College is the time to live life, be young and free and… yeah, yeah, I get it. Since I agree I hate to hit you with reality but, we must eventually consider the consequences of our actions because what we try while we’re ‘living life to the fullest’ could prevent us from living at all.
Recently, I interviewed former drug dealer Shane Morris, who wrote Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing, and Death, the essay that exposed Molly in the EDM scene. When I read it, I was like holy sh*t this is scary! So, I reached out to Shane and got the inside scoop about Molly that we all need to educate ourselves with.
If you’re convinced that you’re about to read a load of bull meant to scare you, I have a question: What would you do for $300,000 right now? I’m going to guess a lot. Well, Shane made $300,000 in one year alone by selling Molly yet he decided to walk away. He took a six figure pay-cut because he couldn’t stand the possibility of killing one of us, a college student, which was a majority of his clientele.
There’s a possibility you’re asking yourself who is this Shane Morris man, and why should I listen to him? Fair enough. Shane originally began selling Molly in 2007, at the same time he started producing music events and managing artists. He knew that the men in his business (the EDM scene) were making around three times the money he was by selling drugs. Shane ran his music production business and sold Molly until 2012, and now has five years of insight under his belt and hundreds of stories about how nothing good comes from hanging out with Molly.
“Molly is like a brand,” Shane said. “You go into a restaurant and you ask for a Coke, and they say, is Pepsi okay? It is a casual name that people use for what they believe to be MDMA.” ‘Molly’ is the popular street name that we’re all familiar with and it’s marketed as an equivalent to MDMA (ecstasy), but is actually made of cheaper materials. Among these cheaper materials sold as Molly are methylone, 2c-I, crystal meth, and 2c-b.
Shane explained how we’re such easy targets, and honestly we should be insulted about that. College students aren’t really questioning where their drugs are coming from, which makes it easier for drug dealers to fool them. “I was the one cutting the drugs, I was mixing them up selling it as MDMA,” he said. By being well spoken and well groomed, he was able to gain the trust of customers and sell drugs that were laced with everything from X to Y, but still call it Molly. Shane said it worked to his advantage that his customer could relate to him: “It was easy to believe me because people would think ‘Shane looks like me, he talks like me, he must be telling the truth.’”
Purchasing an anonymous pill comes with a risk that a lot of college students aren’t focused on, especially amid talk from society who deems the anonymous powder to be cool (ex: Miley Cyrus). “It has been reported as the cool thing to do, to roll, it’s socially acceptable,” Shane said. A particular danger arrives when users health conditions add to the risks.” He says a lot of young people make short-sided decisions, which he understands because he’s been our age. “It’s tough because until you’ve had a close experience or you have seen someone die, it doesn’t seem like it could happen.”
Shane said his life without Molly is way better than it was with her, and now he wants us college students to know what he knows. He told me a story about a hitchhiking trip he took across the United States when he was 20, which is the same age that a lot of us are, or are close to now. When he told friends and family what he was doing, they told him that it was the most dangerous thing he could do, and wanted to know why he was taking such a risk. At age 27, after both surviving hitchhiking and dealing Molly, he shared his insight “I got news for you,” he says, “Molly is much more dangerous.”
Shane leaves us with this thought: “Have your own brand of weird. Remember why you’re in college: it’s to learn new things and gather new things. Do something cool.”
Photo Sources: http://smeharbinger.net/news/drug-called-molly-starts-to-gain-attention