The column I referenced in my desperation post.

I never thought I’d complain that cigarettes weren’t killing me quickly enough.

Everyone’s life sucks – so it goes, and so we’ve grown accustomed to it. A few people get to the point where they just can’t handle it anymore, and try to speed up the death process. We label them as crazy. Sane people don’t try to commit suicide.

I guess that makes me insane.

As I came to, I was only vaguely aware of existence in general. I knew I couldn’t move any of the muscles in my body, and I thought I was watching ceiling fly past my eyes – inasmuch as I could open them. It felt like a hospital, and I heard someone talking about ecstasy, GHB, Valium and alcohol before everything faded away again.

There has been much talk about MDMA in recent months – it seems the media finally caught on to something ravers had known about for quite some time. For the most part, we were warned about how much more damaging ecstasy is than most people think. And all the reports seemed to end with an abrupt “no one knows about its long-term effects.”

I do.

I’ve taken nearly 100 tabs of ecstasy in the past year. In fact, when people ask me what I’m on, I don’t say “E” – that’s not nearly specific enough. Maybe tonight it’s a white diamond, or a triple-stack smiley or a shamrock. More likely, it’s more than one of those.

From my humble beginnings in August, one gelcap of an unnamed variety, I made it up to six per week by February, usually two on Friday, three on Saturday, and one sometime during the week. I once did E at the Sunset Bowl.

Rolling and bowling – an explosive combination.

What started out as a pleasurable escape from the monotony of “real life” that allowed me to be more open with people I didn’t know became real life. The days I wasn’t rolling became the fiction, fraught with depression. And the only way out of that funk was another E-bomb.

Another party, another night of empty fun – I no longer knew what love was without drugs. I spent the weeks waiting for the weekends, and considering that by January I’d dropped out of school and lost my job, there was plenty of weekday time to spend thinking about it – and to become more depressed.

It’s amazing what a lack of serotonin can do for one’s social skills. I became unable to communicate with anyone unless they were on drugs or we were talking about drugs. And, of course, in the latter case, we’d ignore the fact that drugs were slowly chipping away at our lives.

Finally, it became overwhelming. Blaming my problems on random factors wasn’t working anymore, and by March, I realized I had to stop with the E. I went on vacation, stayed drug-free for a week (for the first time in six months), and when I got back into town, pulled my life back together – I got back into school, got a job and pretended to be back in the swing of things.

And so life got manageable again. Enough so that I was confident that I could do E responsibly. As if such a thing exists.

One tab a week became two, and two became four. And with the E came the warped impression of the world again. I thought I’d fallen in love like never before after taking a few weeks off from partying and dropping one tab. But ecstasy is not the happy pill many believe it to be – it merely enhances one’s feelings, so when depression set in again and I took four tabs on Saturday, it was a recipe for disaster.

Actually, it was the appetizer; the list read off by the doctors at the hospital rounded out the meal. By the time I really came to, I found myself unable to talk because I was on a respirator. My right lung had collapsed. Something was going into my arm via an IV, but I didn’t know what. And the uncomfortable feeling in my crotch was thanks to a catheter.

I know a number of people who have done E for longer than I have and never tried to kill themselves – but then again, I’m not the first to do it.

Ecstasy can facilitate amazing experiences, but they aren’t experiences I feel like opening myself up to anymore. I may be half Swiss, but I don’t feel comfortable having so many holes in my arm.