Pubdate: Sun, 23 Jun 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Irina Aleksander

MOLLY: PURE, BUT NOT SO SIMPLE

At a party not long ago in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Kaitlin, a 
22-year-old senior at Columbia University, was recalling the first 
time she was offered a drug called Molly, at the elegant Brooklyn 
home of a cultural figure she admired. "She was, like, 50, and she 
had been written about in the Talk of the Town," said Kaitlin, who 
was wearing black skinny jeans and a tank top. "This woman was very 
smart and impressive."

At one point, the hostess pulled Kaitlin aside and asked if she had 
ever tried the drug, which is said to be pure MDMA, the ingredient 
typically combined with other substances in Ecstasy pills. "She said 
that it wasn't cut with anything and that I had nothing to worry 
about," said Kaitlin, who declined to give her last name because she 
is applying for jobs and does not want her association with the drug 
to scare off potential employers. "And then everyone at the party took it."

Since that first experience, Kaitlin has encountered Molly at a 
birthday celebration and at a dance party in Williamsburg. "It's the 
only drug I can think of that I have to pay for," she said. "It makes 
you really happy. It's very loose. You just get very turned on - not 
even sexually, but you just feel really upbeat and want to dance or whatever."

Molly is not new, exactly. MDMA, or 
3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, was patented by Merck 
pharmaceuticals in 1914 and did not make much news until the 1970s, 
when psychotherapists began giving it to patients to get them to open 
up. It arrived at New York nightclubs in the late 1980s, and by the 
early '90s it became the preferred drug at raves at Limelight and 
Shelter, where a weekly party called NASA later served as a backdrop 
in Larry Clark's movie "Kids."

Known for inducing feelings of euphoria, closeness and diminished 
anxiety, Ecstasy was quickly embraced by Wall Street traders and 
Chelsea gallerinas. But as demand increased, so did the adulterants 
in each pill (caffeine, speed, ephedrine, ketamine, LSD, talcum 
powder and aspirin, to name a few), and by the new millennium, the 
drug's reputation had soured.

Then, sometime in the last decade, it returned to clubs as Molly, a 
powder or crystalline form of MDMA that implied greater purity and 
safety: Ecstasy re-branded as a gentler, more approachable drug. And 
thanks in part to that new friendly moniker, MDMA has found a new 
following in a generation of conscientious professionals who have 
never been to a rave and who are known for making careful choices in 
regard to their food, coffee and clothing. Much as marijuana 
enthusiasts of an earlier generation sang the virtues of Mary Jane, 
they argue that Molly (the name is thought to derive from "molecule") 
feels natural and basically harmless.

A 26-year-old New York woman named Elliot, who works in film, took 
Molly a few months ago at a friend's apartment and headed to dinner 
at Souen, the popular "macrobiotic, natural organic" restaurant in 
the East Village, and then went dancing. "I've always been somewhat 
terrified of drugs," she said. "But I'd been curious about Molly, 
which is sold as this pure, fun-loving drug. This is probably 
completely naive, but I felt I wasn't putting as many scary chemicals 
into my body."

Robert Glatter, an emergency-room physician at Lenox Hill Hospital on 
the Upper East Side, might disagree. Dr. Glatter used to go months 
without hearing about Molly; now, he sees about four patients a month 
exhibiting its common side effects, which include teeth grinding, 
dehydration, anxiety, insomnia, fever and loss of appetite. (More 
dangerous ones include hyperthermia, uncontrollable seizures, high 
blood pressure and depression caused by a sudden drop in serotonin 
levels in the days after use, nicknamed Suicide Tuesdays.)

"Typically in the past we'd see rave kids, but now we're seeing more 
people into their 30s and 40s experimenting with it," Dr. Glatter 
said. "MDMA use has increased dramatically. It's really a global 
phenomenon now."

Nationally, the Drug Abuse Warning Network reports that the number of 
MDMA-related emergency-room visits have doubled since 2004. It is 
possible to overdose on MDMA, though when taken by itself, the drug 
rarely leads to death, Dr. Glatter said. (Official mortality figures 
are not available, but a study by New York City's deputy chief 
medical examiner determined that from 1997 to 2000, two people died 
solely because of MDMA.)

According to the United States Customs and Border Protection, there 
were 2,670 confiscations of MDMA in 2012, up from 186 in 2008.

"Oh, we're very aware of it," said Rusty Payne, an agent at the Drug 
Enforcement Agency's national office. Mr. Payne had not heard of 
Molly before 2008. Since then, the agency has used the term to 
document arrests in Syracuse and Jackson, Miss. "Molly has been very 
much glamorized in pop culture, which is obviously a problem," he said.

Indeed, many attribute MDMA's resurgence to the return of Electronic 
Dance Music (or E.D.M.), the pulsating Euro beat that has infiltrated 
the sound of pop radio acts like Rihanna, Kesha and Katy Perry. At 
the Ultra Music Festival in Miami last year, Madonna was criticized 
for asking her audience, "How many people in this crowd have seen 
Molly?" (She later said that she was referring to a friend's song, 
not the drug.)

