The King of X

If you partied in Dallas in the 1980s, chances are you spent time at the Starck Club, the legendary hot spot where celebrities, Southern socialites, and queer folks converged under one roof to dance—and take a ton of MDMA. For Texas Monthly, Tom Foster tells the story of Robert Jenkins, a pioneering ecstasy manufacturer and distributor during the ’80s and ’90s, and paints a fascinating picture of Dallas’s pill-popping party scene.

Management tended to look the other way on these unofficial transactions, which were a moneymaker for the club because ecstasy kept people drinking and dancing. And since the pills led users to fawn over one another, they weren’t exactly causing the kind of trouble that would attract the police. But sex and drugs have a way of scandalizing parents and polite society, and pressure quickly mounted on lawmakers to do something. On July 1, 1985, the Drug Enforcement Agency classified MDMA as a Schedule I drug. The first ecstasy bust in the nation reportedly happened in Dallas, at a gas station off Preston Road, barely more than a week later.

As the ecstasy trade started booming, Jenkins took note. He initially made small batches by pouring MDMA powder into capsules by hand, one at a time, and selling them at a downtown Austin gay club called Halls. It was “manual, labor-intensive, painstaking work,” Jenkins remembers—not exactly a romp. But when it was clear the drug would soon become illegal, he knew it was time to jump in for real. A penalty of years in federal prison for a first offense would scare a lot of people out of the business, he figured. Somebody had to keep the party going.