This document summarizes research on student perceptions of the drug "Molly" on the UMass Dartmouth campus. The research aimed to understand how students view Molly and whether advisory emails from the university affected their views on using it. Surveys found that students generally held positive perceptions of Molly and were not significantly influenced by media portrayals. While some studies showed negative media messages did not discourage use, others found portraying low drug use as normal could reduce use. The research concluded students at UMass Dartmouth likely had positive views of Molly and were relatively unaffected by the advisory emails.

1. Perceptions of Molly on the Umass Dartmouth Campus
Mary MacNeil-Blackmer
Sociology 316
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

2. Drug use has been associated with college campuses for a long time. As the years go by
new drugs are constantly being introduced into campus environments. Tobacco, marijuana,
cocaine and LSD are various drugs that have seen use on college campuses over the past century.
This research looks at a new drug that is becoming well known on college campuses in recent
years, “Molly.” Molly is actually the new form of a drug known as MDMA, or methylenedioxy-
methylamphetamine. This drug has been used for decades but has been recently repackaged
under the nickname “Molly.” During the course of this essay the drug MDMA will be referred to
by its street name, “Molly.” This form of the drug is supposed to be cleaner and less
contaminated than the formerly used “Ecstasy.” We will be looking at how college students on
the campus of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, view this new form of the drug. Our
questions will attempt to provide some information on these student's perceptions of the drug and
their perceptions of the portrayal of the drug through various mediums.
The drug MDMA has been around for decades, however, it has been called different
names and used for differing reasons throughout the years. It began its life being used for
Medical purposes in Germany before the recreational aspect of it was discovered. (Freudenmann,
Bernschneider-Reif, 2006) After recreational aspects were discovered it became known as
“Ecstasy” and was used in club environments. It is considered a “club drug” because its effects
cause raised blood pressure, quickened heart rate and euphoria. It is also believed to cause
feelings of emotional closeness and people take it to feel more comfortable around others.
Walters et al, 2002) Because of the rise in use of this drug on college campuses around the
country we want to investigate what the students on the Umass Dartmouth campus think about
this drug. As such we will attempt to ask what the perceptions are of the drug “Molly” on the
UMass Dartmouth Campus.

3. Existing Literature
Many young adults, especially college students, are exposed to illegal drugs, and the
number of students being exposed grows every year. In a survey conducted in 2007 by the
Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (2008), 19.8% of college students
regularly used recreational drugs, and 36.9% of the participants had used recreational drugs at
least once. The large amount of students participating in drug use shows the need for studies to
be done on college drug usage. In an article written in the Journal of American College Health
(2003), 119 colleges were looked at to determine how common drug use is among students. The
research was then compared to findings in the past. Their research showed that drug use in
colleges had gone up from 4.4% to 6.6% between 1993 and 2001, not including marijuana, and
that 2.1% of students used ecstasy.
Freudenmann and Bernschneider-Reif (2006) explain the early chronological timeline of
the drug MDMA. MDMA was created initially in hopes to be an appetite suppressant, but it
eventually became a recreational drug. Germany was the first place to successfully produce
MDMA. The company Merck created the official patent for MDMA in 1912. Scott Walters,
Betsey Foy, and Ralph Castro (2002) also discuss the history of MDMA focusing on ecstasy.
Ecstasy (aka X, E, and XTC) is the street name for MDMA, which is meant to be taken in a pure
form. However, most of the ecstasy that is purchased in the streets or clubs is not pure. The
effects of this drug are unlike any other, creating feelings of euphoria and emotional closeness.
According to the article The Agony of Ecstasy research shows that in “recent years the use of
alcohol and other drugs has stayed the same but ecstasy use has more than doubled” (Walters,
2013).

4. MDMA has been a prevalent drug on the underground black market in the United States
since roughly around the early 1970’s, which gives the now illicit drug enough time to be studied
in regards to long-term use. Thomasius et al. (2005) Studied long term use in Hamburg,
Germany. Thomasius et al. (2005) focused on mental disorders in individuals who have used
MDMA or “molly” recreationally and the mental disorders it may have caused to arise that once
may have been dormant in the users. Some of the examples of the mental disorders that were
found to be associated with the drug use were anxiety, panic disorder and eating disorders. The
top two mental disorders found were dysthymia, which is a depression disorder, and social
phobia, which is a social disorder. Long-term users were shown to have life-long anxiety and
have become somewhat reliant on MDMA to alleviate their disorders.
There are a number of ideas surrounding how young adults view this negative
information about drugs and MDMA in particular. Some theories have found that students and
young people are not significantly affected by media, specifically by celebrities and their
popularization of drug use. Rachel Shaw (2010) found that young people were more cynical
towards Amy Winehouse than expected. They did not believe she had made a good choice by
using drugs to the extent that she did and they did not view drug use as good because of her
usage. Harold Roseburg, Chelsea Baylen, Shanna Murray, Kristina Phillips, Marie S. Tisak,
Amelia Versland, and Erica Pristas (2008) found that some current college students abstain from
using drugs such as alcohol, MDMA/Ecstasy, inhalants, cocaine, marijuana, and hallucinogens,
regardless of the current media exposure. The main reasons why students were found to abstain
from these drugs were perceived harmful effects, absence of enjoyment, likely loss of control,
effects on one’s body, inconsistency with one’s values and self-image, and difficulty acquiring
the substance. The media’s portrayal of drugs did not seem to affect their use at all.

