MDMA, also known as Ecstasy, beans, rolls, or just plain X. This drug has a long history, which began almost 90 years ago. In 1912 Merck, a German pharmaceutical company, first synthesized MDMA (Erowid). MDMA was then patented in 1913 or maybe 1914 (patent #274.350) by the same German company supposedly to be sold as a diet pill (The Invention). The patent has no mention of any intended uses of the drug. There are other urban legends associated with Ecstasy, such as in 1953 the US Army tested MDMA as a possible truth serum, but there is no evidence for this (Saunders). “The father of MDMA – or ‘stepfather’ as he describes himself- is Alexander Shulgin (Saunders).” This man is responsible for the modern research of MDMA. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, Shulgin then received a research job with Dow Chemicals (The Invention). Sometime in 1965 Shulgin synthesized MDMA, but he did not try it himself, yet (Erowid). Then somewhere around 1968 he began working with MDMA personally and introducing it to other people (Erowid). But, it wasn’t until he heard raving reviews from other experimenters who has also synthesized and tried MDMA that he began his own experiments (Saunders). “Shulgin is also the first reported human to use MDMA (The Invention).Shulgin then goes on to describe how he gave some of the drug to a friend who was about to retire from his career as a psychotherapist. Shulgin then began traveling the country introducing MDMA to other therapists and teaching them how to use it in their therapy (Saunders). All of the therapists Shulgin introduced the drug to began in the same way, taking the MDMA themselves (Saunders). The psychotherapists felt that they had no right to give a psychoactive drug to another person unless they themselves knew how the drug effected their own minds (Saunders). The testing going on between the...
