Nonprofit efforts to develop MDMA as a prescription pharmaceutical reveal that the drug's identity is not fixed but is shaped by clinical trial practices. Drawing from ethnographic research, the article argues that researchers' distinction between pure MDMA and the street drug Ecstasy rests not on chemical difference but on a difference in safety that must be actively produced through the trial. Safety emerges from managing which bodies can absorb the drug and which bodily events count as effects, accomplished through clinical documents that control these relations. The work examines how pharmaceuticals become fluid objects transformed in new informational and material environments.
Collective afflictions among teenage girls in Nepal, often labeled 'mass hysteria,' are reported in local and national newspapers as strange and mysterious events. Treatments range from shamanic rituals to psychosocial interventions, the latter gaining prominence with the rise of global mental health. The discourse around these cases reveals deep societal anxieties about moral community breakdown, the status of shamanic knowledge, and gender norms around emotional expression. Because the cause is ambiguous, symptoms are dramatically displayed, and the afflicted individuals themselves are absent as experiencing subjects, these cases become a blank screen onto which broader collective anxieties of a changing society are projected and debated.