e-book The Theater: A Chasing Ecstasy Story

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Jan 21, - Matthew Klam article describes his experiences with Ecstasy, But after chasing that initial high for a couple months, every other Kyle, 21, a student in Florida and a friend of Jennie's, had heard amazing stories about Ecstasy, but music · Pop Culture · television · theater · watching · video: arts.
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As he begins taking me back to that almost mythical first time , his voice ratchets upward in tone, the words coming quicker, excited at the recounting of such an obviously glorious experience. His body language echoes his words. Between swallows from an oversized mug of cappuccino, this is his story: "Some friends of mine and I had gone down to the Lizard Lounge -- where that retro club Polly Esther's is now -- wanting to try some Ecstasy.

We wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The word was that it was just, you know, very cool stuff. Very safe, not too trippy. My girlfriend scored some pills, these large whitish tablets, like horse pills almost, from some guy that was just selling them right there on the street in front of the club. Nasty, nasty flavor. After that, we kill some time dancing, walking around, just sitting there waiting for the stuff to do whatever it was going to do.

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We were nervous, too, but everyone had assured us that this was a cool place to do it. And I vividly remember -- like it was yesterday -- sitting on a little, like, gas main that was mounted against the wall at the mouth of the alley, with people going by, drag queens, students, and suddenly being very, very conscious of my vision becoming amazingly good.

And I felt this tingle that began in my fingers and spread all over my body, coming in waves, just this indescribable feeling of aliveness. Just like that. And after this initial rush of pleasure came an overwhelming -- and I mean over-fucking-whelming -- feeling of total and complete positivity. Any and all fears I had harbored about doing my first drug were waylaid instantly. It was pure bliss, but it didn't knock me off my feet, or feel scary in any way.

We spent the next four, five hours just walking around downtown Austin. We went to the banks of Town Lake and lay in the wet grass and watched the stars and cuddled. And we talked. We talked for hours. We talked about everything.


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It was probably the best, most open and honest conversation I've ever had with anyone in my entire life. Which is not something you find too often in freshman couples, you know?

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I suppose that wasn't due to doing this drug, right, but it didn't hurt the situation at all. And I mean, like, for the better. There are more grinny, happy X-tales floating around Austin than there are wannabe filmmakers. Sometimes it seems like everyone here, at one point or another, has tried Ecstasy, "X," "E," whatever you choose to call it, at least once. They've had the better part of two decades to do it in after all.

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And despite everything -- the DEA's war on drugs, rampant scare stories, and obvious misuse, overuse, and outright abuse -- it's still very much here in the midst of the live music capital of the world, fueling all-night parties, love-ins, and clandestine husband-and-wife emotional therapy sessions. No cultural group has been more closely identified with Ecstasy, however, than the raver kids, those DJ-knob-twiddling wearers of monstrously baggy trousers who run fun-riot over assorted local venues on the weekends, dancing for hours on end to the sweaty, propulsive rhythms of house, jungle, drum-n-bass, speed garage, and trance.

Yet while ravers as a cultural group are indeed very active in the Texas Ecstasy community, they're hardly the only ones. It should go without saying that just being a raver doesn't automatically mean a person has ever tried Ecstasy, or ever plans to, or is anything other than a model citizen with a wardrobe full of preposterously oversized outerwear. The spectrum of current and former Ecstasy users runs the gamut from the above-mentioned anonymous urban professional and his friends to nearly any type of person you might find on a Sixth Street Friday night, from fraternity and sorority types to punks and upscale clubgoers.

Plenty of shiny happy people have crowded local hour eateries after 2am for years now than can possibly be explained by two martinis and a quickie in a club restroom. Naturally, it takes all types to fuel an ongoing movement like the country's Ecstasy boom, though the majority of users spoken to for this article tend to be college-educated, thoughtful, and well-spoken individuals. Despite its current standing as a federal Schedule I drug, which places it right alongside heroin and cocaine in terms of illegality, Ecstasy attracts the intellectual, creative types who find the idea of nodding off in a pool of their own vomit or jittering like a nic-fit reprobate all night somewhat off-putting.

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It's a party drug that's frequently shared by couples, alone and at home. It's also the focus of an increasing amount of media attention these days. Recent studies have concluded that long- and short-term use of the drug may impede the brain's neural transmitters in charge of releasing serotonin and dopamine, chemicals responsible for memory, sleep patterns, and emotional highs and lows. The story of Ecstasy and its arrival in Austin in the early Eighties is an epic tale of late-night debauchery, high-flying club life, and one very disgruntled Drug Enforcement Agency.