5. Another theory is that media campaigns can affect young people if they appeal to their
sense of social normalcy suggesting that by showing low drug use in a positive light, students
will use fewer and less severe drugs. A related study in Montana by H. Wesley Perkins, Jeffrey
Linkenbach, Melissa Lewis, and Clayton Neighbors (2010) found that young people were less
likely to drink and drive and more likely to have a designated driver when confronted with social
norms marketing that encouraged these practices. When given the impression that other people
like them did something, young people were more likely to engage in that behavior.
Several experiments and studies have shown a positive association between media
portrayals of the drug, both positive and negative, and positive student attitudes towards the
drug. Kathryn Vincent, Kimberly Caldeira, Kevin O'Grady, Eric Wish, and Amelia Arria (2010)
conducted a longitudinal study at a college university, because the drug has an increased use
among educated and academically achieving youths. A surprising piece of evidence revealed that
individuals who had heard a greater number of negative messages were significantly more likely
to have used the drug. There was no evidence that negative messages discouraged students from
using MDMA. Individuals with a low perception of harm were also more likely to use the drug.
This suggests that one’s attitudes toward and beliefs about the drug strongly affect use. Also,
perceptions of social norms and risk- taking beliefs affect use as well.
Another study that supports this theory was conducted with 117 undergraduate college
students at New Jersey University. Noel Brewer (2002) hypothesized that the increase of
exposure to information on the internet would cause searchers to have more accurate knowledge
about club drugs, such as MDMA. The second hypothesis was that this increase of knowledge
would prevent them from willingly using the drug. Upon searching the internet for club drug
information, however, students believed that club drug use may help them fit in when in a social

6. situation. The information students found on the internet led to stronger beliefs that the drugs
would help the user be more at ease socially, and for those who had never used the drug they
believed the drugs could be beneficial. Searching actually influenced students’ attitudes about
the drug in a positive way. In our study we will be looking at college student’s perceptions of
Molly and how those perceptions have changed as a result of a number of circumstances.
Methods
We hypothesized that there would be a generally positive perception of the drug Molly on
the Umass Dartmouth college campus. We also hypothesized that the students would be
relatively unaffected by media and celebrity portrayals of the drug. As Shaw's (2010) study
showed, young adults often take a more critical eye to their celebrities than adults often imagine.
Brewer’s (2002) study also demonstrated that young adults have a positive perception of Molly,
especially after being exposed to the internet. With our research we tried to focus on two goals.
We had a main goal of looking at the perceptions of Molly on the UMass Dartmouth campus and
we also were looking at how effective the UMass Advisory Emails were at deterring the use of
Molly. Thus our research was exploratory and evaluative. Our surveys used mostly an
exploratory method. We were looking to gather basic information about how students on the
UMass Dartmouth campus view the drug Molly. As such we asked them a series of questions
about their perceptions of the drug. They were also evaluative as they some questions concerning
the UMass Dartmouth advisory emails concerning the drug Molly. The survey asked if the
emails had made the students more or less likely to use Molly and if the students had noticed the
emails at all.

7. We collected the information we were looking for by using surveys to get a basic
overview of what students thought. This was a quantitative look at student’s perceptions; we did
not go in depth with any question or ask anything with a subjective or lengthy answer. Because
of the restraints of the class, our study used convenience sampling to get its results. We prepared
a survey with simple questions asking about students’ use of Molly and opinions about the drug.
There were also questions about possible influences of the students’ perceptions. They asked
about celebrity and media portrayal of the drug as well as the UMass Advisory E-mails about the
drug. These surveys were anonymous and voluntary and received no compensation upon
completion. Three members of our group selected a class they were in, factoring in the class’s
subject and size. We wanted our participants to be between fifty and one hundred students and to
have varied majors so as not to single out the department we, as researchers, are in. Three classes
were chosen and we arranged to give out the surveys around the 19th of November. We handed
out 66 surveys and received 64 completed surveys back. When the surveys were collected they
were brought together and numbered from 1 to 64, not separating out for class of origin. After
this we began to analyze the data. To analyze the data we created a codebook by assigning
numbers to the various possible answers and using those numbers to easily compare the data. We
analyzed the data by putting the information into Microsoft Excel and using its sort tool to
organize the data and look for significant findings.
Unfortunately, when the surveys were created several mistakes occurred. Question 2 was
wrongly numbered as Question 3, and all following questions were a number off. There was also
a question where the answers should have been “More Likely” and “Less Likely” but were
instead “Yes,” “No,” and “Not Sure.” This led to confusing answers to that question. I
interpreted “Yes” as “More Likely” and “No” as “Less Likely” and did not assign “Not Sure”

