It's not worth the momentary high.
It just sucks the life out of you,
it sucks the happiness out of you.
Ecstasy is a synthetic or man-made
mind-altering drug.
It can have other qualities, like as a stimulant,
a depressant or hallucinogenic.
They're almost the size of an Advil
or something
and they have different pictures
and they're all different colors.
It's a designer drug.
It's made with all different types of chemicals.
You never know what's in it.
The facts are, is that it's not just in nightclubs
or raves anymore, it's in our own homes.
Kids are taking it
and teenagers are taking it.
Adults are taking it for fun --
they think it's a recreational drug.
And it's not.
It's much more serious than that.
Well, it started out as parties. It started
out like, me and my boyfriend would go to a party.
90--100% of the people
were on Ecstasy when I was at parties.
There's so many different
varieties of it out there --
whether it's cut with methamphetamine, like
heroin. Some is cut with more dope than others.
So when I took Ecstasy,
where I was hallucinating so heavily,
it was because the batch
had acid in it or LSD in it.
It was a speed-based Ecstasy pill.
And I was so wired up,
I had foam coming out the side of my mouth.
There's just so many things that
play a factor in it, it's pretty unknown.
I've been to raves and seen countless people
taken away in ambulances.
Just - you never know
what you're going to get in that pill.
-- It was the summer out of 8th grade.
-- I was about 16 the first time I took Ecstasy.
I was 18. I just got out of high school and
was moving into my first college apartment.
I was a freshman in college. That would have
been 19, 20 years old -- 19 years old.
I went to celebrate my 21st birthday
with a bunch of friends,
and I went to this club. And one of my friends
pulled me aside in the bathroom and said,
"Hey, you feel really good right now -- I have
something that will make you feel even better."
They'd be like, "Okay, if you take this Ecstasy
right now you're going to feel so great."
"You're going to feel like you're
on top of the world. Just try it. Come on."
And I was pretty worried -- was this really
addictive, what would it do to you?
And he just said, "Oh no, no, no. It's this really big
thing. It's really, really big in the nightclub scene."
"And it's not that bad, it's not like you
get addicted to it or anything."
It had a little dolphin stamp on it
and I thought, "Okay, this can't be bad.
I mean, one small little pill, no big deal."
So me and a bunch of my girlfriends took it
and we were partying all night long,
but then the next morning
I didn't realize what it had done to me,
because I was so depressed.
It just sucked all the happiness out of me.
The next day I woke up, and I just
felt so bad, the first thing I thought was,
"You know what, I can't wait to take more X,
because I just don't want to feel like this."
For the next few days after I took it,
I felt like crap.
The next time you take it,
you have to take 4 to 5 pills.
But when you come down, all you want
is to go back up again,
because you just hit that depression.
And the next thing you know,
you're taking 9 to 10 pills,
not even getting close to that first time.
Just stuck in your head, "I'm such a loser, I'm
this, I'm that," and "I'll never do this drug again,"
and then half an hour to an hour later
you're doing it again,
because it's the only thing that
makes you feel better.
And so it pretty much was like
a revolving door: trying to get happy,
then getting sad, then happy, then sad.
It just kept getting worse and worse.
So you're almost scared to come
down from it,
because you don't know what's going to
happen when you come down.
Because you're so depressed,
you feel so bad, your body feels so terrible.
You can't sleep, you can't eat,
you're like extremely hot and sweating.
It was being up and down,
up and down, every day.
My emotions were so dysfunctional,
they didn't make any sense to me.
I didn't know what was going on
with my body.
I felt like a different person.
I felt -- you know, I wasn't okay with myself.
I felt like a different guy when I was on it.
It just really warps the brain,
and I think it changes a person's personality.
Unfortunately, it's been heavily promoted:
that it's okay, it's a party drug, it's a love drug.
And really, it's a dangerous drug.
You'll take it at a nightclub and you're going
and you're dancing, and you're not worried about
going and getting water
or whether or not your heart
is about to explode, it's pumping so fast.
