which can have a bounce back depression effect which is worse with chronic use and harder to remedy.
 
Don't mess with "e", it can do seriously evil things to your head.

Going home from a rave at Raindance in 1991 we stopped at a petrol/gas station for snacks and drinks. I bought a Cadbury's Flake and it tasted absolutely disgusting.

Anything that makes you think chocolate tastes bad ... well, there oughta be a law ...
 
calebprime said:
Some of the agitation that younger people taking SSRI's seem to experience is from the side-effect of obsessive thoughts and from akithesia. I experienced racing thoughts and flight of ideas from taking Prozac--but the problem is--I'm that way anyway. It's very difficult to disentangle the SSRI effect from the depression/anxiety that people have to begin with.

But bassett, a hint: you're going to do better if you find studies that actually prove long-term damage. That's where the action is, so to speak.:D
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Sorry, i can't let this one slide.

Your argument boils down to this:

- Person has a really bad headache.
- Person takes pain killers to remove the headache
- Person commits suicide because it still hurts too much
- pain killers caused him to commit suicide.

Maybe some commit mass murder while taking SSRI, but saying that is the cause... i demand more evidence.
 
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TobiasTheCommie said:
Sorry, i can't let this one slide.

Your argument boils down to this:

- Person has a really bad headache.
- Person takes pain killers to remove the headache
- Person commits suicide because it still hurts too much
- pain killers caused him to commit suicide.

Maybe some commit mass murder while taking SSRI, but saying that is the cause... i demand more evidence.
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Tobias, this is a terrible misunderstanding, which I see I've caused by careless phrasing.

Actually bassett was talking about mass murder relating to Ecstasy.
I was saying it didn't happen much.

The "long-term damage" I was referring to was from Ecstasy, not Prozac. The jury's still out on both, but if I had to guess, I'd say Ecstasy is a lot worse for you.

My personal experience with Prozac was unpleasant, and I do know of some people who become agitated from SSRI's. As you know, here in America they've started putting a "black box" warning on the SSRI's, and the finding seems to be that there is a small percentage of younger people who seem to have an elevated suicide risk. (This is just from The Boston Globe) However, the risks of not treating are also great. So for me it's one big question mark.

I sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding. I'm a little suspicious of authority, but I've been saying here many times that the combination of therapy, lifestyle change, and medication seems to work for people. My main concern is that people who are not really depressed (like me) get medicated, and then it's hard to get off the stuff. As for numbers, I've got nothing. Nada.

I remember your response back in my brief When is Psychiatry Effective thread and I completely respected it.

Let me know if there's anything else I've said which strikes you as being wrong. I'll see if I need to correct it.

Caleb
 
Ok, sounds good, and i'm sorry for jumping on you like that.. as i said, i couldn't let it go. :)

With your post, i no longer disagree with anything... :)
 
I was also careful to say that in studying the effect of SSRI's on "suicidal ideation" that it's hard to disentangle the initial depression/anxiety from the later effect of the drug. Prozac didn't make these people depressed to begin with.

Actually, my main personal concern with Prozac was impotence and a weird "high" that made me feel estranged from myself. Not suicide.
If I had been "compliant", the doctor would have told me that the "high" was going to go away. But I'm not sure if I could take feeling that "hyper" for that long. So I stopped.

My problem was not depression but smoking marijuana, which basically acts like a sedative. So the combination of withdrawing from marijuana and going on a stimulant drug, plus the difficulties I was having in my life at the time was a "triple whammy": I was jumping out of my skin.

The problem: Doctors don't deal with people like me very often, so I had to learn to translate their advice into something I could use.

I can't be any more frank than that!

caleb
 
Its hard to say if a lot of these people were taking MDMA only. without some sort of formal study its impossible to say what was in the pills people took while out and about, if it had stuff other than extacy in it. I know meth is cut in with pills quite a bit, it makes sense as a business move.
 
Only time I ever took X, we got some X and some acid, and decided we'd find out what all the eXcitement was about We took the X. We waited two hours. Nothing happened. We dropped the acid. It was a pretty standard acid trip. I saw no point.
 
I saw a lot of things during my time as a medlab scientist in a hospital. Most drugs I'd come across (and, ironically, some of which I myself had sampled in my time), and seen the effects. MDMA I only ever encountered once in A&E, and that was a rather strange situation. The details are vague now, but I do recall it had something to do with too little or too much hydration.

I've tried it once. Not sure if I'd ever do it again. Risk seems too much now, in hindsight, but the sensation that time was definitely an experience.

Athon
 
Thanks for the links guys. As far as I can see one of the main problems is that very few studies seem to address ecstacy on its own, they almost all just look at ecstacy users. This has the obvious problem, as I mentioned in the OP, that there are no quality controls. Are mental problems really caused by ecstacy, or just by whatever crap dealers have mixed with it? Clearly there are ethical problems involved in actaully testing this, but it is an important question. The study on rats that showed their brains heating up is interesting, but on the other hand I have never heard of anyone confirmed deaths from this, so it seems quite possible that the risk from this is exaggerated.

As for addiction, the concensus seems to be that ecstacy isn't very addictive at all. Yes, there are some chronic users, but they are few and far between. It doesn't seem to be anywhere near as addictive as alcohol or even caffeine, and certainly not in the same league as other class A drugs that it is grouped with.

I have heard of water intoxication before, but I have not seen evidence that this was actually due to ecstacy. The accounts I have read claimed that people drank too much water because they knew they would get dehydrated and overcompensated, not because of the actual effects of the drug. Does anyone have more information on this?

So, as far as I can tell, prolonged ecstacy use may cause brain damage, but how much is not clear and it doesn't seem any worse than regular drinking, it is very rare to overdose and is not especially addictive. Very few deaths can be attributed to ecstacy, directly or indirectly. The biggest problem is the matter of quality control, which is mainly caused by the drug's illegal status. And yet ecstacy is classed as one of the worst drugs possible. Weird.
 
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