With only a few hours left until the party, Jane Doe invites her friends over to her house to get ready and “pre-game”. One of Jane’s friends brought along their newest best friend, Molly. Molly’s introduced in the kitchen, where the friends pour her into their water bottles. Soon each of her users begin to feel the euphoria; each of their senses intensifying, heartbeat increasing, pupils dilating. Jane and her friends just took the newest most popular kind of ecstasy, Molly, short for molecule.
Molly is a pure crystallized powder of ecstasy, classified as a MDMA. Molly started getting more recognition after rapper Tyga released his single ‘Molly’, featuring rapper and avid Marijuana user Wiz Khalifa. However, Molly has been the go to ‘pure’ ecstasy since the early 1980s.
“[Molly] makes you the happiest you’ve ever been in your entire life, it literally makes the world perfect,” an anonymous student said. “I’ve used Molly three times in my life, and it’s all been this year, and it showed me what the world was like outside of the depressed person’s point of view.”
Although users often experience a sense of euphoria from the high created from the drug, too few of its users know the physical harm done to the brain.
In the educational and interactive Mouse Party, it illustrates the way the high is created as the drug change the activity of neurotransmitters in the brain. In the normal brain, chemical messengers, such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine are regulated by the brain to keep the body at homeostasis. The use of Molly, however, mimics the serotonin and is then taken up into the transporters, making the neurotransmitters work backwards, shooting excessive serotonin back into the synaptic cleft, causing the user to get the high.
“I like to save my brain, so I don’t take MDMA often, as it does, you know, take away parts of your brain,” the anonymous student said.
Research shows that users of ecstasy can experience long lasting confusion, depression, and selective impairment of attention spans and memory. Because of its negative side effects, the DEA labels it a Schedule 1 controlled substance, considered to have a high potential for abuse and no accepted use in medical treatment, which means it’s illegal.
“Most of the consequences that follow getting caught with a controlled substance result in felonies meaning jail time, probation, and fines of high amounts,” school resource officer Mark Mitchell said. “If you’re under the influence of a controlled substance and you’re in a public scene, you can get into legal trouble.”
Although ecstasy has been around for quite some time, Molly is relatively new, gaining more recognition with teens and young adults who attend raves, parties, nightclubs, and concerts.
“The problem with students doing Molly is that they’re not just taking ecstasy, they’re actually mixing it with other things,” another anonymous student said. “I’ve heard of plenty of people who will take Molly, smoke a blunt, and then have alcohol. It’s become insanely dangerous because they don’t know what they’re putting in their body and how much their body can handle.”
Attention has been taken off of the old ecstasy pills used in the 1990s, because users found that they were laced with everything from caffeine to other drugs, such as cocaine. That led some people to turn to a more ‘pure’ substance. That’s where Molly comes into the picture.
Yet Molly itself is not as reliable as users think, nor as glorious as iconic artists lead on. However, artists glorifying illegal drugs and alcohol is not exactly news; especially with stars such as Miley Cyrus glorifying it in song lyrics such as “Dancing with Molly” from her newest hit single “We Can’t Stop”.
“The main effects Molly will have on its users is loosening inhibitions, heightening and intensifying feelings of euphoria and a sustained high for an extend period of time,” campus nurse Jeannine Haines said. “The danger is that every brain processes and works a little different and a certain amount of a certain drug may not affect one person as it will another and we do not know what the effect is going to be.”
Users of Molly will consume the drugs through either swallowing, mixing it with water to create the infamous ‘Molly Water’, snort it, or parachute it – fold it in a tissue and swallow – and will quickly experience the euphoria. However, the actual dangers of Molly are often ignored as there have been four deaths from Molly alone in the previous summer.
“Students don’t know how much of a certain drug their body can handle,” Haines said. “It can cause a real danger, especially if they’re mixing it with other drugs.”