8. answers to either group. I counted the “Not Sure” answers towards the overall count of who
answered the question when calculating percentages.
As this was an anonymous, confidential survey there was little opportunity for harm to
come to the participants. At the beginning of the survey the participants were informed that the
survey was anonymous, confidential and voluntary and that the survey would not affect their
grade whether they chose to take it or not. They were informed that they could stop at any time
for any reason or skip any question that made them uncomfortable. They were given full
disclosure as to the purpose of this project in the opening paragraph, which mentioned our
reasons for asking them about Molly. They were fully aware that their answers would not be
connected to them in any way and that they would be used as research about the perception of
Molly on campus.
Findings
As the data was analyzed we began to make some very interesting findings. The first
result we noticed was the number of students who had taken Molly versus those who had never
taken it before. 20 percent of the students surveyed reported taking it at least once, or about 1 in
5 students. Of those students 77 percent reported a good or very good experience with the rest
reporting an okay experience. No student who had used Molly reported a bad or very bad
experience in their survey. This was a strong first indicator that Molly was being used with
reasonable frequency on the Umass Dartmouth campus and that reactions to the drug are
positive. It also seems to indicate that students are not having any strong negative reactions to
taking the drug. The questions following those prove to be a little more confusing in what they
revealed.

9. There were a number of findings that seemed to show that the experience of Molly was
not as positive as the answers mentioned above indicated. Despite Molly being marketed as a
social club drug specifically meant to help people become more socially comfortable 46 percent
of those surveyed said Molly did not help them achieve this. Only 23 percent said they did feel
more socially comfortable because of Molly, a low number considering Molly’s reputation.
Despite rating mostly good experiences only 30 percent of the participants said they would take
Molly again. The same percentage said they definitely would not. As 23 percent reported an
okay experience and 30 percent would not take the drug again, at least some of the people who
would not take the drug again had to have reported a good or very good experience. It would be
interesting to look into why the users who reported a good or very good experience of Molly
would not want to take the drug again. Some other good news for anti-drug activists would be
that most of the students who had not taken Molly had no intentions of ever taking it. Of the 80
percent of overall participants who had not taken the drug only 8 percent were willing to
consider trying Molly in the future. 77 percent would not ever consider trying Molly. This seems
to indicate that those who are not doing Molly are not doing it because they do not want to, as
opposed to not being able to find or afford it. It is also possible that many of these students have
not heard of the drug Molly and do not know exactly what it is and so have no intention of trying
an unknown substance.
The celebrity and media have a surprisingly profound effect on the use of Molly on
campus. The Umass Dartmouth advisory email system also has a strong effect, although it is less
effective than the media and celebrity ones. The media portrayal showed the strongest effect
where 89 percent of students had noticed the media, and 89 percent were less likely to use Molly
because of it. Celebrities had an audience of 80 percent who noticed their portrayals, but only 67

10. percent of students were less likely to use the drug after. Celebrities also made 33 percent of the
students more likely to use Molly. The Umass advisory emails convinced 86 percent of those
who read them to not do the drug, but only 56 percent of the students had actually noticed the
emails. This implies that the emails were effective in portraying Molly in a light that makes
students not want to take it, but also shows that 44 percent of students are not receiving or
reading these emails.
When looking over our survey results it was easy to tell that our demographics were
biased towards white, female seniors. 67 percent of all survey takers were white, 76 percent were
female and 68 percent were seniors. This bias is why most of our results were translated into
percentages. For instance, while there were only 3 men who had taken Molly and 10 women, the
men had the same percentage of Molly takers as women, which were both at 20 percent. While
most of our survey takers were seniors, only 25 percent of those seniors used Molly. This method
does not work perfectly with the smaller numbers, however. Because only 5 freshmen, 10
sophomores and 5 juniors took the survey their numbers of 0, 10 and 20 percent Molly users,
respectively, are not significant. This only means that none of the five freshmen took Molly and
one each of the juniors and sophomores did. Likewise because there were very few responders
who were not white the fact that 12 of the 13 Molly users are white is not surprising. This meant
that only 29 percent of whites used Molly. People who identified as black, Hispanic and “Other”
did not use Molly at all, but only 19 percent of the students were black, 6 percent were Hispanic
and 4 percent were “Other.” The numbers for Asians are most skewed with percentages being
factored in. 3 Asians were surveyed and one had taken Molly, making the percentage of Asian
Molly users 33 percent though only one Asian student reported use. These problems were

