Why We’re Bringing This Text Back
Few Spanish-language authors have discussed drug use as frankly as Antonio Escohotado. This essay, written in the wake of several deaths at a rave in Málaga, is not an apology for ecstasy: it is an indictment of the hypocrisy with which we approach what young people do with their free time. We are reviving it because its arguments, despite the passing years, still describe well the mechanism by which a relatively manageable substance becomes dangerous.
Youth Leisure and the Liturgy of the Weekend
Escohotado starts from a portrait of young people: daring, indolent, generous, and selfish in equal parts, with some spending power for the first time and a calendar sown with more than a hundred Fridays and Saturdays a year. That festive escape valve, he argues, is what lets them put up with the boredom of the rest of the week. It is neither a new phenomenon nor an exclusively urban one: even the country teenager who used to amuse himself with a hoop and a stick learns to be bored when he moves to the city. The uncomfortable conclusion is that a youth with more money than ever and the same recklessness as always cannot be protected with hoaxes or self-serving omissions.
The Uncomfortable Comparison: MDMA and Aspirin
The pharmacological core of the text is a deliberately provocative comparison. Escohotado points out that the safety margin of MDMA—the ratio between the minimum active dose and the average lethal dose—is not much lower than that of aspirin. And he stresses the decisive detail: aspirin is not harmless in itself, but its active ingredient is sold pure and measured with scrupulous care, in keeping with the old aphorism sola dosis facit venenum (only the dose makes the poison). Without control over composition, any substance loses its margin of reasonable use.
For historical context, the essay recalls that MDMA was used for psychological exploration before its international prohibition, that the World Health Organization’s expert committee debated its possible therapeutic usefulness in the mid-1980s, and that a Spanish court once classified it as a “soft” drug after weighing the expert report of the chemist Alexander Shulgin, before a higher court overturned that ruling for reasons more diplomatic than pharmacological.
The Real Danger: The Adulteration Chain
Here is the argument that interests us most from a harm reduction standpoint. Escohotado tells a first-person anecdote: he was offered a pill sold as “purest” MDMA, and out of caution he took only half; an hour later it was clear that it was more like an amphetamine-type stimulant in an excessive dose. His moral points not to a particular molecule but to the chain that delivers it: a clandestine manufacturer with no controls, middlemen who don’t know what they are selling, and an end user who has no idea what is in his hand.
Hence his harshest image: a malignant pharmacy where you ask for magnesium and are handed cyanide, multiplied across millions of branches. The “involuntary” deaths—those caused by an adulterant, an impurity, or blind dosing—are, in his reading, the predictable fruit of the prohibitionist experiment, not proof of any substance’s intrinsic wickedness.
Against Demagoguery, Gradualism
The essay closes with a political proposal: instead of promising the impossible eradication of supply and demand, try gradual, reversible solutions—limited programs, different dispensing channels, constant evaluation of results—combined with authentic information campaigns oriented toward real use and its concrete risks. His underlying bet is that these substances “are here to stay” and that only supervision can end the monopoly of criminal networks, which are dangerous not so much for breaking a debatable law as for serving up botched products that end up affecting the body of the person who uses them.
A Critical Reading
This text should be read with perspective. It is an opinion essay written at a particular moment and with a polemical intent; its comparisons—the aspirin one, for example—serve to discuss the role of purity, not to suggest that MDMA carries no risks. Later research has documented dangers inherent to the molecule even when it is pure: hyperthermia, worsened by physical exertion and hot environments; hyponatremia from drinking too much water; serious interactions with certain drugs (especially serotonergic antidepressants and some MAOIs); and individual cardiovascular or psychiatric vulnerabilities. Purity reduces one kind of harm, but it does not eliminate it.
From a harm reduction perspective, the essay’s practical conclusion remains sound: uncertainty about composition is a first-order risk factor. That is why drug checking services exist, along with independent information organizations such as Energy Control in Spain. This article offers no guidance on use or dosing; its value is educational and historical. For any doubt about interactions, symptoms, or risks, the reference should be reliable health information and, in an emergency, emergency services.
