Drugs and Alcohol (young people)

In the second half of the year, my parents were away one weekend.    Two of my friends who had taken Ecstasy pills before had been mentioning MDMA for a while so I decided I wanted to try it.  They’d been taking pills since college, but I’d never gone near it.  I had friends who used cannabis in high school as well but I didn’t want to take it.  I was interested in reading about it, though. 
   
There’s a book called ‘Street Drugs’. I think it was written 1992, 1993 which is a tome of about 500 pages.  It’s written by a drugs worker about all the drugs he had encountered, and the problems they caused but also the history of the drug’s use and where, the properties of the drugs as well. It was pretty balanced illustration of drugs' positives and negatives.  I was quite well versed in drugs, I just didn’t have any particular desire to use them.

So it came to halfway through the first year of university – near Easter.  So we went in for 2 grams of Ecstasy in powder form.  I remember the powder being quite novel to them, I think it was when powder MDMA wasn’t so widespread as it is now.  The pill market was rubbish at this point, they were really impure.  And the powdered MDMA was sold at a reasonable price so we got some and took it when my parents were away.
 

I always struggled with depression.  I’ve had some manic spells, some long depressive spells.  I don’t struggle so much with feeling bad for long periods of time so much now.  In high school and through college I was having a really difficult time being happy.

And ecstasy - ecstasy taught me how to manage things. It’s one thing if you’re depressed to think “things are probably much better than I assume they are”, but you can’t really see them as being good.  That goes even if you logically can see that there’s no reason to feel bad.

But with ecstasy, well, you take it when you’re otherwise depressed and you can see everything in a completely different way.  You are actually seeing things as a happy person.  And that helped to show me that you can see the world in different ways, maybe even control how you see it a bit.  I noticed there were triggers that made me start thinking negatively about things, and there was stuff I could do to stop those triggers.

Ecstasy for me has been really helpful in showing me how to manage having moodswings, how to deal with getting depressed and getting manically happy.  E put you in a place where everything is fine – even bad things.  It removes any drama surrounding any issues you have and you can just see them in a rational light.  It’s great.
 
I mean apart from that I have learnt to identify triggers which tend to make me think negative thoughts. And... I’ve learnt how to dupe like for example if I’m. Most of the time I was very, very tired for a lot of the time when I was at school. I wasn’t sleeping very well. I mean, you know I had a very bad diet but now I notice if I start to notice the patterns of those thoughts emerging over the course of a day and I tend to go to bed early or I tend to put on a comedy show on the TV or listen to something funny. Like I’ve learnt how to manage things a lot better and that isn’t something that I did before I took ecstasy. And ecstasy did say, it showed me, you know, like the things which you may have anxieties about - you don’t have to have anxieties about them. You know that isn’t an unchangeable part of you.  Aging and experiencing more of life has obviously had its part to play but I think E has done a lot for me too.
 

It’s covering up its just complete escapism like all drugs