A Girl Named Molly

There's a girl out there named Molly who'll show you unconditional love and asks for nothing in return. Not a call the next day or a text goodnight. She's a modern muse. Paul McCartney had Linda, Eric Clapton had George Harrision's wife, and now every rapper, whose name rhymes with boss or starts with a Wiz, Lil, Big, or Young, has spoken of their love affair with Molly. Her love has no boundaries. She'll love men. She'll love women too. Still, for as great as Molly is, she's misunderstood.

It's America. A land where legal substances turn you in to the walking dead and the banned ones make you love in a way the sober mind has no other way of reaching. MDMA -- or Molly as she's referred to as in most songs on Funk Master Flex's playlist -- is one of these banned substances. It's sometimes confused with Ecstasy but there is a difference. Ecstasy comes in a pill form and has MDMA in it but there's other stuff mixed inside it like cocaine, heroin, and whatever else the chemist felt like throwing in that day. MDMA alone though comes in a powdery form and once ingested, you'll start feeling a level of happiness you never thought possible.

Iain Mcgregor, a professor at the University of Sydney in Australia, and his colleagues did a study on the effects of MDMA on lab rats. After being administered MDMA, the rats bodies produced Oxytocin at an accelerated rate. It's hard to speak for rats when but humans have a more effective way of communicating. (At least some of us do.) The reason for the uncontrollable happiness is because of the Oxytocin. Oxytocin is the chemical inside us responsible for falling in love and the bond a mother has for their child. 

            When you're around a person you care for on Molly, you appreciate them completely. All ego is dissolved and you don't care if you sound like an idiot or come off as weak.  If the person you're with is talking to you affectionately, their voice sounds different than when they're saying something normal. You hear affectionate words in a gentle tone but you can actually feel it hitting you in these powerful vibrations.

When someone you don't know rubs up against you on Molly, it feels good. When you care for the person on the other hand, you never want them to let go. You kind of just want them latched on to you forever. This is the feeling Nicholas Sparks tried to capture in the Notebook, or whatever other movie based off his books where the girl unrealistically turns down Channing Tatum like he's some friend zoned bum who's followed her around since High School.

When something on the streets is giving powerful reactions like this, science is never too far behind. Dr. Michael Mithoefer did a study on MDMA treating Post Traumatic Stress disorder. The good doctor cordially introduced 19 patients suffering from PTSD to Molly. Mithoefer would sit the patients down for eight hours and have them talk about those traumatic moments in their life. It seemed Molly's affection allowed them to finally speak freely about horrific incidents in their lives which originally triggered the stress. Of those 19 people, 14 said it improved their lives more than three years later.

CNN ran a story on Mithoefer's treatment and centered it on one of his patients. A woman named Rachel Hope. Hope says anything from a familiar smell or something that reminded her of the trauma would give her intense visuals of being raped as a child. She tried every form of treatment and the only one that worked for her was taking MDMA with Mithoefer. Finally being able to speak about her trauma and attacking the problem head on made great strides on improving her life. She was able to finally function in society and even raise a child. Something she would never have been able to do before Mithoefer's MDMA treatment. While it was only a small study, this can open the door for this kind of treatment on a larger scale.

Whenever there's a radical new treatment, the anti-drug skeptics are always going to be there to point out the negatives. If you ingest too much MDMA it can lead to your body overheating, which causes hyperthermia. (A little water will fix that right up.) While this is true, you shouldn't take too much of anything. Too many cheeseburgers will make you fat and a lot of legal prescription pain killers will kill more than the pain.

If one wanted to go down the legal route when treating their panic disorder there's always Xanax. All you have to worry about is an increase in impulsive behavior, change in libido, depression, thoughts of suicide, drowsiness, losing the ability to create new memories, and withdrawals. Molly makes you fall in love though and that's considered the radical treatment.

Julie Holland, an associate professor at NYU's School of Medicine, is an advocate of MDMA. In front of the United States sentencing commission in 2001, she plead her case on MDMA being safe by the amount of patients brought in to New York's Bellvue Hospital. "If Bellevue isn't seeing MDMA casualties, it's because they aren't out there." Her studies showed that from 1993 to 1999, only 139 cases in Bellvue Hospital were because of Ecstasy, the MDMA alternative with cocaine, heroin, and whatever else is mixed inside it. 73% were mild cases with little toxicity, 22% were because of an increased heart rate, and 12% were due to vomiting.

A recent study on MDMA casualties was done by the British Columbia Coroners Services. According to their data only four causalities were because of MDMA. They investigate more deaths in in an hour than the amount of MDMA cases which came in. It also didn't say how they died. It could have easily been the rare case where the person didn't drink enough water.

The word "drug" is looked at ignorantly in our society. There are a lot of people who consider marijuana, crack, and MDMA to be a part of the same family and it's so far from true. That would be like aliens doing a study on mammal behavior but only using dogs. Their studies would be inconclusive if they just assumed dogs and humans acted alike because they were mammals. The same goes with drugs.

Each "drug" should be viewed and studied separately. Crack turns you in to a zombie while marijuana and MDMA have proven therapeutic uses. It's funny how America went along with Richard Nixon's war on drugs yet don't believe in anything else he said. Being for the "war on drugs" is a way of justifying your laziness. All it takes is a little research on Google to find the truth.