Science Finally Caught Up With the Weekend

The version of MDMA that kills cancer is, for now, also the version that kills the patient. That’s the catch. But research out of the University of Birmingham in 2011 suggested the gap was closable—that a chemically modified form of the compound you’d find pressed into pills at any half-decent club might, within years, be running clinical trials against blood cancers: leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma.

Professor John Gordon from the School of Immunology and Infection was careful with the language. We don’t want to give people false hope, he said—which is exactly what someone says when they actually have hope and are trying not to get ahead of themselves. The mechanism they’d identified was specific: the drug appeared to attract fatty acid molecules in the cell membrane, softening the outer wall, letting the compound slip inside. Healthy cells resisted this. Cancerous ones didn’t. Dr. David Grant, the cancer researcher on the project, gave a timeline. It needs time and work, he said, but we’ll be presenting the world with a new cancer drug before long. The required dose to fight tumors was still lethal in humans at that point, but the modification work was already underway.

There’s something genuinely strange about this history. Decades of moral panic over ecstasy—the tabloid horror stories, the war-on-drugs campaigns, the nineties rave crackdowns—and meanwhile the molecule was quietly demonstrating anti-tumor properties that orthodox pharmacology hadn’t thought to look for. The underground as an accidental clinical trial. Every bleary morning after a night spent dissolving into a dancefloor was, in some alternate framing, a data point.

The outcasts and the cures sometimes come from the same place.