A brief history of MDMA and its practical applications

Whilst it has become synonymous with big nights out, MDMA was first patented over 100 years ago. First discovered in 1912, Anton Köllisch, a German chemist, had been trying to create a chemical compound which would halt abdominal bleeding. Since then, ecstasy has gone through several stages of legality and illegality, leading to its current worldwide classification of holding “no medical purpose.”

The public’s perception and use of MDMA has almost completely diverged from its discovery over 100 years ago. A dramatic shift in its purpose is unlike other criminalised substances such as cocaine and heroin, both of which are still recognised for having legitimate medicinal purposes in pure forms. MDMA does not grow organically, meaning that it has had a far shorter history, having only been discovered by 20th century science.

Some people, who have not taken MDMA, enjoying a night out

Sabine Bernschneider-Reif, a chemist for a big German pharma company Merck, says that “scientists did not perform basic pharmacological tests with MDMA before 1927,” primarily due to the rapid discovery of other groundbreaking drugs which had solid medical purposes, such as penicillin. However, in 1953 the US army began running MDMA trials on animals. Whilst the outcome of these trials has never been publicly released, it is widely believed that the US army were trialling it as an advanced chemical weapon which would soften up enemy defences without directly leading to casualties.

It wasn’t until 1959 that studies were conducted in order to test ecstasy as a stimulant, and even then it had nothing to do with anything fun. Rather, it was tested as a drug similar to caffeine which could keep commercial and military pilots awake longer – not quite the weekend-long raves it would be fuelling just 35 years later.

According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in America, ecstasy was first spotted being used for recreational purposes in Chicago in 1972. Despite this, it was still relatively unknown and used primarily for medicinal purposes ,even at the end of the 1970s, when pioneering chemist Leo Zeff describing it as penicillin for the soul. This means that just 10 years before rave culture began, based almost entirely around the effects of the drug, it was still being prescribed legally as a means of improving patients mental health in the US.

The point at which ecstasy was outlawed varies slightly across the western world. Britain was ahead of the game, declaring it a Class A substance in 1977, whereas it took America until 1988 to finally criminalise the substance. It can still be purchased in Australia, although for scientific research purposes only, with a severe penalty for any individuals breaking these rules.

Interestingly, all of this happened prior to the explosion of rave music in the late 1980s. By this point the ecstasy which could be purchased from street dealers was incredibly impure. John Ramsey,  a toxicologist at St George’s University of London, says that Mitsubishi ecstasy pills can contain ephedrine, ketamine, paracetamol, caffeine, diazepam, or even nothing at all.

It is the lack of purity which has become commonplace since criminalisation, causing ecstasy to have a bad name with newspapers and the bores who read them. Whilst the mid-noughties were far from the peak of MDMA’s popularity, Sir David Spiegelhalter claims that ecstasy led directly to 27 deaths in 2006. An estimated 8500 died from alcohol poisoning and drunken injuries in the same year. Considering the bad press that one drug gets over another, it is clear that the recreational use of ecstasy has been widely misinterpreted due to the dangerous product becoming commonplace on the street market since the beginning of the 1990s.

There are currently trials taking place in order to see if MDMA has the potential to be used as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, showing that some scientists still hold faith in the power of the drug in its purest form. If ecstasy was to be accepted as having a legitimate medicinal use then it would have arguably followed the same pattern as other criminalised substances, being discovered, used recreationally by small cults, criminalised, become globally popular, and eventually be used under strictly controlled hospital conditions.