Prompted by Michael Lorenzini’s Each Tablet I Took (2022), Peder Clark explores the materiality of Ecstasy tablets, fascinated by the potential meanings behind- and penalties of- their brash branding.
Within the phrases of rapper Gucci Mane, New York-based photographer Michael Lorenzini is an “ex-X-popper”. Each Tablet I Took, 2000-2001 (Lorenzini, 2022) is his guide documenting his consumption of Ecstasy tablets (also called 3,4-methelynedioxymethamphetamine) on the flip of the millennium.
For a couple of years, Ecstasy entranced Lorenzini and his associates. Nevertheless it was not solely the tablets’ pharmacological properties and their pleasurable euphoric results that fascinated him. It was additionally their materiality. Every capsule pressed with a emblem, sometimes a emblem of a multinational company corresponding to a automobile producer (Mercedes Benz, Ferrari, Mitsubishi and Volkswagen all featured). Different variants used iconic and immediately recognisable symbols from the scrapbook of American popular culture: Playboy, the Statue of Liberty, Pokémon, shamrocks, anchors, the greenback signal, and superheroes corresponding to Batman or Superman. Lorenzini photographed each capsule that he consumed, “shot on slide movie with an excessive macro lens”, revealing every disc’s granular texture and minute imperfections. These close-up pictures are organised into an A-Z of Ecstasy’s materials tradition, bookended by a brief essay by cultural critic Carlo McCormick and an afterword by Lorenzini himself.
Lorenzini’s guide is a snapshot of a sure period in New York Metropolis’s nightlife (the fallow years within the wake of Paris is Burning, the Membership Children and N.A.S.A., and Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s clampdown), however it has resonances with wider cultures of Ecstasy consumption. Should you spend sufficient time tracing home and techno subcultures by YouTube feedback on the largest tracks of the rave period, sure model preferences will begin to reveal themselves. “Mitzi turbos” with the long-lasting Mitsubishi emblem, “speckled doves”, dawn colored “pink Calis”, “Supermen”, “Dennis the Menaces” and “rhubarb and custards” are all hailed as the most effective tablets of their day, and remembered with deep affection by ageing ravers, triggered by the music of their youth.
Anecdotally, I do know of a pair who’ve collected a private archive of Ecstasy tablets going again to the Nineties, a lot as wine connoisseurs would possibly curate their very own cellars of classic bottles. The materiality of Ecstasy tablets has additionally proved enticing to at the very least one visible artist; sculptor Dan David produces enlarged replicas of Ecstasy tablets in Portland stone, full with Mitsubishi and dove logos.
The tendency of Ecstasy capsule producers to imprint their merchandise with such logos led a reporter from dance music journal Mixmag to mischievously contact international conglomerates’ press workplaces within the 12 months 2000, to query them about such brazen trademark infringement. Pattern response from Rolls-Royce: “Actually? I wasn’t conscious of this happening! You recognize, the mascot is named the ‘The Spirit of Ecstasy’ – that’s its precise identify!” (Anon, 2000: 30). Simply as in licit markets, such branding helped sure tablets to realize visibility and elicit shopper confidence. Mixmag ran a four-page investigative piece on the re-emergence of Mitsubishi-branded tablets in April 1999 (Rolfe, 1999: 52-56).
From a hurt discount perspective, such branding has, and continues to, assist with identification. The Tablet Studies web site continues to hold quite a few chemical analyses and person reviews of various manufacturers of tablets in circulation in numerous geographical areas around the globe. Even right now, within the period of very sturdy “super-pills”, probably the most infamous tablets are these branded with the Tesla emblem or an impression of Donald Trump.
Historians of medication and alcohol haven’t, by and enormous, paid such shut consideration to the paraphernalia that always accompanies cultures of intoxication. Such scholarship is but to have its materials flip. No one has written a social historical past of the bong, for instance. This evaluation may need to be revisited within the subsequent few years. Artwork historian Hannah Halliwell is creating a venture on how the “the hypodermic syringe and opium pipe had been manufactured, marketed, and perceived in nineteenth-century French society”. Going additional again in time, early fashionable historian Adriaan Duiveman revealed a captivating research of wager-cups for a particular difficulty of Cultural and Social Historical past that I co-edited (with Alice Mauger) in 2023 (Duiverman, 2023). In the meantime, cultural historian Erik Davis’ not too long ago revealed guide Blotter appears to be like on the pictures printed on sheets of LSD, or “blotter artwork” (Davis, 2024).
