Being the man to have taken the most ecstasy pills of anyone ever is not a record you want to hold.
While that might sound a bit obvious, it’s not easy to quantify just how much ecstasy this unfortunate record holder has taken, and just how bad the consequences of his actions have been ever since.
The man, known only as Mr. A, took roughly 40,000 tablets of ecstasy between the ages of 21 and 30. This was documented in a 2006 study where Dr. Christos Kouimtsidis uncovered the effects of these extreme levels of drug use on the brain and body long-term.
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“For the first two years, he took five tablets every weekend,” the report reads. “It escalated to an average daily use of three-and-a-half tablets for the next three years, and further to an average of 25 tablets daily over the next four years.”
For the uninitiated, ecstasy–also known as MDMA–is a hallucinogenic that has become a hard party drug over the past 40 years. Mr. A, who stopped taking the drug seven years prior to meeting with the doctor and taking part in the study, was struggling with various physical and mental symptoms throughout his 30s due to said drug use.
In a later interview conducted by THE FACE, Dr. Kouimtsidis explained further the long-term symptoms that Mr. A suffered from in the years after using ecstasy so persistently.
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“It was extreme, his use was really, really high,” the doctor recalled, “and then he went into withdrawals. He was unable to move for several weeks and had tunnel vision."
As they conducted a memory test on Mr. A, researchers learned of even more unique symptoms that the patient had been going through.
“Disorientation to time, poor concentration, and short-term memory difficulties,” were a few more symptoms Mr. A suffered from, and from there, the list keeps going on.
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The researchers also noted that Mr. A’s concentration and attention were “so impaired that he was unable to follow the sequence of the tasks required” and repeatedly did the same thing over and over again.
Unfortunately, Mr. A’s fate beyond the 2006 study is unknown, as he discontinued getting help for his memory loss issues and hasn’t contacted the doctor or his team ever since.
Dr. Kouimtsidis explained: “We were trying to get him into a residential unit for people with memory problems.”
“He left that unit and disengaged from the services. That was 20 years ago."
Dylan Murray