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Republican Party Reptile(2)

By:P. J. O'Rourke


You get these waves of buoyant jollity. Also, sometimes, you get sick. The young woman did. She weighs a hundred pounds and took the same pill as the guys. We’re six inches taller and none of us is going to be asked to pose for Calvin Klein underwear ads. About an hour after the drug took effect she broke out in a cold sweat. Her heart raced. She felt nauseated. This lasted ten minutes. The rest of us just perspired, worked our jaws a bit, drank stacks of beer, and pissed every three seconds.

We sat talking like teenagers, that is, volubly and at length about nothing that can be remembered, curled on our chairs, smiling, rocking slightly, feeling wholesome and completely swell. “Are you okay now?” I asked the young woman. “Sure,” she said, “I feel great. I’m having a good time. I like being with these people. But”—she turned that eye of inexorable female preserver-of-the-species logic on me—“I always have a good time. I always like being with these people. So I’m not sure I get the point.”

And that’s it. That’s all that happens. You feel real good.

What is this human need to make fun of something else—profound, important, illegal? According to an overinformative article in New York magazine (May 20, 1985), Ecstasy is 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, an opposite isomer (or mirror image) of the active molecule in some hallucinogens. Chemically it’s similar to mescaline and, get this, the nasal decongestant Sudafed. I’d say the effect about splits the difference. To me it felt like a very sophisticated, extremely well-buffered speed. You get the glow without the jitters (or the energy to write term papers). Once any discomforts have passed, the only bad parts of the buzz are a mad passion for cigarettes and that grimy feeling on the skin common to many drugs. There’s no difficulty “maintaining.” If Delta Force banged on your door you’d be able to calmly explain that the PLO terrorists live upstairs in 5B, not at your house. Though you might also thank the commanding officer for being who he is and tell him his uniform is cute.

I suppose you could freak out if you really tried. In the New York article, Dr. Ronald Siegal, a pharmacologist at UCLA, says, “We had a psychotherapist who took it, disappeared, and turned up a week later directing traffic.” Finally found a meaningful career, I’d say.

On the other hand, there have been claims that Ecstasy provides “instant psychoanalysis.” In a Life magazine article, “The Trouble with Ecstasy” (August 1985), an unnamed psychologist says, “A five-hour session can be equivalent to five months of regular therapy. It could put people like me out of business.” Probably a good idea to put people like him out of business, but I don’t see what that has to do with drugs.

What about insights? People keep telling me they had insights, “real insights that really stick with you.” But they’ll never tell me what those insights were. Are we talking about high-quality insights like the second law of thermodynamics or the Pythagorean theorem? Or are we talking about “I finally realized that, deep down inside, I’m me”? Nobody will say. Myself, I didn’t come up with a unified field theory or anything.

To really enjoy drugs you’ve got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage weltschmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?

If you think of your mind as an animal act (as good a metaphor as any, since bugger-all is known about how psychoactive drugs work in the brain), Ecstasy gets right in the cage and bangs the anxiety bear on the head with a lead pipe. It has the big cats up on their footstools making like stuffed carnival prizes. And it brings on the adorable fox terriers in party hats who walk around on their hind legs, ride on ponies, and jump through hoops for about four hours.

Then it gradually slips away, and so did my party guests.

I slept fretfully, getting up every single hour to go to the bathroom. The next day the drug was still in my system. A shower felt wonderful. I felt okay. I was a little disoriented, like I was in the next room and couldn’t quite hear me.

It’s not an aphrodisiac, at least not for men. But when you’re crowding forty, what is? I called the young woman and asked, for strictly scientific reasons (sort of), “Did you want to make love?”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” she said.

On the second day all effects were gone, but I was tired and depressed. X-lag is pretty substantial for such a toy flip-out. A long run for a short slide. “Tune in. Turn on. Go to the office late on Monday.”