Truth About Adam Essay Research Paper The

Truth About Adam Essay, Research Paper The Truth About Adam It’s Friday night and you have nothing to do. You’re putting your schoolbooks away and you notice a flyer that you received earlier today. It says: “Spectacular Laser Light Show…Dance ALL night long to the newest trance songs in the industry.” You decide to check it out and after asking a few people of the location of this dance party you find yourself in front of an abandoned warehouse. You walk in and the sound is blaring and the laser lights you read about are moving to the music. You walk around for a while to see what the all hype is about. You’re walking along and you bump into someone. You look up to apologize and the person is smiling at you and says, “It’s okay, you’re great.” And as the

person’s leaving he holds your arm and keeps walking and lets go when the distance between you and him keeps him from holding on. You don’t think anything of it and keep walking. Finally you see someone you know, it’s the friend that gave you the flyer. You approach her to say hello and like the previous person she’s smiling away and she’s sucking on a pacifier. She approaches you and immediately starts hugging you and telling you how happy she is that you’re there. She asks, “Are you rolling?” and not knowing what “rolling” is you say no. She proceeds to pull a bag out of her brightly colored purse and says, “Here, have a pill…on me.” She gives you a tiny pill, smaller than an aspirin, white with a little red heart. “Go ahead, take it! It’s makes

you feel sooo good,” she says to you as she rubs against you as if she were a cat. Many people, both young and old, are confronted with this situation or one similar to this one. The results of a situation like the above one are pretty much 50/50. Either the person takes the pill or they don’t. Some do and never do it again. While others continue to take it on a weekly basis. Ecstasy has become a very popular designer drug in the United States, but many of the users of this drug have little to no knowledge of what it really is, how it affects them and what dangers they can run into when they use this drug. Ecstasy is one of the many names for the drug called MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxy-methamphetamine). This drug, which is very similar to another drug, methamphetamine, or speed,

is also known as X, XTC, E, or Adam (Clayton 18). Many people take ecstasy and don’t even know what it contains. Half the time it may not even contain MDMA at all. Investigators from the University of California-San Francisco have been conducting a new study on the pills. They found that out of 107 pills of ecstasy, sixty-three percent actually contained MDMA. Twenty-nine percent contained a drug, but no MDMA. Most of the pills had very high dosages of a drug called dextromethorphan. Dextromethorphan is the cough suppressant found in many over the counter cough medicines. The rest of the pills contained caffeine, ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, and salicylates (“Ecstasy”). Those aren’t the only things found in ecstasy, however. Some dealers put other things like baking soda

and sugar in the pills (Clayton 16). Or on a rare occasion someone might put LSD, heroin or speed just so they can sell the pills at a higher price (Alvergue 22). Ecstasy wasn’t always a club drug. It was actually first developed in Germany in 1914 as a diet suppressant but the drug was never really used or tested (Clayton 16). In 1965, a chemist named Alexander Shulgin recreated the drug in the United States. Since it was not an illegal drug for peopled to use, psychotherapists began to use ecstasy on their patients. The drug helped their patients open up and speak freely about their problems. The patient’s ability to communicate and in the manner that they did so was compared to that of “Adam’s innocent and blissful state in the biblical Garden of Eden before he ate the