The wild history of MDMA: 5 Questions for author Rachel Nuwer

Nuwer discusses her new book, I Feel Love, and the history of MDMA.

The science writer Rachel Nuwer grew up in Biloxi, Mississippi in the 1990s as a D.A.R.E. kid. When she tried psilocybin in college, the experience didn’t make any particular impression on her. It wasn’t until years later, in the mid-2010s, that Nuwer tried MDMA for the first time. The drug, also known as Molly or Ecstacy, made an impression. She’d recently started dating her now-husband, who was big into the 90s rave scene, and she began taking MDMA at electronic music shows. Meanwhile, Nuwer was establishing herself as an intrepid science journalist covering the illegal wildlife trade. For years, MDMA was recreational for Nuwer, not a subject of journalistic inquiry.  Then the pandemic hit, and Nuwer and a few friends took MDMA in a more intimate setting at home when she was struck with the realization that she needed to write a book about the drug. Just then, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” started playing and Nuwer thought to herself, That’s the title of my book! 

I Feel Love was published in June 2023 by Bloomsbury. The Microdose spoke with Nuwer about the history of MDMA and her experience reporting on the drug.

The history of MDMA has some surprising connections. How was MDMA discovered and what uses was it originally investigated for?

The story begins on Christmas Eve 1912, when the pharmaceutical company Merck filed a patent for MDMA. They weren’t looking for MDMA; it was a chemical intermediary on a progression to find a new blood clotting agent, and Merck denies they discovered its psychoactive qualities. But there are tantalizing hints from what they’ve published, and from what scholars have found in their archives, that maybe some of their scientists tried it. Merck resoundingly denies that they ever gave it to a person. I tried to get them to do an interview with me, but was cut off.

The next time MDMA pops up in history is the 1950s during this country’s exceptionally shameful, unethical chapter during which the CIA and Army were investigating the drug as a truth serum; we know it was on the list of chemicals of interest for that purpose. Again, we don’t have a smoking gun to definitively prove that the Army ever gave it to people, but I’ve been in touch with Nicholas Denomme, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, who’s become really obsessed with answering that question. He found out that in the 1950s, the University of Michigan did animal tests on the toxicity of MDMA and other chemicals in preparation for human tests. He’s been chipping away at the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request process for years. He found a document that referenced some tests that scientists at Tulane University in New Orleans were doing, which included MDMA, and he found a citation for the document that would have explained what those trials were for. He FOIAed the U.S. Inspector General for this document but they came back to him and said that “a search was conducted and no responsive documents were located,” which makes no sense given how clear the citation he found is. It’s all very fishy. 

I think it’s really important to acknowledge that what he found in these documents potentially means that the first confirmed human consumption of MDMA could have been given under the direction of the U.S. Army, under duress, and without informed consent. That seems important to bring to light, especially now that we’re looking at giving MDMA-assisted therapy to veterans.

I was surprised to learn from your book that it’s unclear who the first person to try MDMA was. You include stories of people in the underground who did not realize they were at the forefront of the history of these drugs. One of them initially didn’t even want her real name attached, even after all these years. What do you think that says about the stigma associated with MDMA, and the underground drug community in the mid 20th century?

I grew up in a period of drug prohibition, but I wasn’t around for the big government crackdown. A few older sources were very paranoid about what they said, and that was an attitude I haven’t encountered in my own life. I appreciated hearing about their experiences and understanding their mentality; it gave me a taste for how strict things were and how serious a threat it was to people’s livelihood and freedom.

But all of my sources were a little different. Some people who were among the first people to try MDMA, like Carl Resnikoff and his partner at the time, Judith Gips, were really happy to chat. They were tickled and even delighted to know they played this role in history. Then you have someone like the person who goes by the pseudonym “Merrie Kleinman” on the opposite end of the spectrum. [Editor’s note: In his book PiHKAL, psychedelic chemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin mentions that Kleinman inspired him to take MDMA after she told him about her experience with it.] 

These days Kleinman doesn’t want to have anything to do with MDMA. She told me what happened, for the historical record, but that’s it. She told me: “The midwife doesn’t keep the baby.” She’s embarrassed by her role in creating these substances and experimenting on herself. She felt that she was reckless – a stupid young person. She didn’t want that on her professional record. She also says she hasn’t followed the news or science on MDMA since either; she had no idea that Shulgin had mentioned her in his book, and she hasn’t been following clinical trials. She’s profoundly uninterested. So it’s impossible to generalize about people in the underground and their roles, but what they all have in common is that they’ve shaped this molecule’s story and gotten us to where we are today.

