Shaun Attwood Fell in Love With Ecstasy, Which Led to Anything but a Good Time

When Shaun Attwood was just a teenager, he became obsessed with business and finance and began trading on the stock market at the age of 16. He came from Widnes, an industrial town in the Borough of Halton, Cheshire, England. According to Business Insider, it was around his teen years that he visited his two aunts in Arizona for the first time. He was immediately taken by the comforting sun and seemingly endless swimming pools. This is the kind of life he wanted.

He went on to get a degree in Business Studies at the University of Liverpool in 1990 while promising himself he would someday return to the warmth of Arizona. Then Attwood got caught up in a new music scene that was taking over the United Kingdom. "There were wide-eyed young people in psychedelic clothing appearing on TV at these new things called 'raves,'" he said. This would lead him to Ecstasy and eventually getting banned from America. Where is he now? Here's what we know.

Attwood was a prolific drug dealer living in Phoenix, Ariz. when a SWAT team knocked on his door on May 16, 2002, per his website. He pleaded guilty instead of risking a sentence of 200 years and was given nine and a half. He served nearly six of that sentence and was released in December 2007. While in prison, Attwood read over a thousand books in an effort to "better himself" and learn more about his own addiction.

The former Ecstasy dealer went from crimes to true crime when he began writing books about his own experiences and a few others as well. He has definitely dipped his author toes into the world of Pablo Escobar. Attwood lives outside of London and frequently speaks to kids in school about the dangers of drugs. He also has a podcast where he interviews "people who have committed or survived crimes to reveal the horror of what those bad choices led to." He is about as reformed as one can get.

After he graduated from university, Attwood re-entered the United States illegally, thanks to a fake H-1B work visa forged by one of his aunts. "As far as I was concerned back then, to get to the top in the business world you had to be completely cutthroat and if that stepped into the grey areas of the law, it didn't bother me in the slightest," he told Business Insider.

He worked as a stockbroker for six years but began feeling the extreme stress of such a high-octane job. In order to unwind, Attwood started throwing parties at his apartment where he would buy a ton of Ecstasy, only to give it away to friends. His goal was to build up the rave scene in America. After quitting his job in 1997 and making a ton of money from dot com stocks, Attwood started throwing bigger parties. He also began driving to Los Angeles to buy cheaper Ecstasy in bulk to resell.

He eventually went to the source of the Ecstasy, which was in Europe, and had mules running pills for him. Things were going great for years until Attwood fell in love. His girlfriend convinced him to quit the drug dealing game and go straight, which he happily did. Attwood foolishly thought he was safe but in Arizona, you can get arrested for a drug-related crime up to seven years after committing it. That's what happened when the SWAT team came a-calling.