It was developed in 1914 and became popular in the 1970s as an adjunct to psychotherapy because of its ability to reduce anxiety and facilitate communication. German marriage-guidance counsellors regularly recommended it. It, too, is good business. This suggests that the British market alone is worth well over 300m pounds a year. Both drugs affect the level of serotonin, a neurotransmitter in the brain that is thought to influence sleep, appetite, aggression and mood.
Neurotransmitters are chemicals that carry messages between nerve cells.
They are secreted by one cell and picked up by receptor proteins on the surface of a neighbor. Both Prozac and ecstasy work by inhibiting the re-uptake of serotonin. This means that the messenger molecules hang around in the gap between the cells and the message gets amplified. So there are some parallels. This does not, however, seem to have been the reason why MDMA was actually proscribed.