The whole time I was high on Ecstasy,
I'd be clenching my jaw.
You literally just want to go like -- bite down
and clench your teeth the whole time.
You can overdose, you can overheat your body,
you can dehydrate your body and pass out.
There's just like this urge to go, go, go,
and I would dance until I couldn't,
until I blacked out.
I actually have witnessed, more than once,
somebody dying from the first time
of taking Ecstasy.
It made me somebody who I wasn't.
I mean, I was fulfilling my addiction,
whether it's through running prostitution rings,
gambling rings, selling drugs,
selling drugs to the kids.
I drove on Ecstasy a couple of times.
I had no idea of what was really going on.
I know I would see a stop sign or a stop light
and I'd go, "Wow that's really, really red!"
I didn't make the connection, "Well, that's
a red light. I think I should stop my car now."
Driving under the influence of Ecstasy,
I didn't make those connections at all.
We were probably 16 or 17.
I was the only one who was on Ecstasy
and everybody else was drinking.
So the police came and saw us,
and everybody was acting drunk and silly.
And they took me and put me into jail
for the night and held me there.
At the time I thought it was hilarious, because
I didn't care about anything -- I was on Ecstasy.
But then the next morning I'm like,
"Oh my God, I'm in jail right now."
I got caught with Ecstasy on me,
got thrown in jail
in a really run-down area of South Carolina.
And I was on Ecstasy
and I was extremely depressed, in jail,
around these really big guys,
threatening to basically beat me up.
We went out to a club one night.
And I had taken, you know, 2 or 3 rolls.
I got in the club
and I started pouring with sweat.
I ended up passing out
and they had to throw me into a cold shower.
I was passed out, but the people who worked
in the club dragged me out of the nightclub,
because they don't want you
to die in their club.
So they will drag you out to the sidewalk
and leave you there until the ambulance
comes and takes you away.
I blacked out for God knows how long,
and woke up in a tub of ice
with my friends around me --
the fear in their faces
of not knowing if I was alive or not.
And the craziest part about it is,
in a situation like that,
because drugs are involved, you don't know
whether to call an ambulance or what to do,
because you have the fear of
getting in trouble for it too.
Basically, I could have died
because they didn't know what to do.
Ecstasy, that's such a new and
designer drug over the last decade or so,
they really don't even still know
the long-term effects of it themselves,
because it depends on
what type you're using.
It causes brain damage.
And when you have brain damage,
that can cause effects on various things,
such as coordination -- you know,
certain dexterities, communication.
I had for a long time jaw pain. I've had
teeth problems for a long time after I took them.
When I see a doctor and stuff,
they tell me my worst repercussions
are down the road,
with the drug abuse I did.
They didn't tell me that I was going to become
very addicted to this,
I was going to become extremely depressed,
I was going to develop,
you know, 2- or 300-dollar habit a week
on this stuff,
that I'd have to go rehab -- rehabs! --
that I was going to be arrested 3 times,
that I was going to be thrown in jail 2 times,
that I was going to have to total 3 cars.
Nobody really ever told me about that stuff
the first time I took Ecstasy.
It seems like it's a lot of fun
and you think that everybody else is doing it,
or they look like they're having a great time.
But in reality it's evil. I mean, it will
take control of you and run your life for you.
If I knew what I knew now and I could go back,
I never would have touched the drug.
I mean, like I said, when I went into it,
I didn't think it was going to do any damage.
It seemed like a normal thing for me
to take Ecstasy --
that a lot of people took Ecstasy and they
ended up doing fine. But that's not the case.
Nothing bad may happen.
Cool, that's fine.
Take these next three weeks:
How are you going to feel?
What about your job, your school, your body's
health, your family's emotions towards you?
You take those two facts, there's no choice.
It's like jumping out of a plane
and just having a set of silverware
as a parachute. It's not a decision.
It's true, it really is.
Because even if you don't get hurt
from the drug the first time you take it,
and you enjoy it,
there's a downside to that too. Because then
you enjoy it -- then you want to do it again.
And once you do it again,
it's the start of your own destruction.