In the last year, rappers have also embraced Molly, with references 
to the drug appearing in lyrics by Gucci Mane, Kanye West and Lil 
Wayne, who raps, "Pop a Molly, smoke a blunt, that mean I'm a high 
roller," on Nicki Minaj's 2012 hit "Roman Reloaded." Rick Ross was 
recently dropped as a Reebok spokesman after he rapped about spiking 
a woman's Champagne with Molly. And Miley Cyrus has a new single 
called "We Can't Stop," in which she sings what sounds like, "We like 
to party, dancing with Molly." (Her producer has said the lyric is 
"dancing with Miley.")

People who like Molly, which can cost $20 to $50 a dose, say it is a 
more socially acceptable drug than cocaine, because it is not 
physically addictive. Cat Marnell, 30, the former beauty director at 
xoJane.com who recently sold a memoir about drug addiction to Simon & 
Schuster for a reported $500,000, has noticed that many of her 
friends who sell Molly like to pack the powder into clear capsules 
that they buy from LifeThyme Market, the health food store next to C. 
O. Bigelow in the West Village. "Molly is the big thing now," Ms. 
Marnell said. "Coke is sort of grimy and passe. Weed smells too much 
and is also sort of low rent and junior high."

But Ms. Marnell scoffed at MDMA's reformed image. "People think Molly 
is this flower-child drug," she said recalling photos from the 2011 
Coachella music festival showing the former Disney star Vanessa 
Hudgens, wearing a floppy '70s hat and American Indian-inspired 
jewelry, dipping into a white powder that the gossip blogs ruled to 
be Molly. (Her publicist said it was white chocolate.) "It's true 
that it's not like cocaine in that it doesn't make you bloated and it 
doesn't make your nose raw, but sometimes you take it and you can't 
sleep or you get really sick. It's still a hard-core drug."

MDMA was first classified as an illegal substance in 1985. By the 
early 2000s, public officials nicknamed Ecstasy "Agony," and warned 
that MDMA use could lead to Parkinson's disease, a lifetime of 
depression and "holes in your brain."

Those claims have since been disproved, according to Dr. John 
Halpern, a psychiatrist at Harvard who has conducted several MDMA 
studies. In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has 
approved studies looking into whether MDMA can be used to treat 
post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety in terminal cancer 
patients. And Dr. Halpern has found no evidence that the drug impairs 
cognitive performance. "A drug that actually does kill brain cells - 
which MDMA doesn't - is alcohol," he said.

But a greater worry for doctors and law enforcement officials is the 
many substances that people might be ingesting unknowingly when they 
take Molly. "Anyone can call something Molly to try to make sound 
less harmful," said Mr. Payne of the D.E.A. "But it can be anything."

According to Dr. Halpern, many of the powders sold as Molly contain 
no MDMA whatsoever; others are synthetic concoctions designed to 
mimic the drug's effects, Mr. Payne said. Despite promises of greater 
purity and potency, Molly, as its popularity had grown, is now 
thought to be as contaminated as Ecstasy once was.

"You're fooling yourself if you think it's somehow safer because it's 
sold in powdered form," Dr. Halpern said.

But to some users, Molly still feels like a more respectable 
substance than others.

"I think people are much more aware of where coke comes from and what 
it does in those countries," said Sarah Nicole Prickett, 27, a writer 
for Vice and The New Inquiry, a culture and commentary site, who 
called cocaine a "blood drug." "Molly, if it's pure, it feels good 
and fun." (Much of it comes from Canada and the Netherlands, Mr. Payne said.)

Ms. Prickett, who moved to New York from Toronto last year, added 
that she could see why the drug might be taking hold in her new habitat.

"My impression of New York was that everyone just did drugs for work, 
that everyone was on speed," she said. "Molly makes you feel 
unplanned, and that's not a common feeling in New York, where 
everyone knows where they're going all the time and they're going 
very, very fast."

Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for 
Psychedelic Studies, which has helped finance MDMA studies since the 
drug first entered the club scene, put Molly in the context of past 
drug trends: in the 1960s, he suggested, people searched for deeper 
spirituality and found LSD; in the '70s, as hippie culture became 
mainstream, marijuana entered the suburban household; in the '80s, 
cocaine complemented the extravagance and selfishness of the greed 
decade; and by the early '90s, youths dropped out of reality, dancing 
all night on Ecstasy or slumping in the corner on heroin. MDMA, which 
in addition to acting as a stimulant also promotes feelings of 
bonding and human connection, just might be what people are looking 
for right now.

"As we move more and more electronic, people are extremely hungry for 
the opposite: human interaction on a deeper level where you're not 
rushing around," Mr. Doblin said. "The rise of Molly is in tune with 
how people are feeling emotionally."
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