Then she heard about Herbal Ecstacy. Castilla is very health-conscious; she figured this might be a good, safe alternative. “I was out with friends and we were dancing. I was feeling a little, you know, so I took it.” The effects began in about an hour. “You feel a little energy. You feel one step better than reality. It tingles all over your body.” Despite warnings in the news recently, she insists, “this stuff is safer than illegal drugs or alcohol. When you’re doing it you don’t lose track of your mind, you don’t lose track of time, your eyes are completely open.” For her, it is the perfect drug: a nightclub euphoric that doesn’t interfere with her career. And best of all, “it’s herbal so it’s OK.”
Since coming on the market four years ago, Herbal Ecstacy and its lesser rivals–Cloud 9, Ultimate Xphoria, X, Rave Energy– have flourished in the rave and club scenes, shadowing the rise of real Ecstasy. Blurring the lines between authorized events and outlaw parties–that was half the fun–raves grew as a free-for-all for maverick entrepreneurs. Anybody with access to a sound system, an abandoned warehouse and some fliers could call himself a promoter, buyer beware. The legal highs, promising a cheaper, safer alternative to Ecstasy, caught the spirit in all ways. Their genius was to ditch the granola mustiness of health-food items for the edgy ambivalence of rave products–to be natural but not boringly legit. “Look at the packaging,” says Collin McKinney, 28, who owns Strange?, a techno-oriented music store in New York’s East Village that sells Herbal Ecstacy. “The holograms, the pyramid, the techno look– it’s like the [rave] fliers.” McKinney, who wears his hair in red-and-black dreadlocks, laughs at the suggestion that herbal highs have generated a culture of their own. “I’ve never seen people who did one [type of Ecstasy] but not the other.”
The herbal highs hit at a ripe moment, arriving in a drug culture that is both expanding (use of marijuana, LSD, cocaine and other drugs has risen in the ’90s) and also bifurcating. On the one hand are utopian, disengaging drugs like pot and psychedelics; on the other, can-do uppers like methamphetamine. Herbals play both sides, selling the promise of psychedelic euphoria while actually delivering just a mild, caffeinelike boost. This has led to disappointment. Like several merchants contacted by NEWSWEEK, McKinney says that when he first stocked Herbal Ecstacy, he couldn’t keep it on the shelves. But after the first six months, “everybody in the dance culture had tried it and realized it wasn’t like Ecstasy. Now we can’t give it away.” Ironically, recent cautionary news stories may be helping keep sales alive.
Todd, 26, an art director from New York, has tried both, and dismisses the herbal variety as “a big marketing ploy.” Herbal Ecstacy reminds him of his high-school friends who once ate three loaves of rye bread because they heard it had the same properties as LSD. Like most subjects interviewed for this story, Todd never believed herbal highs were harmless. “It’s all unhealthy. That’s pretty much a given.” Rachel Kozak, 19, who works part time at Strange?, agrees: “People who are into herbs and health wouldn’t waste their money on Herbal Ecstacy.” Some dealers of real Ecstasy, though, are lacing their product with heroin; savvy users look out for telltale brown specks in the pills. By these standards, herbs are kids’ stuff.
But kids aren’t the only ones taking them. At The Alley, an alternative shopping complex in Chicago, owner Mark Thomas, 41, says at his peak he sold as much as $10,000 worth of Herbal Ecstacy a week, mostly to “people wearing suits and ties, people who were undergoing drug tests in their work and wanted to get high.” In their minds, too, it is the perfect drug: a mild euphoric that doesn’t interfere with their careers. It is the con that keeps on conning.
