A few months before that, I'd done 2CB, a powerful hallucinogen that wasn't technically illegal at the time. It wound up getting banned, and the whole supply dried up. This terrified me; E was already illegal, and I knew there was no guarantee that the feds wouldn't bust whoever was making it for my state. I wasn't willing to live in a world where I couldn't roll my balls off a cliff at a moment's notice.
One day, a friend of mine mentioned in idle conversation that you could use nutmeg to get high. It's true -- I looked it up. Nutmeg contains a psychoactive chemical called myristicin, but what caught my eye was that it's also about 2 percent safrole. It was a revelation. Safrole happens to be one of the main reagents for MDMA (Ecstasy). I thought to myself, "Oh. These aren't manufactured out of thin air. These are from plants."
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Eat about 200 of these, and you'll be ready for Bonnaroo.
I resolved to learn how to make it -- mostly out of idle curiosity rather than criminal intent. I suspect a lot of nerdy kids get into this business because they love drugs and fall down the rabbit hole of studying how all these wacky chemicals affect their brains. One thing leads to another and then, boom, you're committing felonies in real life than most kids barely dare in Grand Theft Auto.