XTC (Extacy Pills)

[Clydiechick]

I am so glad you aren't using the drugs anymore. I have not heard of any clinical trials with it, especially in Aust.

I hope you can find something that helps you with your triggers. Everyone is different.

Take care of yourself.

Clydie

 

[Grainne]

I'll second that Clydie...good for you, emote, for trying to find other ways to cope.

 

[Llama]

I can understand how feeling happy for the first time in who knows how long would have given you the kick you needed to remind yourself that life wasn't worthless and that there was a light at the end of the apathetic tunnel. I'm glad that some good came of your experimentation, and hope that nothing bad has lingered for you to deal with later.

However, it sounds to me that your search for clinical trials using MDMA is a thinly veiled excuse to start taking the drug again. There are plenty of legal drugs that have been through years and years of testing that are proven to help with PTSD in controlling symptoms. (personally I'm on Celexa to help lower my anxiety levels and oh thank god because I couldn't even function before that.)

If nothing else worked and this was a last resort I could understand it, but it sounds like you haven't even tried steady therapy yet let alone looked into currently legal drug therapy.

 

[emote]

Hi Llama.

That's right, I haven't tried steady therapy. I'm still in a long process to get to that point. Although, I am taking some heavy steps to try and get there. I'm trying to face my demons honestly, and not just head on - but really the depth of it all. I'm not looking to take MDMA as a therapeutic tool - I would like more information on it, personal experience wise, if anyone has tested and tried but personally, for me, I don't want to go down that path.

But that means, I don't want to go down any drug taking path.

I'm looking into herbal and acupuncture for my anxiety issues and I'm taking slow (yes, slow) steps into getting back into therapy.

 

[rjtransient]

It's not meant to be personal. I can be blunt. I respect the intelligence of the people who are reading what I write and I believe it's better in the long run to respond with emotionally neutral honesty instead of giving the answer somebody wants to hear. As you've correctly surmised, there was no malice in that post, just curiosity and a need to clarify what you were really saying. Science is all about asking incisive questions, anyway.

I objected to the way you were framing the question. Not to the issues of self-medication or personal reactions to a given substance (legal or not), which are valid discussion topics in their own right.

My personal bias is that I've had friends who were addicts.

I've learned that anything can be rationalized. I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen logic and scientific facts invoked to cloak a person's own biases and behavior. Even or especially by the experts! It's why I avoid Psych Central and why I have to be honest with myself about my real motivations and what I can reasonably expect if I'm browsing clinical psych abstracts on PubMed or personal experiences on Erowid. The fact that a substance has shown promise in clinical trials does not necessarily mean that X drug treats Y disorder, period. That's not what you were saying, but I'm sort of going to an extreme to illustrate my point.

My psychiatrist knows that prazosin (for treating nightmares) is used for in-patient PTSD treatment at a local facility where the patients can be supervised. She's been really reluctant to even give me a trial. We're waiting for the next appointment to give her time to figure out what she wants to say in the 'debriefing' session. It's not that street drugs are necessarily better or worse than what your doctor might prescribe, or that herbal anything is necessarily safer (google 'herbal ecstasy' or 'mephedrone' if you want some up-to-date lurid news stories). The serious psychotropic drug users I knew were generally very intelligent and articulate people. They were acutely aware of what they were getting into, and aware of what they were after: the high. The experience. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not judging it; I've been lurking around Bluelight for years. But when you start using downers to treat anxiety, or meth or MDMA to treat lethargy, that's where things get iffy.

And personal accounts are notoriously un-generalizable. ("SSRIs don't work. But here's a list of the SSREs you can order online from Europe. . . ".)

I'm not implicating you. Just explaining where I stand on this. Ecstasy for PTSD struck me as kind of extreme, like trying out phenobarbital for insomnia. You sound reasonable and open to new information, and it's encouraging that you're looking for more established ways of treating anxiety. In my own opinion, you don't have to justify what you did in the past. It is what it is, and here you are.

Personal experiences would be across the board, I'd imagine. Different individuals with ADHD can respond completely differently to the same drug. PTSD sufferers are not a homogeneous group who experience the same pattern of symptoms. I could comment on what someone said in this thread regarding MDMA's effect on the brain, but I'm not a PTSD researcher, and to be frank, the limbic pathway is involved in everything.

An honest discussion on drug use or self-medication could be interesting if we were to leave out the science-y bits. I don't know if it would be beyond the parameters of this forum.

