Seemingly against all odds, she pulled her body and mind back
together. She became fascinated by notions of human potential,
the way the mind works. And she asked herself the big questions.
"I wanted to make sense of it all." It took years, however, to
reach out to Mithoefer. Her plan: to see whether she could free
herself from torment by taking a drug called MDMA, commonly
known as Ecstasy. Party drug and forbidden substance The
compound known as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA,
was first synthesized in Germany in 1912. No one quite knew what
to do with it. It was studied by the military in the 1950s and
eventually emerged from the lab in the late 1970s. The first
report on its effect in humans was published in 1978 by
independent chemist Alexander Shulgin and David Nichols, a
professor of pharmacology at Purdue University. At the same
time, Shulgin was churning out the drug in his lab and sharing
it with a handful of psychiatrists and therapists who saw MDMA
as a lever for human growth. Dr. Georg