Pillheads, Rejoice: There’s a New, Improved Ecstasy

This rare good news item is taken from VICE magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.

Looking back at the last 40 years of Western culture, you’d have to say that MDMA has made a pretty big impression. The love drug has sired several moral panics, at least one generation gap, a global youth movement, thousands of rave babies, and innumerable anecdotes that get wheeled out whenever people start talking about the ‘best night of their lives.’ But what if we could invent an ecstasy that lasted longer, packed more of a punch, and didn’t leave you stumbling around in a waking nightmare for days afterwards? It might be hard to believe, but that innovation may already be here, in the shape of a little-known drug named Blue Bliss.

Originally known as Borax Combo, Blue Bliss pills are a kind of alloy of three obscure substances: an empathogen (5-MAPB or MDAI), the specific stimulant 2-FMA, and a tryptamine component of 5-MeO-MiPT or 4-HO-MET. They are now starting to do the rounds in circles of experienced sesh gremlins and psychonauts.

Borax is actually the name of the Redditor who brought the combo to the masses in a 2014 post in which he asserted, without evidence, that “the MDMA experience can be replicated with less neurotoxicity using unscheduled compounds.” In blind tests, he declared, veteran MDMA users had been unable to discern the difference between Borax and MDMA until the next day “when they [were] surprised at their near-total lack of comedown.”

Users on a drugs forum called BlueLight dubbed it Borax Combo, and the first trip report on the community psychedelics encyclopedia Erowid landed in 2021. When it was rebranded as Blue Bliss is unclear, but that’s what the drug is principally being sold as on “research chemicals” websites for $12 per pill (or $660 for 100). In 2023, after an uptick of mentions of Blue Bliss online, it came onto the radar of the U.S. National Drug Early Warning System.

“Multiple reports suggest the comedown is far lighter-touch than with MDMA.”

Much has been said about MDMA ‘losing its magic’ and its effects on people waning through overuse. It’s unclear whether Blue Bliss can be taken more often while retaining the same impact, but multiple reports suggest the comedown is far lighter-touch than with MDMA.

It was renegade chemist Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin, aka ‘The Godfather of Ecstasy,’ who first catapulted MDMA from the cobwebbed archives of scientific research into the lives and mouths of countless young hedonists. After synthesizing the drug, Shulgin gave it to a psychotherapist friend and then watched as it surfed from progressive circles in California to various gay nightlife scenes on the East Coast, before becoming inextricably entwined with club culture and birthing a certain kind of high-octane, transcendental partying that we now know as raving.

But after each weekend of partying, MDMA’s infamous Monday blues would hit, extremely hard for some. (Often, this wasn’t exclusively the fault of the MDMA, but other drugs and alcoholic drinks consumed alongside it.) Therefore, I’m glad to report that based on my own field research the Blue Bliss experience has a more equanimous tail-off and less serotonin-depleting effect than MDMA, even when both were taken separately without other intoxicants. 

So, could Blue Bliss spawn its own cultural movement? Quite possibly. Dr Matthew J. Baggott, a neuroscientist and expert on psychoactive drugs, has said its discovery represents a genuine milestone in the development of viable MDMA alternatives. And, so far at least, it’s avoided the draconian crackdown that was launched against MDMA from 1985 onwards. The U.S. authorities have been fighting what feels like an unwinnable war on drugs for a long time, and evidence of MDMA’s therapeutic benefits is increasing. 

Of course, the jury is still out on the long-term effects of Blue Bliss. There is no suggestion that it is inherently ‘safe.’ As with all research chemicals, it exists in a regulatory gray area, meaning no toxicological or clinical studies have been conducted. Still, as the West inches toward drug decriminalization and the medicalization of psychedelics, the emergence of Blue Bliss points to a future where new synthetic empathogens could be just as fabulously euphoric as their forefathers, while taking less of a toll on our precious little brains.

Follow Mattha Busby on Instagram @matthabusby

This rare good news item is taken from VICE magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.