MDMA’s promise of a risk-free high is what makes it so dangerous

SPOKANE, Wash. — Outside it was a cool, rainy Monday evening, but inside it looked like Saturday night.

In a cramped apartment, a crowd of 20-somethings prepped themselves to see Zedd, an electro-house DJ, by smoking pot and chugging water, with a stereo pounding away in the corner of the living room. Young women walked in a frantic rotation in and out of the bathroom, where they swapped their work clothes for tiny shorts and crop tops in neon green and pink and yellow. Their arms were lined with chunky beaded bracelets, eyes painted with bright eye shadow and lined with cartoonish fake eyelashes. As people rushed to leave, a blond young woman ran in and out of a bedroom searching for the last things on her preshow to-do list: “Shoes and drugs, shoes and drugs,” she muttered to herself.

It’s become a typical scene for these friends. After they all traveled to the Paradiso Festival — a 20,000-plus-person electronic dance music (EDM) show at Washington’s picturesque Gorge Amphitheatre — the group, mostly made up of Washington State University and University of Idaho graduates, was hooked. Now, whenever there’s an EDM show, like the one that Monday night in Spokane, they reconvene, traveling from various corners of two states just to be together.

They say there’s nothing that makes them feel as happy as seeing these shows as a group, dancing in the lights, popping a few points of MDMA — also known as Molly — and forgetting about jobs and obligations. They say there is nothing like the way the drug makes them see one another again and again in a whole different light.

In the back bedroom of the apartment, Justin, an unassuming 23-year-old in a black dress shirt and a neon green necktie, was making sure his friends got the experience they wanted. As he picked through the hits of MDMA he'd brought — clear capsules filled with a caramel brown powder — a young woman wearing a bow tie walked in.

Justin and his friends (who agreed to speak on the record for this story under assumed names) say that listening to EDM and taking Molly go hand in hand. It’s the whole point: Take Molly, dance for hours, feel happier, content and full of love — all without consequence.

Researchers say that attitude is what attracts so many young people to the drug. It’s also what makes MDMA — a drug that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has observed is being used by more and more young people — so dangerous. In some states, SAMHSA has found that nearly 10 percent of young people have tried Molly. And during this year alone, the drug has been mentioned in the deaths of several young clubgoers. They include:

Patrick Witkowski, a 21-year-old Washington State University graduate who died at the Paradiso Festival in June. Though early media reports claimed MDMA was the cause of his death, his family said they still have not received an autopsy report on what exactly killed him.

Brittany Flanagan, a 19-year-old Plymouth State University student who took Molly at a Zedd concert in Boston — reportedly the first concert she had ever attended. Her death prompted the cancellation of the next night’s Zedd show and this tweet from the DJ:

Jeffrey Russ, a 23-year-old Syracuse University graduate, and Olivia Rotondo, a 20-year-old University of New Hampshire student, who were attending the New York City Electric Zoo festival in late August. Just before collapsing, Rotondo reportedly told an EMS worker, “I just took six hits of Molly.”

University of Virginia honors student and Jefferson Scholar Mary “Shelley” Goldsmith, 19, who collapsed after taking Molly at a Washington, D.C., EDM concert on Aug. 31.

Back at the apartment, Justin and his friends said they were not worried. They said that the media are causing hysteria about the drug, that taking Molly is just like drinking: Don’t take too much, drink water and watch out for your friends.

Justin dropped his pills into a plastic baggy and tucked it into his sock, then grabbed his white gloves with glow sticks sewn into the fingers.

They were ready for the party to start.

Rob and Deirdre Goldsmith have learned a lot in the last few weeks. They’ve learned about EDM club culture, about raves and Ecstasy and MDMA and Molly, and that even perfectly good, smarter-than-average kids take it.

What they’ll never know, though, is if their daughter, Shelley, had ever taken Molly before the night she died on the floor of a nightclub.

“I think there’s a perception that it’s not a hard drug,” Rob Goldsmith said. “That it’s not addictive, so it’s not a hard drug — it’s safe.”

“It’s not in the same league as heroin, cocaine, LSD,” Deirdre Goldsmith added, paraphrasing what she’s heard about the justifications for the drug. “It’s to enjoy the party more with no aftereffects. That could be the case some of the time, but if it was all of the time, Shelley would still be with us.”

Brad Burge, communications and marketing director for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, said that while MDMA is dangerous enough on its own, what people are purchasing on the street is rarely MDMA.

The drug has its roots in clinical psychology trials and found popularity in the Dallas and London club scenes in the 1980s. That’s when the drug began being called Ecstasy. Burge says that name, like Molly, was basically a brand name for a concoction that drug dealers were selling.

“Ecstasy often doesn’t contain any MDMA at all,” he said.

Molly presents the same issue. A USA Today article noted that seizures of pure MDMA by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have dropped — suggesting that what’s on the street isn’t MDMA at all — and that when DEA labs analyzed the seized drugs, just 13 percent of them contained any MDMA.

“Molly is just the newest brand name,” Burge said. “The No. 1 thing is that it’s not MDMA. If we say that, we risk miscommunicating, saying that MDMA is not risky — which is not true. It is.”

In fact, after so many deaths happened at EDM shows in the Northeast around the same time, some people blamed a bad batch of Molly. Regardless of whether that was true, Burge said MDMA can kill on its own.

Whatever people like Shelley Goldsmith are buying as MDMA may contain any number of seriously dangerous drugs, Burge said, including ketamine, methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, bath salts — even caffeine pills.

“The problem with that is that nobody knows what Molly is,” he said. “If you buy it from one dealer or another dealer, it’s all represented as Molly.”

And even if the drug is largely MDMA, there are risks associated with that too, like severe dehydration and elevated heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature.