A few months ago there was a recently Pitchforked BNM’d (Best New Music rating on Pitchfork music website) band coming through and playing a show in Eugene. Honestly, I try not to associate with BNMers, but these guys were out of the norm — nice, and not too douchy-seeming — so I had them over to my place for some beers. They’d been on the road a while, looked a bit weary and were in definite need of a pick me up.
“Knowing people,” I asked them if there was anything that I could help them out with.
Now, there’s a lot of different drugs around Oregon; there’s a lot of different drugs around the University. They had their choice of just about anything really, but what did these Brooklyn hipsters want?
“Well, we really like MDMA,” said their main bro.
Ecstasy. Nothing new here, a lot of different people take Ecstasy. I’m sure one of the reasons why the mentally challenged cast of Jersey Shore have the IQs of cavemen is in part due to droppin’ E and fist-pumping at the club all night to Tiesto. But here in Oregon where the drug culture has been around for decades now, this stuff has really taken off. In fact, I would say that for most hipsters, it is their drug of choice.
There’s a little confusion behind the etymology behind MDMA. First, there’s ecstasy. E is traditionally sold in pressed tab (pill) form and it’s hard to tell what else there might be in there. Meth, caffeine, baby laxatives and all other sorts of tweaker chemicals are commonly used to cut the MDMA to obtain higher profit margins. It’s only a relatively recent trend that MDMA has been sold as a powder or even as crystals. This is usually more to near-perfectly-pure and is what we now know as the infamous Molly.
Molly is a partying hipster’s dream come true. One or two doses of good Molly can make a hipster’s plugs pop out. Hipsters love “opening their minds” and trying to accept other people. They suck at it, because in reality they only like other hipsters. This is where Molly helps them “open up.” The lovey-doveyness that comes with snorting yourself into oblivion eases that social anxiety. But be wary, a hipster on Molly may try to befriend you or even hook up with you.
On Molly, hipsters transform into athletes of the night. The goal: massaging, dancing, frolicking, sneering, zoning, blabbing, chillwaving, “mind-expanding (bra),” chillin’, tweakin’, zonin’ and fixieing. The mind surges from a chill, lo-fi surf-rock state that you might find on the latest chillwave album to the explosive joy you’d find with The Flaming Lips. Getting lost in that chemical-induced bliss makes you forget about all the burnouts in Eugene.
A friend once relayed the story of a person who had dumped five hits of Molly in a cup of coffee at the Oregon Country Fair and slurped it down. He felt like the sun was holding him all day. The next morning, he woke up with an anxious wrenching in his stomach and overwhelming paranoia. He went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with severe PTSD. The doctor said he had done the equivalent of taking a baseball bat to his brain.
More and more reports, however, repeatedly list MDMA as significantly less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes. The British medical journal, The Lancet, has published multiple articles suggesting this, and the British Parliament was seriously considering relegating the legal status of MDMA to a Class B illegal drug from its current Class A position, a class that denotes more dangerous drugs. It was only stopped short. Yet in the United States and in Oregon, the classification of the drug has it so it’s on par with heroin in the Class A felony designation.
Biking on fixies around all night and bouncing up and down to Passion Pit whilst “rolling balls,” while not sounding that appealing to me, is a favorite hipster pastime. It’s too bad that by the time Daddy’s skrilla runs out and it’s time to grow up and apply for law school, they’ll have probably figured out how bad this stuff really is. But by then the damage will be done. Not such a bad thing considering admission rates are down.
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