Sam Amico
When you spend an entire decade doing little beyond downing ecstasy, you probably don’t expect to live to tell the world about it.
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But one 37-year-old raver from the UK remains alive, though we’re not sure how well. This after taking about 40,000 pills of the drug over a 10-year span in his 20s.
Per the New York Post, citing a British medical journal, the man only stopped the madness after he began collapsing at parties. Prior to that, he was high more — “really, really high,” to be precise — more often than not.
Gee, imagine that.
“To our knowledge, this is the largest amount of ecstasy lifetime consumption ever described,” Dr. Christos Kouimtsidis, a UK psychiatrist co-wrote in the case study published in the medical journal Psychosomatics, via the Post.
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For the sake of the study, and the man’s privacy, he is called Mr. A throughout the article.
“The fact that Mr. A survived such a systemic assault at all seems miraculous,” the Post wrote. “However, overdoses from MDMA are exceedingly rare, and generally occur due to dehydration, or when the drug is tainted with another illicit substance. Although too much of any substance — illicit or not — can prove fatal, according to toxicology experts.”
Interestingly, this study surfaced following reports that the U.S. could potentially make the drug available at hospitals as soon as 2024. Given its effectiveness at treating PTSD. In theory, anyway.
After all, a trial in 2021 on 90 patients with severe PTSD showed that 88 percent went into remission after being administered the drug. Granted, no one took 40,000 pills in that particular trial. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t be as fortunate as Mr. A is today.
“More importantly, this could pave the way for the approval of more psychedelics to treat a variety of conditions ranging from PTSD to anxiety,” per the Post.
