In Praise of Ecstasy Pill Art

To artists Adam Fierman and Peter Andrew Lusztyk, pills are more than just a way to make a distinctly average midweek club night worth the entry price—they are cultural artifacts that encapsulate moments in time. For an ongoing project called Dutch Candy (now being released as a book), the pair have been collecting ecstasy pills and documenting the stamps printed onto them, gradually revealing the strange ways in which the illusive world of pinger production closely mirrors that of popular culture.

When the popularity of the rapper 6ix9ine (FKA Tekashi69) peaked in 2019, beautifully-crafted ecstasy pills emblazoned with his face hit the market. As quickly as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, so too did a range of mask and Pfizer pills themed around the vaccine. And when design agency Gretel redesigned Netflix’s logo in 2014, a batch of Netflix-inspired Es did too.

To understand more about this weird intersection of art, capitalism, and drug culture, VICE caught up with Adam at his home near Vondelpark in Amsterdam to chat about the ever-expanding archive of Dutch Candy.

VICE: Why did you start documenting pill designs as cultural artifacts?
Adam Fierman: I was working with some of the brands whose logos have been used on these pills. I realized that they spend millions of euros developing their brands, which then get stolen for free by pill producers to push an increasingly commoditized product. I was fascinated by that world; like, why would you steal this logo versus that one? And you realize that there’s this race between producers all trying to tap into the zeitgeist to sell more pills.

Why do pills have designs on them anyway?
The first reason is to differentiate the product. When you do pill testing [in the Netherlands] it turns out that most pills are pretty clean and contain a similar range of MDMA. So trying to differentiate your product in the market is one reason.

The second one, which we found when talking to a producer through an encrypted chat platform, was that people associate the quality of the pressing itself with the quality of the [chemical] product inside. So the producers were chasing finer and finer pill designs as a demonstration of their commitment to quality.

The final reason is that the street dealers were saying that if a pill design was interesting they sold more of it, irrespective of how much someone was originally going to take. We saw this with the set of ‘three wise monkey’ pills [the same batch of tablets had three separate variants: ‘see no evil’, ‘hear no evil’, and ‘speak no evil’]. Street dealers said that even if someone wanted one pill, they were buying all three in the end. And so it really is a marketing world that we’re talking about.

Obviously using these designs is an egregious copyright infringement…
Yes [laughs], you can’t send a cease and desist if you don’t know who is needing to cease and desist.

…but how do these brands feel when their logos are used?
I think there’s a public reaction and there’s probably a private reaction. I can’t speak to their experience, but I can tell you that we’ve had a few times where brands will reach out—sometimes with legally-worded letters—asking us to not use their imagery for pop-ups and things we do. I doubt Mitsubishi, for instance, would want that association to be public.

We also saw, however, that there’s some brands who—unofficially, I think—would say it’s a badge of honor, because it means that your brand has won in culture.

Interesting.
There is one story—I won’t name the specific brand—when we did our first pop-up gallery space. A man in a business suit came in, he was looking around the space, then he came up to me and said, “Can I ask you a question?” I said, “Yeah,” and he gave me a business card. He was a representative from one of the alcohol brands. “Is there a way we could have our logo in this world?” he asked. And I asked him, “What are you actually asking for right now?” And he said: “No, no, we don’t want to sell pills. We just want our logo to also be among this stuff.” I told him I couldn’t help, but what an incredible moment. Unbelievable.

In a highly hypothetical scenario where you yourself are the pill producer, what design would you make?
Oh, man, what a question. First of all, I, of course, have to say, I’m not—and we’ve gone to extreme lengths to make sure we stay on the right side of the law with this entire project. I do a lot of design, manufacturing, and engineering projects, so I’d be curious to know what’s the limit of what you can produce in terms of size, scale, and complexity.

I also think these micro-production or micro-runs are fascinating. Pills being produced for a festival that’s only open for two days. I think we’re going to be seeing more and more of that. I think it’s only a matter of time before we see truly personalized pills, where someone goes and gets a [unique] pill for their birthday party or something like that. It’s happening in almost every industry; intense personalization and rapid expansion of services provided. I would not be shocked if that happened in this world as well.

Click here to learn more about the Dutch Candy project.