The man who took 40000 ecstasy pills - The Face

A little-known case study involves a man, Mr A, who took an unprecedented amount of E’s over nine years.

We had a chat with the author of the study, Dr Christos Kouimtsidis.

“For the first two years, he took five tablets every weekend,” Dr Kouimtsidis wrote in the report.

His lifetime intake of ecstasy pills was estimated to be more than 40,000 in nine years.

So that was an exceptional case of high use over a prolonged period of time; typical use is not every day and not the amount of tablets he was taking.

​“As far as I remember, he had easy access to ecstasy,” Dr Kouimtsidis recalls.

​“You cannot say 100 per cent, but we can safely attribute the memory difficulties that he had experienced when I’d seen him to the heavy use of ecstasy for a prolonged period of time.”.

It’s a fascinating case study, but it can’t be generalised across MDMA users as a whole, because nobody else before or since has decided to neck what some users would take in several years in one day.

​“We need to be very careful how we use those extreme cases,” Dr Kouimtsidis says.

​“We were trying to get him into a residential unit for people with memory problems,” Dr Kouimtsidis recalls