ECSTASY FEARS BASED ON 'FLAWED TESTS'

MUCH of the scientific evidence showing that ecstasy damages the brain is
fundamentally flawed and has been mistakenly used by politicians to warn
the public of the dangers of the drug, a report said yesterday.

The inquiry by New Scientist found that many of the findings on ecstasy
published in respected journals could not be trusted. It said it was an
"open secret" that some researchers who failed to find impairment in
ecstasy users had trouble getting their findings published.

"Our investigation suggests the experiments are so irretrievably flawed
that the scientific community risks haemorrhaging credibility if it
continues to let them inform public policy," the report said.

It found there were serious flaws in brain scans which allegedly show that
ecstasy destroys nerve cells involved in the production and transport of
serotonin, a vital brain chemical involved in a range of functions
including memory, sleep, sex, appetite and mood.

In 1998, George Ricaurte and Una McCann at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore published a paper in The Lancet that seemed to provide the first
evidence that ecstasy use led to lasting brain damage. The research
involved brain scans with a radioactively tagged chemical probe that
latched on to the serotonin transporter proteins that ecstasy targets. The
thinking was that brains damaged by ecstasy would give off less radioactive
'glow' than those where the serotonin cells were intact.

The scan pictures, which showed the brains of ecstasy users did on average
glow less, were used in public information campaigns. In America they
strongly influenced harsher penalties for ecstasy offences.

But two independent experts told New Scientist there was a key flaw. They
said the way brains reacted to this kind of scan varied enormously with or
without ecstasy.

Some healthy brains glowed up to 40 times brighter than others and even a
number of ecstasy users' brains outshone ecstasy-free brains by factors of
10 or more. Another study by Dutch scientists led by Liesbeth Reneman and
Gerard den Heeten at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam was similarly
flawed.

New Scientist said it found that "despite the poster depiction of 'your
brain on ecstasy' there never was - and never has been - a typical scan
showing the typical brain of a long-term ecstasy user".

Stephen Kish, a neuro-pathologist at the Center for Addiction and Health in
Toronto, said: "There are no holes in the brains of ecstasy users. And if
anyone wants a straightforward answer to whether ecstasy causes any brain
damage, it's impossible to get one from these papers."

Marc Laruelle, an expert on brain scanning at Columbia University, New York
City, said: "All the papers have very significant scientific limitations
that make me uneasy."

Similar uncertainty surrounds evidence that ecstasy impairs mental
performance. In the majority of tests of mental agility, ecstasy users
performed as well as non-users.

Andrew Parrott, a psychologist at the University of East London, found that
ecstasy users outperformed non-users in tests requiring them to rotate
complex shapes in their mind's eye.