Soviet Union came crashing down via E

 The Spirit heard this esoteric story from a trusted and well-respected source...Back in the 1980s, when MDMA was unscheduled and legal, the Federal Analog Act (1986) was still under wraps, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was investigating this drug, an NIH worker had some Soviet generals over at her townhouse while they were here on business. While sitting in her hot tub with them, she offered them some of the MDMA she had from the NIH (the NIH was giving MDMA out to researchers and psychotherapists at the time as well). Several weeks later, she gets a call from Moscow from one of the generals, asking her if she could send over some of the stuff they had tried. She ships like a pound of it overseas. These generals give this recreational MDMA out to all of the upper Soviet hierarchy. Conclusion: allegedly, you can attribute, on a 1st image international relations level, the singular or multiple experiences of MDMA of these Soviet politicians and military personnel to the introduction of perestroika and glasnost. Is it true? The Spirit doesn't know either, but it is a valid conspiracy theory.

Furthermore, today, ethnic Russians (both in Russia itself and throughout the old Soviet Union) are thought to control a large share of drug production and distribution, with help from different ethnic groups (e.g. the Azerbaijanis in the case of synthetic drugs). Traditionally, local people in the Eastern European transit countries (i.e. Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania) would assist in the smuggling of illicit drugs across the Continent. This continues to happen today, but as a domestic market for E (MDMA) emerges in many of these countries, local criminal gangs are taking a greater control of the local drugs trade. Much more evidence would need to be collected to confirm any kind of Ecstasy-Soviet conspiracy, but either way, the world is a very different place today than it was back when MDMA was legal.