Nights Out With Mandy Are Not For Me

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Louise Wade decides against getting acquainted with MDMA.

It has often bewildered me why drugs are illegal and alcohol is not. On numerous nights out I’ve seen many boys throwing their guts up because of the 20 jagerbombs they’ve previously gulped, while girls argue in the street because their friend left them for a one night stand. Yet it’s not often you see such behavior from people who are taking illegal drugs.

I’m not here to bang on about making drugs legal, however. Because the policy will probably never change and really whatever I say, isn’t going to stop anyone squashing £40 into someone’s hand with an awkward handshake, whilst having a plastic ‘baggy’ dropped into their pocket.

The thing that intrigues me, though, is how people negotiate the transition from being high up on drugs to coming right down, often with apparently no more damage to themselves than a dozy Sunday under the duvet.

Within a couple of hours how can anyone go from from feeling ‘infinite’ as in Perks of Being A Wallflower to hitting a particularly uncomfortable place called rock bottom – and survive?

Obviously we all know something of the pharmaceutical side of this, and I’m not going to go into that. But I do want to know why hundreds of teens repeatedly take these drugs, knowing the final outcome, the dreaded comedown. Is their night so fantastic that they can overlook this inevitable sadness? And how do they manage it so often with seemingly so few casualties overall?

Here’s an illustration: on a recent trip to a club I will not name, somewhere in East London, I encountered many such teens having the time of their lives, and clearly ‘mandied up’.

The music may not have been to my taste, but I was enjoying my night nonetheless, even though most of it was spent in the smoking area, with my new best friends.

I made a lot of best friends that night. People I’d only just met confirmed their undying love for me whilst trying to light the cigarette perched on the end of their gurning gums. Their pupils were the size of gobstoppers so I was puzzled as to how they still couldn’t see the cigarette at the end of their nose.

These are just some of the lines that came reeling out of a group that latched their luvved-up selves onto me:

I love your lipstick.’

‘You look so great tonight!’

‘What’s your name? I’ll add you on Facebook.’

‘I’m having the best night, aren’t you? How great is the beat of this set, I can really feel the music inside me.’

Why couldn’t I feel the music inside myself? It could only have the ‘mandy’ affecting them.

Afterwards I did some research and found that MDMA aka ‘Mandy’ was developed to make people open up and talk more; it was regularly used to re-ignite marriages that had hit a brick wall. Under the influence, normal feelings of empathy are intensified, with many users often experiencing a strong sense of affection towards people they hardly know and sometimes even strangers.

The sense of euphoria was coming solely from a tiny pill they had swallowed, enabling these young adults to get lost in the music, and dance around like baboons. Of course, they weren’t exactly pleasing to look at – baboons may well be more beautiful, but hey ho they were having fun.

So I’m clear about why they wanted to get high, but I still can’t see how to handle the comedown without traumatic effect. Since I really don’t get out how it’s done, for the time being (at the very least) I’ll be sticking to a few G&Ts whenever I try to feel the music in my bones.

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