Last April, driving down the interstate, traffic came to a halting stop, and I was rear-ended by a car going sixty miles an hour, when my car was sitting still. Although lucky to be alive and walking, I suffered from a sprained neck and numerous nerve entrapments all down my spine. I lost feeling in my right pointer finger, couldn’t move my neck, and felt constant sharp electrical pain in nearly all of my body.

The thousands of dollars worth of treatment I received over the next couple of months did very little, if anything, to free up my strangled nerves. Muscle relaxers did me more harm than help; they made my mind and spirit equal that of an amoeba, certainly not a good thing for finals week with courses like organic chemistry and neuroanatomy. Furthermore, muscle relaxers offer no lasting quick-fix (as I will later compare to the effects of MDMA), so one needs to be taking them all the time, which ultimately weakens the supporting muscles in such a way that the spine isn’t held upright, leading to further unnecessary damage. A neurologist that I visited took me off the muscle relaxers, since he agreed that they are not the ideal form of treatment, and prescribed a combination of pain killers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and neuromuscular massage every other day. The pain killers only made me into an unproductive zombie, not doing anything to treat the underlying problem. The anti-inflammatory drug offered a very minor temporary relief, and the neuromuscular massage didn’t do all that much for me either. I still woke up some mornings in tears because I felt like a prisoner trapped in my own body, a self-contained torture chamber. But my finger didn’t hurt; I couldn’t feel it at all.

Exam week came and went, all too painful for my condition. It’s not the test material that bothered me, but having to sit in the same chair for six hours taking an organic chemistry final; I had major problems sitting in one of those chairs for more than ten minutes.

But after the exams came the big party for the graduating class, the party where someone offered me MDMA, and I was healed. Actually, I took a combination of MDMA and Zanex, which loosened me up considerably. At the peak of the drug effect, I went to lie down on a large, inflated "Moon Walk" that was rented for the party. The waves and ripples from the forty-foot diameter, six-foot high billowing air cushion comforted me with a slow, rolling frequency and quite a high amplitude of a sine wave. Safe in the netted walls of the Moon Walk, supported by inflated arches which converged overhead, I found myself to be in a red womb-like environment. Every muscle in my body was free and floating; I felt no pain. The nylon parachute material offered me complete support in whichever direction it gently tossed me, giving me a full spectrum of motion with zero muscle strain. For two hours, I let myself be completely free to the whims of the large billowing waves powered by friends elsewhere in the Moon Walk womb, with their dancing and jumping and falling on top of one another. Pure bliss. It was the first real relief I had felt for over two months.

The next morning, quite different from previous mornings, my body no longer tortured me with agonizing pain of all kinds. In fact, I woke up feeling refreshed, alive, highly conscious, and free from all pain. And if that wasn’t enough, a full amount of feeling was restored in my once numb finger. Thoughts rushed to my mind of the possibility of curing thousands of people from whiplash injuries with the MDMA/Zanex/Moon Walk therapy. It would not only be the most effective treatment, but the most enjoyable and time-efficient. Insurance companies and sports industries might support research for such an effective therapy, and physical therapy centers would hail it as a godsend, since clients might be willing to spend a few extra dollars on such a thing.

Since then, I have experienced very little, if any, discomfort in my spine. This has strongly influenced my opinion that MDMA can bring multiple medicinal benefits to patients. It’s too bad that the government has made it very difficult to obtain approval to do any type of research with pharmaceuticals such as MDMA. There might be a strong potential to find positive research results using MDMA as a neuromuscular treatment for spinal injuries. Experimentation is what leads us to knowledge about all medicines.