Ecstasy

Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House: 'Ecstasy' is a brand name. According to tradition, the tag first became attached to the drug MDMA (3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine) some time in the early eighties, when it moved out of the American psychotherapeutic community in which it had circulated for over a decade, and into wider use as a recreational drug. The street-dealers needed something punchy, and with its connotations of sexual abandon, the word 'Ecstasy' served them more than well, propelling the drug into mass use, international prohibition and ultimately a social significance only matched, in the pharmaceutical stakes, by the sixties flowering of LSD culture.