Taking ecstasy can be an extremely blissful experience – it’s why the drug is called “ecstasy”, and generally why people take it. However, it can also have many downsides: the comedown, the fact it can be extremely dangerous if you don’t use it responsibly, and – as anyone who’s taken it will know – the fact it can make you do and say some very embarrassing things.
By way of illustration, we asked some people to relay the cringiest stuff they’ve ever done on ecstasy.
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– “Watched Coldplay.”
– “Started a WhatsApp group with some people I met in the smoking area called ‘we’re all going to the aquarium tomorrow’. We did not go to the aquarium.”
– “Got my face glo-painted in Lakota – a club in Bristol – by a hippie who would only accept payment in drugs and had a single trainer full of various powders and tabs next to her. It was a real low point for me. Obviously, at the time I thought it was the best sensation in the world and that I looked amazing.”
– “Genuinely enjoyed a drum ‘n’ bass night.”
– “I was on a stag-do in Barcelona and ‘double-dropped’, by which I mean ‘dropped two individual quarters of a pill over the course of about four hours’. Everyone else had done much more than that, but I got a bit freaked out for some reason and started applying cool gel packs to my head and back. Everyone else went out for the night and I stayed in, watching videos on my laptop.”
– “I know someone who cheated on their boyfriend because they actually thought the guy they were getting with was their boyfriend, and then was like, ‘Wait, you’re not Sam, WTF,’ mid-kiss.”
– “You sort of had to be there, but in 2016 I inspired this video with my 4AM chat:”
– “The day I bought my wife’s engagement ring I went round my friend’s house to celebrate, and he put a stupid amount of MDMA in bombs, which we all dropped quite early on in the night. I don’t remember a huge amount very clearly, but I do remember having what I thought was quite a nice conversation with someone next to me on the sofa about, inexplicably, pork pies. Turns out there was no one next to me, and two of my friends had been sitting opposite me and half-laughing, half-being very concerned for about 15 minutes.”
– “Came up on a coach and spent some of the journey hassling the stranger next to me about wearing bowling shoes outside of an alley. They were Nike Cortez.”
– “The first few times I’d done pills they hadn’t had much of an effect on me anatomically, if you know what I mean. So the first time I got peanut-dick – they must have been really strong pills, I was very loved-up – I thought it would be a good idea to show an entire room at a house party how small my dick had got. I still cannot believe I did that. Even writing this to you know is making me hate myself.”
– “Took a fully-clothed bath with three of my mates, and we spent the whole time stroking each other’s hair and faces. Probably looked quite cringe, but it felt amazing.”
– “I suddenly declared that I’d found total inner peace in a club and insisted my mates and I left immediately. When we did eventually leave, I struck up a conversation with some equally out of it guy, and we said he could come in our taxi, as we were heading the same way. I was retelling my story about finding enlightenment – for about the fifth time – and he got weirdly jealous, saying he wanted it too, and lashed out at me across the seats. My inner peace ended right there.”
WATCH: How to Use Ecstasy as Safely as Possible
– “I’ve only done ecstasy twice, because I am a square, I have the smell of squarehood upon me, and people don’t often offer me drugs as a result (they gaze at me and know I was Too Into Books at secondary school; they smell the pheromones I pump into the air and fundamentally know I still buy myself a Lego advent calendar some years). So, the first time: I did half a tablet and turned into the most monstrously horny man alive, an entire personality 180, and chatted up (and instantly struck out with) every single woman present in the bar I was in, revolving around the dance embarrassing myself in front of all of them in turn.”
– “Second time: I did half a pill at a day rave and invented the concept of sitting down. This is important, because a lot of people sat down before I invented sitting down, but they didn’t sit down. This is very hard to explain, but it helps if you are on ecstasy: sitting down is a fun activity for all (you are probably sitting down right now! Your ass bones are actively engaged in the chair or bed beneath you!), but you’re not sitting down. Some things feel very good when you’re on stimulants (warming yourself under a hand dryer, having your back rubbed, watching The Jungle Book (1967)), and sitting down is one of them: so good, in fact, that I found a soft padded leather seat-cum-cube and sat down on it, and then I refused to move. For, like, four hours. ‘Please,’ my friend was begging, after travelling from Manchester down to see the headline DJ. ‘Please, please, stop sitting down. I want to see music. I came here to dance.’ And I would sip my Strongbow Dark Fruits and say: ‘Can we just sit down for, like, 45 more minutes.’ I stayed there until kicking out time at 11PM, when I promptly got on the Overground home, really sitting down, then got back to the flat and just really sat the fuck down in it. ‘Why don’t we do this all the time?’ I asked him. ‘This is great. Just: sitting down.’ Haven’t seen him since.”
– “Somehow ended up on a duel carriageway in east London at 5AM after a Christmas party and tried to hitch-hike my way home. After what seemed like forever, a van started to slow down as it approached me, and I understandably got extremely excited, until the driver popped his head out of the window, shouted ‘Wanker!’ at me and sped off.”
– “Completely lost my mind and started asking my girlfriend when we were going for dinner with David Cameron. She thought she’d lost me forever.”
– “I work in the media, and cannot recall the amount of times I’ve met an aspiring writer / photographer / illustrator in a smoking area and very earnestly told them to email me about working together.”
– “Either when I texted my uni boyfriend – who I hadn’t spoken to for three years – to forgive him for everything (we broke up because I cheated on him) or basically every cuddle-puddle conversation I’ve ever had.”
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