Sunday, September 26, 2010

the rise of X

At the Ratatat show at Club Nokia this week, I was surprised to see a youthful turnout of mainstream college kids who recreationally used MDMA.  These kids didn't have the wings, candy bracelets, and other visual identifiers of MDMA users. Some of them were decidedly mainstream kids.  I'm used to seeing MDMA users at electronic-music parties, like Electric Daisy Carnival and the like, but I was surprised to see them out on a Tuesday night for a rocking (and yes, electronic, but hardly rave music) performance by Ratatat.

According to the LA Times, rap/hip hop/top 40 music has embraced X in their lyrics, and in their euro- sound.  Interesting, Eminem is credited elevating X in hip hop: 
Time was when the drug of choice for rappers was either weed or booze (or, in certain cases down South, sippin’ on "sizzurp"). And the notion of ingesting a powerful love drug -– one known to overwhelm a person’s inhibitions, eliciting bro hugs and feelings of cosmic interconnectivity that are distinctly at odds with rap’s dog-eat-dog mentality -- would have been as improbable as an MC wearing tight jeans.
But things began to change when Eminem burst on the scene.
In a 1999 Rolling Stone interview, the hard-rhyming pill-popper consumed no fewer than three Ecstasy tablets in the presence of an interviewer and then bragged, “I wrote two songs for my next album on Ecstasy.”
Certainly Eminem is one of the more introspective rappers on the scene - does his X usage explain this?

Via Mindhacks, this development dovetails with the first peer reviewed clinical trial published about the use of MDMA on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder patients.  The Phase II pilot trial found that MDMA was very effective in reducing the Clinically Administered PTSD Scale score for the patients in the MDMA arm of the trial.  While there is skepticism by some about MDMA in a therapeutic setting, it obviously makes sense to contain the scope and size of these blinded trials.  Some have even argued that MDMA is safer than tobacco and alcohol use.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

new blog ya'll

I decided to develop an anonymous blog to 1) engage the world, 2) improve my writing skills, and 3) learn something.  Cheers.