In the late 90s/early 2000s, I went to a lot of raves and everyone who partied and took club drugs used ecstasy and ketamine regularly, often in combination.
A lot of people that I used to hang out with back then are on a private email list now, where we talk about more boring stuff like our families and jobs and so on, since everyone basically aged out of the scene in our early 30s.
I recently made a post about how my mom had been abusive towards me as a kid.
Almost every single person on the email list responded with a similar story of abuse, sometimes of a horrific nature. And almost everyone talked about dealing with trauma and depression their whole lives — and how the rave scene and the drugs they took probably saved them. Several talked about suicide attempts before getting into raves.
I had known these people for almost 15 years and I had never really talked about this except for the random conversation on ecstasy with one or two of them where they or I as sort of worked out our issues with them at an after party or whatever.
I was pretty surprised at how consistent the story was. I know that’s how I felt about the drugs— that the combination of those two (and lsd to a lesser extent) and the community around the music probably saved my life — even though I took a lot of dumb chances and went well beyond the therapeutic info the hedonistic from time to time.
I went from being a lonely, closed up victim of abuse at home and a decade of bullying at school to being outgoing and popular in that scene - even to the point where I learned to DJ and played gigs in front of crowds of 1000+ people.
It helped me not just in the scene but in my personal life and my career. I learned to recognize some of my learned toxic behaviors that pushed people away from me and how to recognize them in other people. I distanced myself from my family and home town friends who had been treating me terribly, and my career took off — even with no degree — and largely because of connections I made in the scene.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it seemed transparently obvious at the time that MDMA, LSD and ketamine were near-miraculous substances and deserving of serious scientific study, and it always seemed perverse that the government was doing everything in its power to prevent people from taking them, while at the same time pushing people to take anti depressants and stimulants that were so much less helpful and enlightening.
I haven’t used drugs in nearly a decade and don’t intend to, but I’m glad that researchers are starting to take them seriously.