At once antiquated and frighteningly hard-core, it's the weird, scary uncle of today's wildly popular and comparatively nonthreatening psychoactive stimulant, Ecstasy.

According to a long-term drug survey conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan,

Ecstasy, then known as MDMA, was around in the '70s and early '80s but most often in therapeutic settings, notably as an aid in marriage counseling.

In 1985, after it had developed a reputation as a college party drug, the Drug Enforcement Administration made it illegal. The result, naturally, was that Ecstasy went from college party drug to universal party drug, especially at raves, all-night dance events sometimes known for causing severe dehydration in participants too high to either stop dancing or to drink enough water.

Although it's possible to have a bad time on Ecstasy, for most people, that's not what happens (don't try it! MDMA is a neurotoxin associated with mood swings, memory problems and, in some cases, death). Acid, on the other hand, has always been as closely associated with bad trips (don't try it!) as with deep religious experiences and access to higher planes of existence.

LSD has a high-risk/ high-reward ratio. It not only requires a time commitment — an LSD trip can last 20 hours, whereas Ecstasy usually peters out after five hours (though this varies) — its early rituals suggested a deliberate, even thoughtful approach to drug-taking that seems out of fashion today. Although he got a little lax about it as time went on, Timothy Leary's ideas about "set and setting," which emphasized the importance of the psychological state of the user as well as the environment in which the drug would be used, recognize that the way to avoid a bad hallucinogenic experience has a lot to do with how well you know yourself and how willing you are to remove yourself from bad-vibe people and excessive external stimuli, like televisions or ringing phones.

No wonder no one does LSD anymore! It's incompatible with the contemporary American lifestyle. You have to make time for it, you can't multitask while you're on it, plus it might be unpleasant. Ecstasy is known to offer a one-dimensional, blissfully brainless high. Sure, you should probably take the day off to do it, but if acid is a mental marathon, full of peaks and valleys and unexpected endorphic turns, Ecstasy is neurological air guitar. It's fun and silly and offers unearned euphoria that's less about retreating into the brain's complexities than about falling in love with the world as you already know it.

If we're looking for a way to measure how feelings about consciousness changed over 40 years, we could do worse than to consider the philosophical gulf between LSD and Prozac. One purports to expand the mind; the other belongs to a class of drugs whose phenomenal success rests largely on their ability to keep the mind from expanding into uncomfortable places. One renders a person nonfunctional in order to question reality; the other is about becoming more functional while questioning little.

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