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Sam's first exposure to MDMA was on the summer of

June 10, 2017 by Katherine Berry

Sam's first exposure to MDMA was on the summer of 1991, when he was just starting out in college. In the early days, the drug was a powerful and sometimes dangerous substitute for alcohol. When I first heard about MDMA, I was more of a hippie. I didn’t enjoy the novelty of it, but it made me forget about the physical benefits and drawbacks of the drug. Sam didn’t consider himself a recreational drug addict—he had a long-standing preference for alcohol, and he loved drinking. The experience changed him. But I was still a young man, and I had the mental capacity of a 20 year old who had never tried anything else, and could not stop thinking about it.

The last time I visited Sam was at a party for his class on the subject of psychedelics. I was at my dorm room where he was in the middle of a class discussion about his own psychedelic experience. The topic was "Why is it that I've been doing this all my life?," and Sam looked on with surprise. I explained that I had just taken the drug (he'd never used it, and that he'd never tried it). When I explained that I had never had any experience with it, Sam thought it was something I must tell him. He had a very different theory. The more I looked into this, the more he thought, "Oh, I was in a situation where I was going to talk about some sort of weird thing at a university conference."

This was a strange experience for Sam. The most difficult thing I'd ever felt was, "Why are I doing this now?" And I was quite sure the answer to this question was: Because I'd been doing this for more than 5-10 years. I had started out as a young teenager and started doing it on a whim. But I never really found it quite the way I wanted to. I thought it was just something that I hadn’d got into. I thought it was just too much stress to deal with. And so I began to talk about it at the very beginning, and what I was going to say to my teacher and my father and my friends and the rest of the students around me.

So I decided I would write a book, the first of two—it would be called "Intro to Ecstasy," which would be published by the beginning of the millennium. I would have to do a lot of research on the subject, and I also wanted to explore the potential of the