Energy Flash

Ravers eagerly assume that they’ve been sold an inferior product, and take more pills to compensate; hence the perennial mantra ‘E’s are shit these days, you have to take five of them to get a buzz’. Often the ‘weakness’ of any given Ecstasy pill is caused by the serotonin-depletion effect; the bliss-deficit is in the raver’s brain, not the tablet. If E was legally available in doses of guaranteed purity and fixed levels of MDMA content, it would be easier for users to monitor their intake, to realize when they’re overdoing it.

Taking Ecstasy is like going on an emotional spree, spending your happiness in advance.

House and techno producers have developed a drug-determined repertoire of effects, textures and riffs that are expressly designed to trigger the tingly rushes that traverse the Ecstatic body.

Writing about his memories of London’s most hedonistically crazed gay club, Trade, Richard Smith came up with the brilliant phrase ‘a . . . communism of the emotions’.

What all these different uses of MDMA have in common is ekstasis: the Greek etymological root of ecstasy, its literal meaning is ‘standing outside oneself’. MDMA takes you out of yourself and into blissful merger with something larger than the paltry, isolate ‘I’, whether that trans-individual is the couple-in-love, or the dancing crowd, or the cosmos. MDMA is the ‘we’ drug. It’s no coincidence that Ecstasy escalated into a pop cultural phenomemon at the end of the go-for-it, go-it-alone eighties (the real Me Decade). For Ecstasy is the remedy for the alienation caused by an atomized society.

Electronic Body Music in Europe fed into rave.