11. unavoidable in a survey sample of our scale and would likely become less of a problem of the
survey was given to more participants.
Our findings ultimately did not support our hypothesis about students having a positive
perception of the drug and being unaffected by media and celebrity portrayal. The students did
report positive experiences after using Molly, but many also did not wish to use Molly again.
Also most of the students who had not used Molly had no intention of ever doing so, implying a
low opinion of the drug. The respondents also reported being negatively affected by the portrayal
of the drug. About 80 percent of those who saw media and UMass Dartmouth portrayals of
Molly said they were less likely to take Molly because of them. Respondents to the celebrities’
portrayals of the drug gave a more equal balance between positive and negative effects, but the
students were still more often influenced toward a negative attitude of Molly. This strong
response to the media and emails goes along with Perkins’, et al., (2010) findings about the
effect of posters and other types of marketing on young people. The lower numbers on the effect
of celebrities’ also goes along with Shaw’s (2013) findings that young people are less affected by
the actions of celebrities and are often critical of them. However, these findings go against
Brewer’s (2002) study about how students’ opinions of Molly become more positive when
exposed to more knowledge about it.
Discussion/Conclusion
In our research we looked at the perceptions of the drug Molly on the UMass Dartmouth
campus and how it has been affected by the drug’s portrayal in various mediums. Although we
hypothesized that the students attitudes would be positive and their opinions would be relatively
unaffected by the portrayal of the drug, our hypothesis was wrong. The students had a mixed

12. opinion about the drug with most students leaning towards a negative view of it. The portrayal of
the drug also had an impact of making the students less likely to use the drug in the future.
Nonetheless, this was an important study as it delved into the perceptions of current students on a
modern campus concerning a drug that is becoming more and more widespread as the years go
on. MDMA has been studied before but, as we found out when attempting to research it, most of
these studies are very old and may not apply to students today. It is important for research to
constantly update itself with the new generations, especially when the drug concerned is
experiencing a new wave of use. Our work has made an effort to update current knowledge of
MDMA use on modern campus and look at how the students perceive the drug, as opposed to
simply how often they use it.
To that end our research had some successes and some failures. We provided a good
starting block for research about students’ perceptions of this drug and, with our quantitative
samples, we were able to get a fair amount of knowledge about the topic in the amount of time
we had. We obtained a good grasp of what the people who used Molly thought of the drug and
we were able to obtain more cursory looks at how non users saw the drug and how outside
portrayals of the drug affected possible use. Unfortunately our research was limited by the
restraints of being in a college course that only lasts a few months. We could only hand out short
surveys to a limited body of students which, as mentioned before, created a strong bias in our
demographics. We also did not have the time to look at the findings in a very in depth way, we
only really noted basic numbers and percentages and were unable to find correlations. Still it was
a good start to what could grow to be a very interesting research report.
Future studies could benefit from expanding on the surveys we already did by making the
surveys more in depth and giving them to a much wider group of people. They could check our

13. findings against a larger pool of respondents and possibly be able to make a more definitive
statement about the perceptions of Molly on the campus. All investigations of Molly would
likely be worthwhile as this is an emerging drug on modern campus life. Looking into what
causes students to take Molly in the first place would be a definite help to understanding the
phenomena. Additionally, researchers could look more particularly into the UMass Dartmouth
advisory system as a whole in its capacity to influence students on campus.
We would like to point out that although the UMass Dartmouth advisory emails were
effective in making students less likely to use the drug, they only had this effect on the students
who actually read the emails. Most of the students did not receive or read the advisory emails
and so were not influenced by them in any way. We recommend that the school look into new
methods of communicating what it perceives as important information to their students. This
could take two main forms. The first would be to find a new medium of reaching the students.
Studies would likely have to be done on the most effective way to do this, but there are many
other means more palatable to modern students, such as text messaging. The second would be to
make the emails stand out more so that students notice them when they are looking at their email
accounts. We would also like to point out that although 20 percent of students have tried Molly,
those students largely did not indicate that they would be trying it again. Most of the students
indicated having a negative perception of Molly already and were not considering taking the
drug. As such we contend that Molly is not a serious problem on the UMass Dartmouth campus.

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