DOSE:

1 - 2 tablet

oral

MDMA

BODY WEIGHT:

230 lb

I bought a fairly huge amount (for one person anyway) of pressed pills of Ecstasy a couple weeks before the first dose, intending to stretch it out for a long time. The dealer assured each tablet was 180-200 mg each.

Background: I'm a male in his early 20's with prior experience with LSD and psilocybin. I'm an engineer, and over the years I have fostered an attitude of incurable scientific materialism and rationalism. I don't have a mystical bone in my body, but the arresting effects of psychedelics cannot be denied. I'm an atheist, but I can still feel immense spirituality evoked by a psychedelic trip or even by a clear, starry night. To be cheeky, perhaps psychedelics are what I'm filling that 'God-shaped hole' with. I approach these trips as scientifically as possible, putting in plain language. I value objectivity immensely, and trying to put these subjective, ineffable experiences to words is a huge, fun challenge for me to grapple with. Several times, I'll catch myself trying to describe an acid trip to myself while driving or something. In light of all this, this report will be rather dry, and I apologize in advance for it.

One Friday evening (I wanted to give myself all weekend to get over any negative or weird after effects) I took one tablet whole, and chewed on it a few times. The powder it broke up into was bitter and the unpleasant taste of it lingered in the back of my throat for several minutes. I'm still not sure what the inactive ingredient was. I gulped the rest down with tea and retired to my room in my apartment to goof around on the internet. I didn't want to try and go out or do anything with anyone when, for one thing, I never had MDMA before, and two, I didn't really know what these particular tablets were going to do to me, and three, I'd hate to raise my chances of getting busted. This is what I always do when trying any illicit substance.

I felt the effects settle in over the next couple hours. My sense of touch increased greatly and my muscles wanted to stretch out and move around. To an observer, it may have looked like I was having a protracted orgasm. This was a body high. Later on, I dubbed MDMA 'the love-hump drug' due to both the increased sense of touch and the lack of ability to get an erection. 'The cuddle drug' is probably more apt. Anyway, a warm, fuzzy feeling settled in my crown, and I just laid there, listening to techno and chilling out. End-to-end, I'd say it lasted 6 hours. I was underwhelmed by the drug's effects overall, especially since the tablet was supposed to be a heavy dose. I began to suspect I had been burned, but this was probably just due to it being my first time. 24 hours later I experienced an unusual moderate-severe headache, but no other possible symptoms of an MDMA hangover persisted.

This is where I got reckless, but what I did had interesting after-effects. Exactly a week later, I downed two tablets and decided to repeat the last week's activities. I started to feel it kick in only five minutes after taking it and had a feeling of floating or being lifted. Compounding my dumb decision was a huge meal I had eaten before taking the dose - I'm wiser now and know that MDMA impedes digestion. If any food is eaten immediately before rolling, it will sit in your gut for a lot longer than it would if sober. Once again, I retired to my room and got on my laptop. About 40 minutes after ingestion, I began to feel an immense feeling of euphoria and well-being, rivaling any other euphoria that I've felt at any other time in my life. I was all smiles and I kept asking my internet friends if they wanted to Skype. It was good that they didn't take up my offer, because I didn't last too much longer after that.

The serotonin flood was becoming an uncontainable deluge. I felt like a million bucks, but my jaw muscles, which I learned were at the mercy of serotonin, ached to clench. I was sweating like a pig (no wonder there were all those ecstasy deaths in those hot crowded dance clubs). My head was starting to move faster than I could follow. Around an hour and a half after the dose, I lost consciousness on my bed. I remember it feeling like I was patiently waiting out the high, like I was huddled in a dark cellar with a massive hurricane raging outside. I recall a rushing noise and occasional flashes of light - I'm not positive, but I think I gave myself a seizure. Five hours after the dose, I woke up groggily. I was naked and had stripped my bedsheets out from underneath me. My bed was soaked with sweat. I learned immediately what woke me up - a huge feeling of nausea. I then proceeded to evacuate that huge dinner out of my mouth into the toilet. That was the worst part. A weird effect that I noticed was that I had apparently lost my hearing. Something was pressing on my ears, probably from the inside.

I woke up again in the morning, 12 hours after the dose. I was thankfully alive, not deaf, and felt okay, aside from an absolutely massive hangover. I had lost my appetite and the sensation of hunger didn't come back to me for almost a week - I kept myself fed simply by virtue of routine and food's good taste. The appetite-nullifying effects persisted.

My mental landscape was a strange, strange place the week after my double dose. Strange tracks of thought would take me to weird images and memories/situations that either were completely off the wall bizarre, or obviously didn't happen. Instances of hallucinations (visual pareidolia) were more frequent. My head buzzed with psychosis, and I was fighting the dark feeling that I had driven myself insane, or that the drug had revealed a latent, already existing schizophrenia that I was already afflicted with. It reminded me of the psychotic tracks of thought that appear when one is on acid, and that helped convince me that all I was experiencing was a serotonin imbalance that was being corrected. By all external accounts, I showed no signs of mental distress at work or home, aside from being a little out of it. I will never take so much of the stuff again.

I puzzled for a long time on why the effects of the dosages weren't apparently proportional to the actual amount taken. One dose gave me a vague body high, and two doses sent me into a blackout and possible seizure. I blamed the possibly inconsistent amount of MDMA in the tablets (if only it were legal and standards existed), my brain's unfamiliarity with MDMA, and the short time span between dosages. Many other things could have been in play, including day-to-day brain chemistry and mood. I waited a month to allow my brain to reset itself before trying it again.

I decided to try it a little differently the next time around. When the time came, four Fridays after the double dose, I got home, took one tablet, and pulverized it. I was already feeling very good, considering other things that were going on. I even felt my jaw wanting to clench before ingestion, as if my brain were anticipating the serotonin flood. I mixed the powder with some chocolate milk and downed it. Less than a half hour after ingestion, the roll was in full effect ('That was fast!' I remarked in my journal). An unexpected effect was the visuals. My hands, writing on paper in front of me, were breathing, moving subtly back and forth. It reminded me of shrooms or acid. The psychotic trains of thought returned. I ditched my paper pad early on and just laid back and experienced the roll. I lingered on memories, thought of people important to me, watched some sappy feel-good videos ('Gratitude' by Louie Schwartzberg on YouTube), and generally had a very nice time to myself. I felt very at peace with myself and everything around me. A couple hours into it, I actually fell asleep. Over the course of this, I had a feeling of nausea in my stomach and I was afraid of vomiting. The feeling of nausea faded away over time, seemingly going into my head to turn into the feeling of pleasurable well-being.

This feeling continued for several days after the fact. As I journaled 3 days after the fact: 'Just spent some time chilling out, looking at photos from 4 years ago, thinking about how much time passed and how I've changed. Listening to nice music, feeling the sun rays warm me. There was a weird sense of gratefulness that's still hanging around. I hung out with the family Sunday and everyone was happy to see me and fun to be around. I wasn't even high or anything.' There were no headaches or negative after-effects. I have a standard now - no more than one tablet a month. I want to preserve what this drug is giving to me.

There were many good things happening in my life around that time and maybe I was just in a naturally good mood for the weeks that I've been experimenting. But during that time I felt very 'zen', very good about things. It's very hard to isolate what can be definitively attributed to the afterglow and what can't. In any case, the ecstasy didn't hurt :)

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 105194
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 24
Published: Nov 22, 2022	Views: 947
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