L.A. Times Shocker: Adults Take A Nearly Always Innocuous Substance, Go to Work! Good Golly, Miss Molly!
From today's L.A. Times, a great example of pointless, contextless, vaguely fearmongering reporting about, essentially, a group of young professionals who like to take a nearly always harmless drug that has managed to get itself a huge bulge in press by the simple rebranding of what you might as well just call "street MDMA" since you never know what's really in it from "ecstasy" to "molly." ("Molly" is generally sold not as pressed pills but as powder or crystals). The reports about deaths or hospitalizations "connected" to this street drug do not prove that the drug caused in and of itself any of the hospitalizations or deaths.
And what do they do after the breathlessly reported:
After a long and raucous dinner party on a recent weeknight, guests decamped to a loft in Manhattan's TriBeCa neighborhood, perhaps the most desirable chunk of real estate in the city that never sleeps.
There was no music or dancing at this after-party, though. Instead, a host distributed clear capsules of tiny white crystals that guests proceeded to swallow — an illicit dessert known as Molly….
They feel kinda good, then they go to work. Like nearly all users of illegal drugs.
Adult professionals, getting high. It's actually not really news, certainly not to New Yorkers. As the story even alludes to itself, one might have heard rumors of the presence of cocaine in the corridors of financial and entertainment and media power in the dim distant past. Some of those rumors were, alas, true.
For Los Angeles folk, this story has the added nut kick of our hometown paper's regular practice of reporting trend stories that could be reported anywhere—like, say, the city with the name on the masthead–out of New York, because it's, you know, the only real city.