The history of ecstasy, its discovery and use and social implications.
Born during a snowy winter in Brooklyn in 1948, Bruce and his parents fled to the warmer climes of Los Angeles. He grew up a (San Fernando) Valley boy with plans to become an attorney.
He loved to write and expressed his talents early, with first publication was at age 16 in the Congressional Record of the United States with its topic, Democracy and What It Means to Me. Bruce started to college in 1966 at California State University Northridge, majoring in Political Science and left at the end of his third year to become a full-time hippie.
After living in Laguna Beach California for half of 1969, Bruce set off on a hitchhiking journey which took him all the way to the beaches of Goa, India.
When he returned, he took up journalism and his second publication in 1971 article for the radical underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press.
In 1976, Bruce was hired by High Times Magazine when the magazine was published by Yippie radical Tom Focade (1976-1977) as a contributing editor. A series of articles followed including his "LSD Purity " which was the centerpiece for the 1977 "Special LSD issue" of High Times . Then a debate Synthetic vs. Organic psychedelics, with author Andrew Weil, MD was published. A third piece that same year was "Who Turned on Whom? written in collaboration with Peter Stafford.
Bruce also served as a researcher and consultant for the first edition of Psychedelic Encyclopedia, which Stafford published with And/Or Press in 1977.
Bruce moved to Omni Magazine in 1977 and was a contributing writer there until 1982. That same year, Bruce decided to return to college with the hopes of becoming a psychologist researching psychedelics. He received a Bacholors in Psychology from UC Santa Cruz and moved to Santa Barbara from 1979-1981 to complete a Masters Degree in Psychology at University of Californaia Santa Barbara. Bruce returned to Santa Cruz in 1981 where he lived two decades.
In 1982, he began studies at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco for his Ph.D. From the time he moved to Santa Cruz, he worked with a group of people including Peter Stafford, author of Psychedelics Encyclopedia. With them, he organized conferences and seminars with Timothy Leary, Alan Ginsberg, Albert Hofmann, William Burroughs Jr. Stanley Krippner, Ralph Metzner, Robert Anton Wilson, Laura Huxley and many others.
In 1988, Bruce published Ecstasy: The MDMA Story with Ronin Publishing, Berkeley. A second updated edition was published in 1994. The book was published in Spanish under the title Extasis. Bruce left Saybrook just short his dissertation to start a company called The Mindware Catalog, Mindware went online and was one of the first web sites to sell software in March, 1995. Since then the company has morphed into the Mind Media Life-Enhancement Network at http://www.mindmware.com and the Mindware Forum blog at http://www.bruceeisner.com/mindware. In 1991, he launched another project called Island Group named for Aldous Huxley and his last novel, Island.
In his role as President of Island Bruce directed the creation of the Island Web, the noted counterculture websites http://www.island,org. Bruce was editor of six Island Views newsletter and Psychedelic Island Views which published three yearly magazines until 1998.
In 2002, Bruce moved to Las Vegas, Nevada where he currently lives. Last year, he reentered Saybrook and is completing his Ph.D. He also continues as President of Island Foundation, currently working on the Island Sanctuary Project. He also continues as owner of Mind Media. His latest thoughts and feeling are expressed publicly and updated online almost daily with his web logs, Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing at http://www.bruceeisenr.com and the Mindware Forum.
