My personal experience with MDMA is that it makes you feel empathetic, not that it actually makes you more empathetic. It helps you feel good about yourself and others, and so long as you're doing so with trustworthy people with similar goals - It's basically the same thing. My roommate's boyfriend did MDMA while I was in the house, and they were convinced that they knew me and had a deep personal connection with me from that point forward.

It was not true at all, and ended very badly (he drugged me, and that's all that I know for sure).

There was a Canadian psychologist who tried to “cure” criminal psychopaths by administering LSD to them in the 70s. The result was they became better at manipulation and deception and experienced higher rates of recidivism. Jon Ronson covers this episode in his book The Psychopath Test.

I can speak to this, having shared a lot of MDMA experiences with a self-professed sociopath who was formerly a good friend until he crossed the line a bit (harmlessly).

The experiences seemed to be more hedonistic for him than anything... However -- and this is big, imo -- the MDMA did help him open up about a lot of things (for example, being a sociopath) and other kinds of darker predilections that he had kept inside / experienced in the past. And I think it made him a much better person for it, in all kinds of ways, just getting this stuff out and sharing.

But in the end, the relationship fell apart because I couldn't deal with the subtle manipulation that he would constantly try to get away with (hilariously assuming that I couldn't pick up on what he was doing, which was often very obvious -- a sociopathic trait, being unable to relate and thinking oneself superior). We had a lot of good times, and I think about those days often. In the end I just couldn't handle the quirks... which might say more about me than him.

What sorts of subtle manipulations would you notice?

Leaving out the MDMA part, this matches my experience with sociopaths. Because they're less repressed they're more fun, almost a guaranteed good night out, but they push & push & push and don't know when to stop, and won't stop (except for a short while) if you warn them, until finally the relationship (platonic I mean) gets too much and you finish it. And they can get quite upset about it, this no-emotions thing for sociopaths doesn't really match what I've seen. They seem to be empty inside, an unfillable hole, but certainly not emotionless.

This happened to me, but I've never thought of myself as sociopathic. Rather, I grew up in a situation that required me to repress my feelings, and MDMA was a gateway to breaking down the giant wall I had, unknowingly, built up.

From my experience of dealing with people that I have thought to be sociopaths when they describe their experiences on MDMA they usually describe them as feeling really good and feeling really good about themselves but without developing or expanding their empathetic connection to others.

This. I've had two ex-partners who fall somewhere down that spectrum (one diagnosed) and they both really enjoyed MDMA (one having abused it in the past and one bordering on unhealthy regularity).

They just enjoy feeling really good.

My most recent ex also really enjoyed psychedelics, but as far as I could tell she had qualitatively very different experiences from me - not so much of the psychedelic/mystical/connecting aspects and more of recreational enjoyment and to some limited extent self-exploration. Her deepest realization was that she appreciated hanging out with her childhood friend. She never had a bad or dark trip or any of the anxiety.

I think it's a mistake to believe that these things affect different psyches similarly.