Davis’ investigation of LSD sheets has parallels with Lorenzini’s venture. McCormick notes these similarities in his introductory essay to Each Tablet I Took, writing that “the logos, textual content and imagery of illicit drug packaging – what we would name a type of cottage-industry folks artwork – sign the mindset of the customers”. He means that LSD blotters typically “characteristic[d] iconography borrowed from cartoons, comics and fantasy illustrations … to ascertain a visible tableau of innocence and optimism.” Heroin baggage however would typically characteristic the logos of both luxurious manufacturers corresponding to Gucci, or extra mordant imagery corresponding to skulls, dividing “into indicators of aspiration and glamour [or] emblems of their pollutive energy of self-abnegation”. For McCormick, the visible tradition surrounding MDMA consumption was an ambivalent marriage between these two antecedents of LSD and heroin: “in a approach each in regards to the idealism of psychedelic drug use and the tongue-in-cheek ironies of narcotic consumerism”. Additionally it is value noting the connection between illicit medication packaging, and that of the licit pharmacological {industry}, as Lorenzini briefly does on the again cowl of Each Tablet I Took, juxtaposing the Ecstasy tablets with Advil ibuprofen, Viagra, Prozac anti-depressants, and Pepto-Bismal tablets. In brief, the means, strategies and mediums by which individuals devour their intoxicants is a vital experiential historical past, and one that may present us a lot about its wider tradition.
After all, the style and texture of those tablets and tablets can also be a extremely essential side of their materiality, one considerably inaccessible to my analysis on Ecstasy for apparent moral, authorized and technical causes. One may be barely envious of students corresponding to James McHugh (who by the way advised me about Each Tablet I Took), who in the midst of researching his excellent guide of some years in the past An Unholy Brew (McHugh, 2021) took the method pioneered by experimental archaeology, and tried to brew among the alcoholic drinks from recipes present in his pre-colonial Indian sources. It is a line that many historians of medication and alcohol should stroll; ought to we partake (or admit to partaking) the substances that we research?
For private {and professional} causes, my very own experiences are one thing that I’ve been all the time been considerably coy or reticent about discussing (not that that stops individuals asking). To my many interlocutors, the inventory response has typically been to attract some obscure comparability with army historical past and counsel that you simply don’t have to have fought in a battle to put in writing such histories.
Drug experiences are inherently subjective and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, intoxication is all the time temporally and traditionally contingent; “taking a capsule at a competition in 2019 was not the identical as taking a capsule in 1989 at a rave” (Clark, 2022: 137). However as medication historian Mike Jay not too long ago and maybe extra persuasively mused,
In regards to the creator
Dr Peder Clark is a Analysis Affiliate on the College of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He’s writing a brand new cultural and social historical past of Ecstasy in Britain, and may be discovered on Twitter/X @pederclark. His analysis is supported by Wellcome.
The guide Each Tablet I took, 2000-2001 is on the market from Blurring Books: https://www.blurringbooks.com/
References
Anon. 2000. Pilled to the Air Max. Mixmag.December 2000. 30.
Clark, Peder. 2022. Ecstasy: A Artificial Historical past of MDMA. 127-140. Geoffrey Hunt, Tamar M.J. Antin and Vibeke Asmussen Frank (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Intoxicants and Intoxication. London: Routledge.
Duiveman, Adriaan. 2023. The Ingesting Desk as Battlefield: Warfare Analogies and Masculine Feelings in Early Fashionable Dutch Ingesting Songs and Wager Cups. Cultural and Social Historical past, 20:1, 27-42, DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2021.1965733
Davis, Erik. 2024. Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Lorenzini, Michael. 2022. Each Tablet I Took 2000-2001. New York Metropolis: Blurring Books.
McHugh, James. 2021. An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian Historical past and Religions Oxford: Oxford College Press.
Rolfe, Julian. 1999. The Mitsubishi Story. Mixmag,April 1999. 52-56.
