The Nintendo Pill

There’s this MDMA pill going around Belgium called Nintendo and the joke writes itself but apparently it’s actually there, making the rounds, people are taking it. Some guy from a club said it came on at midnight like a hammer, the whole place started looking beautiful, his friends got sentimental and kept telling each other how much they love each other, that moment about an hour in where you think you’ve figured out something crucial about what matters, and he got worried his friend was too far gone so he ditched his second dose, which obviously doesn’t help because now he’s just alone at the peak convinced he’s become the god of everything. That’s the thing about rolling—you get that certainty, that absolute conviction that everything makes sense, and you’ll never feel it again quite the same way.

The brands are everywhere. Nintendo, Mitsubishi, Superman, Li-Ion. You see them and you think they mean something, like there’s actual consistency or someone gave a shit beyond pressing them fast. But it’s just a name, a story the dealer tells so you don’t have to think about the fact that you’re consuming something completely unverified. Could be pure MDMA. Could be mostly speed. Could be something nobody even knows because they bought it from someone who bought it from someone. The brand is pure fiction, and we believe in it the way we believe in anything we can’t check.

Which is why people make the dark joke at the end. Bath salts, face-eating, the paranoia that lurks under every drug story about what happens when you take the wrong thing. At least with Nintendo someone put effort into pressing the pill, stamped a logo on it, created the illusion that a human being thought about what they were doing. It’s stupid and it’s not safe, but it’s something. It’s a brand, and a brand means someone decided it was worth naming. That’s all we have sometimes—the confidence of the person who labeled it.