as as good as five months of therapy. There was also a select a group of 'explorers' who used the drug in various ways, but, surprisingly, they never discovered its potential as a dance drug. By 1984 the drug was still legal and was being used widely among students in the USA under its new name 'Ecstasy'. It is rumored that a big-time dealer called it 'Empathy', but, although the name is more appropriate, he found that Ecstasy had more sales appeal. In Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, Ecstasy was even on sale in bars where you could pay by credit card, where it replaced cocaine as the drug of choice among yuppies and even spread to people who normally kept well clear of drugs. However, it was this public and unashamed use that resulted in the drug being outlawed. During 1985, Ecstasy got into the mass media because a small group of people sued the US Drug Enforcement Agency to try to prevent them from outlawing the drug. The controversy provided free advertising which made Ecstasy spread like wildfire throughout the US. It was a case of bad timing. The previous year there had been a widely publicized disaster that made the authorities overreact to any new scare. A batch of 'China White', a so-called designer drug which was sold to heroin addicts as a legal substitute, had contained a poisonous impurity, and, tragically, it caused a form of severe brain damage similar to Parkinson's disease. As a result, the US Congress passed a new law allowing the DEA to put an emergency ban on any drug it thought might be a danger to the public. On July 1, 1985, this right was used for the first time to ban MDMA. It was put in the most restrictive category of all, reserved for damaging and addictive drugs without medical use. The effect of prohibition was to curtail research into the drug without changing the attitudes of recreational users. However, the Agency's haste was at the expense of not following the letter of the law, leaving the ru...