It's also irrevocably tied to this city's vital electronic music scene, though as before, the tale of the tablet is less about dance-club culture than the emergence of a whole new strata of cultural subgenres. And as befits an age where the world appears to be on the cusp of a massive global technological revolution, Ecstasy advocates along with their detractors are becoming a noticeable presence on the Net.

Where did it all begin? Listen up. Class is in session. Everything Starts With an 'E' Germany, the Great War had yet to begin, Kaiser Wilhelm was still looking flash in his pointed hat and epaulet combo, and the little pharmaceutical company known as Merck was busily cranking out a new breed of psychotropic drugs, having previously given the world the one-two sucker punch of morphine and Dilaudid and by extension, William S.

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MDMA, the chemical abbreviation for Ecstasy, received patent number There persists to this day an intriguing rumor of its use during World War I as a battlefield stimulant. The story has it that German and American troops, cresting on a euphoric wave of MDMA, laid down their weapons for a little while and had a party.

Wishful thinking, probably, but a nice story nonetheless. During the mids, a California-based biochemistry Ph. What Shulgin discovered during his odd years studying the drug he died in just as ecstacy began infiltrating the counterculture was that MDMA had keen applications in the field of psychotherapy. During the mid-Sixties and throughout the Seventies, more than a half-million supervised doses of MDMA were given to patients by their psychotherapists.

In tightly controlled, clinical settings, physicians administered MDMA to a wide variety of patients. Whether their subjects were afflicted with depression, marital strife, post-traumatic stress disorder, terminal illness, or just general mental unhealth, doctors discovered that the drug broke down barriers to communication. By all accounts it appeared to be a wonder drug. None other than than counterculture guru Timothy Leary sagely chimed in on the possibility of the drug's future misuse, saying "no one wants a Sixties situation to develop where sleazy characters hang around college dorms peddling pills they falsely call XTC to lazy thrill-seekers.

Leary, never one to discount the benefit of unproven pharmaceuticals, married his wife Barbara in just days after their first shared "XTC" experience. By the early Eighties, both the American political climate and the drug itself were undergoing massive changes. Jimmy Carter's folksy ineffectiveness gave way to the rose-tinted, right-wing fervor of the Reagan administration. Waiting in the wings, MDMA, commonly known by the street name Ecstasy by now, was poised to enter mainstream drug culture.

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On the East Coast, in New York City and Boston, at such nightclubs as the Saint, Studio 54, and the Paradise Garage, gay men took to the Ecstasy that was being manufactured in city-wide bathtub operations in numbers unheard of since hippies discovered LSD. For them, it leveled emotional walls, created a deep, abiding sense of belonging, and allowed them to dance and party all night long.

The previous drugs of choice, cocaine and poppers, paled in comparison. To top it all off, it was legal. Compactly built, with thinning, closely cropped hair and piercing blue eyes, dressed in a tight black Lycra T-shirt and dark trousers, he could pass for any other former clubgoer cautiously edging his way into middle age.

Calling Jaggers a "former" anything, though, is a mistake. The man who first DJed Austin's legendary punk and new wave Club Foot, then moved on to help establish countless other clubbing institutions -- among them Dallas' Starck Club, Houston's Rich's, Austin's Backstreet, and San Francisco's Folsom -- is still hard at work, taking monthly red-eye flights to assist at various club locales across the US and the UK.

If you want to know when and how Ecstasy came to Austin, Jaggers is apparently the man to ask. The high-profile club consultant probably knows more than anyone in Austin about the early days of the Ecstasy scene and what preceded it. Back in , while spinning vinyl at Club Foot, he'd fly up to New York City on the weekends to hang out at a massive, planetarium-themed gay club known as the Saint www. Pure powder. Everybody was there knowing that they would be accepted totally. At the time, it was legal, so there wasn't even any guilt associated with it, no fear.

It was just something that everybody did, and it was a beautiful thing.

The money was good, he would be close to his beloved Saint, and the gig seemed rife with possibility, so he packed up his records and flew to New York. The rest, as they say, is history. I'm the man responsible for turning on Dallas. The progressive, party atmosphere of Austin in fall was well-suited to Ecstasy's euphoric high. The drug quickly swept through the already-knowledgeable gay community, and the club Halls at Colorado St. On Thursday nights, Halls hosted the mobile Club Iguana, and it was here, around the corner from Voltaire's Bookstore in the heart of Austin's current arts district, that the Austin Ecstasy scene exploded in one huge grinning bliss-out.


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Halls had been intended as a gay club, but the gay community didn't take to it as fast as the owners had hoped, which is why Club Iguana -- this club within a club -- was started. I've heard that story more times than I can remember.