If her dealer s right, shortly after she eats a pill, Elena s neural axons will drench her brain with excess serotonin, her heart will race, and she ll find herself overwhelmed by an exhilarating sense of deep empathy with all humankind. Three to five hours later she ll crash, tired and perhaps depressed from serotonin depletion. But she s got a bottle of 5HTP vitamin supplement and a small cache of Prozac to take care of that. And though the jury is still out on the drug s long-term neurotoxic effects, as long as Elena remembers to stay cool and drink water, she ll undoubtedly come down alive. But if Elena s pills aren t MDMA if her dealer is wrong she could take a dose and die.
Some bogus pills are harmless rip-offs.
Others can prove deadly, especially in a rave setting. Like X, PMA raises blood pressure. Two Chicago-area ravers died from the drug. One of them had taken a staggering five doses. With Ecstasy use deeply embedded in the fabric of modern dance culture due in no small part to the media, which by hyping raves as drug fests guarantees that drug users will attend the problem of adulterated pills threatens to destroy the very scene that spawned the current X boom.