 

[bright_morning]

This is a dangerous past time of yours, I hope you find a better way. You obviously haven't seen anybody close up that has adverse reactions to mdma? They are like out of control monsters that try and rip their own skin off, pull their own eyes out, rip chunks of hair out of their own scalps. It can take 10 men to hold down 1 mere male under the effect.
Clydie

I'll say nothing more here than that I can relate to emote's psyche changing moment ( I have my own story making a beginning with MDMA and continuing with Jesus Christ).

Clydiechick, you are describing people who thought they were taking MDMA and were actually taking TMA or PCP. Don't propagate fear without knowledge. Taking MDMA has its own consequences, but I don't think you are going to find too many, if any, stories of self mutilation taking ecstasy. Many of the horror stories involving MDMA were nothing more than propaganda from well funded researchers who felt pressure to testify against it on behalf of the government.

I am in no way condoning MDMA use, as I feel its dangerous in ways not yet documented or entirely understood, not the least of which is how it affects our expectations of human interaction in relationship. Also it is extremely difficult to synthesize for chemists, so the likelihood of purity on the streets has gone down exponentially every year since 1988 when it was made illegal and during the witch hunt that followed the law.

There is a shit-ton of research out there on MDMA and some of it is favorable and some not so much. As to those who are adhering to the idea that it floods the brain with serotonin... read more! It is not actually known whether it stimulates the release of serotonin, or inhibits its production. The scientists that enjoy messing with brain chemistry don't know a whole lot about anything really... remember prozac? Wasn't that a fun lie?

Emote: any one moment of joy can change us for life, this is true. I am glad you found that in some fashion at all. I can relate to that idea. As a teen I escaped into the rave scene of the late 80's and early 90's and found many of my first acquaintances with feeling "safe" or "happy." All that I can say to you would be what you already seem to know, which is that those experiences can be synthesized but they hold no water until we move on to find them in very real connection with other people.

I have found that God is leading me down this path and my life is better than its ever been (ironic considering I am reliving a buried trauma even as I type this) because I left the party to join life.

I hope this makes sense.

 

[rjtransient]

bright_morning, the point I'm taking away is that context is everything. LSD is also being tested for PTSD. The idea is that exposing someone with an anxiety disorder to a triggering stimulus in the context of drug-induced euphoria accelerates extinction learning. They're running similar experiments on D-cycloserine in conjunction with psychotherapy for patients with anxiety disorders; except that DCS enhances memory consolidation without the benefit of euphoria.

I'm bemused by the amount of attention this is receiving from the media. The public has seized it. Every newspaper, tabloid, and online blog seems to be posting about it. This might be the Next Big Thing in psychiatry, much like the SSRIs (whose efficacy was totally out of proportion to the amount of hype they received).

I don't know many researchers who are well-funded, TBH; maybe you see that more in Big Pharma? If a big business isn't interested in your research proposal, you're probably not going to get funding. Getting a brand new drug onto the market is a bitch. So I shouldn't be surprised that we're taking another substance with a long history of documented use and looking for clinical value. MDMA is already commonly used in the lab. But the public response seems to be more like, "Can an illegal substance actually be therapeutic?"

The scientists that enjoy messing with brain chemistry don't know a whole lot about anything really

Haha! As a respectful layperson/bio student, I'd say they're at least making headway, but I think my more cynical neuroscience profs would agree with you. (In fact, what you said sounds almost like a direct quote from my psychopharmacology prof.) What we do know about the brain is nothing in comparison to what we don't know. That said... just to be evil, I've attached a slide of the localization and density of the delta opioid receptor in the brain. The diagram is very simplified. We're looking at one subtype of receptor. And then look at Wikipedia's summary table on 5-HT (serotonin) receptors and the effects of serotonin binding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT_receptor. You can see why this isn't cut-and-dried.

As a teen I escaped into the rave scene of the late 80's and early 90's and found many of my first acquaintances with feeling "safe" or "happy." All that I can say to you would be what you already seem to know, which is that those experiences can be synthesized but they hold no water until we move on to find them in very real connection with other people.

Well said, and I'm genuinely happy it worked out for you. Apart from context, it looks like the second essential element for making this work is to make the transition to a new lifestyle. (Right now, drug augmentation of fear extinction loses its effect over time, so I'd imagine having something positive to transition to, like religion or new relationships, would be very beneficial.)