Inner Ecstasy

Just yesterday, a cricketer, Asim Butt, was charged with substance abuse. The use of this recreational drug, Ecstasy, meant that he was banned for a year. The drug is illegal, but what does it actually do? Here's a pretty good account of the experience:

It distinctly was not an out-of-the-body experience, as it was not a mind-expanding one... It distinctly was a further-into-the-body experience, and a mind-clarifying one. An impenetrably penetrating experience. An excavation of the self. An exhumation of the other. Because that is how one finds gold—one exhumes it, excavates, one digs for it, deep, and deeper.

This isn't the best part of 'Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater', an essay in Granta which describes, vividly, how a man turns to his son for drugs and what happens to both their lives. Interesting stuff there.