Was MDMA really better back in the day?

“The pills were much stronger back in the 1990s.”

That statement, or variants of it, bounce around the comments section of my TikTok every day. Among some people over a certain age, it seems to be a common opinion that their ecstasy experience was much superior to later, like-minded generations who also enjoy draining their serotonin like dish water while flailing their limbs to electronic music.

“In 1989 it was £25 for a [MDMA] pill,” Leon*, a 56-year-old caterer from Lincoln, tells THE FACE. ​“It was so worth it – they’d have you coming up for hours and smiling, hugging and gurning well into the next day.” But, in his experience, by the mid-2000s, when the price of pills had crashed to a fiver, the high they produced had become ​“trash”.

Still, ever-hopeful, Leon recently tried some modern-day MDMA. The results of the trip down memory lane? ​“It was just a weird, absent, not good daydream effect,” he recalls. ​“I wish I could emulate those original Es, but it just can’t be done.”

Leon isn’t alone in his experience: plenty of old-school heads say that the ecstasy high is, at best, weak compared to those they (perhaps foggily) remember from their youth. But is it true? If you strip away the subjective experiences and look at the objective data, it tells us a different story. According to research, the average MDMA content of a pill in the 1990s and early 2000s was somewhere between 50 and 80mg, while pills containing more than 150mg of MDMA were very rare before 2005.

Contrast that with current trends: one in three pills currently in circulation in the UK contain over 200mg of MDMA, according to drug-testing charity The Loop. That’s over 1.5x a common adult dose. And to be clear, that is Not. A. Good. Thing. ​“There has been an increased number of hospitalisations and reports of MDMA-linked deaths nationwide in recent weeks,” The Loop warned earlier this month, a situation the charity attributes to the strength of the pills. Which seems as good a reason as any to remind you to check out our guide to taking MDMA as safely as possible.

The pills, then, are undeniably stronger. I made a TikTok video in which I pointed out the data examining the strength of pills over time – but that just threw up more questions, not least from the aforementioned old-school ravers. While they accepted that there is a higher MDMA content in today’s pills, they contended that the MDMA they got in their youth actually had different, better effects because it’s now manufactured in a different way.

It is true that MDMA is synthesised differently now. Up until the late 2000s, it was made using a precursor called safrole (a liquid extracted from the roots and bark of sassafras plants). But the safrole supply largely dried up towards the end of that decade, after a crackdown by various authorities on the savage deforestation created by the trade, most notably the 2008 seizure and destruction of 33 tons of the precursor chemical in Cambodia. The Australian Federal Police teamed up with the Cambodian authorities on that operation, and they claimed it was enough to produce 245 million ecstasy tablets with a street value of £4.82 billion. Maybe they were right – the siege caused a global drought of MDMA and strapped boosters to the mephedrone rocket on its unstoppable rise to the moon.

As the 2000s made way for the 2010s, underground chemists in the Netherlands worked out a new way of synthesising MDMA using a key ingredient, PMK methyl glycidate. In this process, safrole was no longer required, and it’s this switch that some people say changed the effects of the drug in a negative way.

So, in essence, this debate boils down to one question: if you made the exact same drug (in this case, MDMA) using two different precursor chemicals, would you expect the effects of that drug to be different?

I put this question to Matthew Fuchter, professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford.

“In terms of the active ingredient of a drug – the one that gives the response – it should not matter if you use a different precursor to prepare it,” he explains. ​“The molecular structure of the final prepared drug would be the same. assuming the preparation is done correctly, and therefore give the same response.” While pills of the acid house golden years and those of today could contain different extra ingredients, for example additives to the formulation to aid dissolution of the tablet, the effect of the active ingredient (MDMA) ​“would basically be the same, regardless of precursor”.

Hamilton Morris – a researcher, journalist and documentarian creating some of the most insightful features on the topic of drugs I’ve ever seen – shares what he thinks is going on.
​“This is a question people bring up all the time,” he says. ​“It’s very important to disentangle the subjective impressions people have of using drugs in their youth from actual, measurable changes in the chemical compound.” That is: we remember the experiences of the good old days of our youth as golden because, well, they were the good old days of our youth.

Another huge factor at play here, Morris says, is how people’s individual psychology can change over time. ​“The first thing is to figure out whether or not people are simply describing a change in their response to a drug over time, as opposed to an actual chemical change in the substance itself. If they don’t have any analytical support for the idea that the effects [of the drug] have changed, then I wouldn’t assume that it has – especially if you don’t know precisely what dose they are consuming. There are so many variables to consider.”

What about the different precursor chemicals? ​“The introduction of these PMK methyl glycidate precursors doesn’t explain all that much,” Morris insists. ​“Because they’re essentially MDP2P precursors [compounds that participate in a chemical reaction to produce another compound that’s required in the synthesis of a drug] that go through the same synthetic route. So it’s not like it’s going to produce any fundamentally different compound.”

I was keen to hear the opinion of Adam Winstock, a professor and researcher who has published over 100 papers on the topic of drugs. He also believes that some people are often noting a change in the way MDMA hits them as they get older, rather than the effects of the drug having fundamentally changed. ​“Your brain may have changed,” he says. ​“You will have started losing brain cells from the age of 25. Your diet and health might be different. You might be getting less of the serotonin lift-up.

“Also, your life has changed,” he continues. ​“Your responsibilities, your hopes and aspirations for the world; your reality. That person that you fell in love with on your first pill at a rave in Wales turned out to be a muppet in the end! Life has changed.”

Professor Winstock also points to a litany of other variables that could cause shifts in someone’s response to the same chemical stimulus over time: if you mix the drug with other substances; what context you take it in; tolerance; changes in mental health; the expectations; and so on. As he puts it: ​“If someone’s first experience on MDMA is good, I’m not quite sure they’ll ever recapture that golden-age experience.

“I do think there are shadows of consistent [MDMA] effects though,” he says. ​“For a lot of people, even when they’re older, MDMA will let them feel more empathy, euphoria and allow them to talk more openly. But for your brain, it’s no longer a novelty.” It can become dangerous to take more and more in a fruitless attempt to recapture the original magic. ​“Older people will be more vulnerable to the cardiovascular effects of MDMA, such as the effects on blood pressure and heart rate.”

This debate, it’s clear, isn’t going away any time soon, not least as it’s as much a wistful discussion of the loss of youth as it is a conversation about the chemistry of a party drug. Because of course, for some, this compound has come to represent much more than a simple stimulant. It’s emblematic of an incredibly exciting period of their life. Their formative, pleasure-seeking years. A stress-free time in the past when life was less complicated. When we lived in a simpler world, and there were no responsibilities waiting for us at work on Monday morning.

“People often attribute changes in their drug experiences to changes in the drugs themselves, without any analytical evidence to support that,” Morris points out. ​“And I think they tend to dramatically underestimate the influence of their own changing psychology. It’s normal for people to respond differently to the exact same drug as they age. I don’t respond the same way to alcohol now as I did when I was 18. And that’s not because the ethanol molecule has changed. It’s because I have changed.”

Our changing MDMA experience, then, perhaps isn’t simply a story of lesser living through chemistry. It’s also a tale older than ecstasy itself: that there’s no high quite like the high of youth.

*Name has been changed