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Wednesday, June 26, 2013Molly/Ecstasy - Makes a Come Back in New York Society
June 23, 2013. Read the entire article at the NYTimes Web Site
Molly: Pure, but Not So Simple
Excerpts from The New York Times Sunday Styles
‘Molly is the big thing now. Coke is sort of grimy and passé. Weed smells too much and is also sort of low rent and junior high.’
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.” Since that first experience, Kaitlin has
encountered Molly at a birthday celebration and at a dance party in
Williamsburg.
Molly is not new, exactly. MDMA, or 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, was patented by Merckpharmaceuticals 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.
Known for inducing feelings of euphoria, closeness and diminished anxiety, Ecstasy ($20 to $50 a dose) 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: 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. Molly - the name is thought to derive from “molecule”.
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.”
According to the United States Customs and Border Protection, there were 2,670 confiscations of MDMA in 2012, up from 186 in 2008. But a greater worry for doctors and law enforcement officials is the many substances that people might be ingesting unknowingly. “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 an NYC doctor, 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.”
Writer, IRINA ALEKSANDER, New York Times, June 23 Edition
