In the US, before the drug was criminalised, some therapists used ecstasy to treat their patients. Many reported positive results. Few people tend to become addicted to ecstasy. This is likely due to the fact that with successive doses, there is an increase in the severity of the negative effects together with a decrease in the experience of pleasurable effects. Tolerance occurs when a user needs to take successively higher doses of a drug to achieve the same pleasurable effects.
Research suggests that tolerance does occur with ecstasy.
That is, the successively larger doses needed generate increasingly severe side effects for only the same amount of pleasure. That's a little over half a million people. Moreover, while the media has been rifewith reports of adverse reactions to ecstasy, in reality these are quite rare. Ecstasy is the least frequently seen drug of all clinical drug presentations, and in this country, only a few deaths have been attributed to its use as opposed to ecstasy per se 9. The Stepfather of Ecstacy Alexander Shulgin describes himself as the stepfather of ecstasy.