In the book, you talk about the lead-up to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision to add MDMA to the list of Scheduled I drugs in 1985. Drug dealers like Michael Clegg were brazenly selling it in huge quantities, attracting the attention of federal regulators, and many researchers, therapists, and advocates, including MAPS founder Rick Doblin, participated in a lawsuit against the DEA to fight their attempts to schedule the drug. That included some interesting — and shady — maneuvering. Tell us about those details; how did you report that out?

In 1985, MDMA was still legal but the writing was on the wall for it being scheduled. Professors were trying to fight it, but Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, knew it was going to be scheduled, and he wanted to make sure there was MDMA available for future research. Doblin commissioned David Nichols, a professor of pharmacology at Purdue, to create this big batch of MDMA. Nichols made two kilograms of pure, 99.98% MDMA – tens of thousands of doses — kept under lock and key for years. 

That batch Nichols made was funded through donations from Michael Clegg, who was head of an organization called the Texas Group, which manufactured and sold ecstasy. Doblin and Debby Harlow, a therapist-in-training who was helping head up the case against the DEA, went to meet with Clegg and basically begged him to cool his engines and stop being so obvious about selling the drug. But Clegg said he was going to keep doing what he was doing. “Frankly, Debby, If it’s made illegal, I’ll just make more money,” he told them.

And Doblin asked him, ‘If you’re going to keep doing that, can you at least give us a donation to help fund our case against the DEA?’ And Clegg said, ‘I’m not going to give you money, but I can give you drugs.’ Harlow was like, ‘Absolutely not — we’re not crossing that line because it’s going to look like this group of therapists and doctors who are suing the DEA are working with the biggest drug dealer in the US; it’s an ethical line we cannot cross.’ Doblin, on the other hand, was like, ‘Yeah, give me the drugs,’ – he was ready to load up the trunk! So Clegg gave Doblin a donation of 20,000 MDMA pills, and then sold Doblin another 19,000 pills for $3 each. That caused some infighting between Doblin and the other people fighting DEA, but Doblin ended up taking those drugs and selling them to people at New College in Florida, and with that money, he paid David Nichols, the professor at Purdue.

That same MDMA Nichols made continues to be used: it’s what they used for MAPS clinical trials, and researchers like Gul Dolen at Johns Hopkins and Harriet de Wit at University of Chicago have used that MDMA in their work too.

Doblin wasn’t forthcoming with this story when I first interviewed him, but there was something he said in our interview that hinted at it, and I grabbed onto it, and he eventually decided to tell me the full story. It’s all a little shady, but things like that need to be recorded for the official history of the drug. 

You also discuss Clegg’s relationship with a man named Bob McMillen, who at first went into business with Clegg selling MDMA, but then parted ways with him over his concerns about Clegg’s business ethics. What do you think it says that a drug known for inducing feelings of love and empathy still finds itself at the center of bitter disagreements and infighting of this kind?

These drugs are agnostic, neutral tools. They aren’t good or bad. It’s just like how people aren’t good or bad — we’re nuanced. There’s a quote from a 1994 MDMA ethnography by Marsha Rosenbaum and Jerome Beck: ‘If you give MDMA to a shallow a–hole, they will continue to be shallow a–holes.’

It’s easy for people to want to believe that MDMA is a panacea, just as we want to believe tech is going to solve climate change. But that was really hammered home for me recently when the BBC excerpted part of the book about a white supremacist taking MDMA, and it went viral as people republished not the excerpt itself, but light rewrites of it. With each retelling, the subtlety was lost. In the end, it became “white supremacist takes MDMA, renounces beliefs and finds love.” And that’s not really what happened – the guy admits he’s still bigoted, and says he believes he probably always will be. 

From the stories you’ve included in the book, it sounds like your reporting included hearing many tales of trauma and healing. What was that like for you? 

There were many times where I’d be doing interviews with people who tried MDMA either in the underground or in clinical trials where we’d end the interview in tears because the stories were just so powerful. And yes, some of the interviews I did were quite heavy. But the thing that really distinguishes the reporting for this book from some of my other work is that many of these stories had some sort of happy ending. People who have been suffering under the weight of their trauma or substance use disorder for years or decades have encountered MDMA or other psychedelics and their life is better for it. With my previous reporting on wildlife trafficking or poaching, it’s the opposite. One of the reasons I came to this topic was that I wanted to focus on something more optimistic, where people are actually excited about the future. 

No matter how much you think you know about MDMA, I think there’s going to be something in this book that surprises you. I was personally blown away by how rich the stories, the history, and the science around this drug is. I think MDMA is a lens through which we can look at human behavior, and to understand how our society works, or doesn’t work.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.