Legal Ecstasy in Five Years?

[rachel1997]

Legal Ecstasy in Five Years?

by Kristen Philipkoski

2:00 a.m. Feb. 5, 2001 PST

Ecstasy, or methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), will be available for use with psychotherapy in as little as five years according to one expert.

It's a goal that people like Sue Stevens are working toward by telling the world about their experiences. At the State of Ecstasy Conference in San Francisco on Friday, Stevens shared a passionate and moving account of how taking MDMA helped her and her husband cope with his terminal cancer.

Emanuel Sferios, founder of DanceSafe, a nonprofit organization that promotes health and safety at raves and in nightclubs, asked for a show of hands of those in the audience who had never used an illicit drug. Not a single hand went up.

Empathy, coincidentally, is MDMA's defining therapeutic effect, advocates say. The drug releases serotonin and dopamine, causing feelings of empathy and pleasure.

Hardcore scientific research on the physical effects of MDMA is hard to come by, mainly because it's illegal and studies require government approval. The most prominent researchers in the field presented their results.

The big argument is whether MDMA is "neurotoxic," i.e., whether it permanently damages serotonin brain cells and can cause permanent brain dysfunction.

Some researchers, like Dr. Charles Grob doubt that it does. Grob is the director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA School of Medicine, and the only researcher to date to have performed an FDA-approved clinical trial on MDMA.

Others, like George Ricaurte, believe MDMA is too dangerous to give to humans under any circumstances. Ricaurte works in the department of neurobiology at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, and has published research showing monkeys still showed damaged serotonin axons seven years after they were given MDMA.

While Grob is waiting to begin his next study, other researchers are proceeding with animal studies.

The body's apparent inability to regulate its temperature while under the effects of MDMA according to many press reports in the past several years has sent many "ravers" to the emergency room with symptoms of dehydration and hypothermia.

So Jessica Malberg at Harvard University gave MDMA to rats and studied them for the same symptoms.

Since simply handling a rat can change its body temperature and invalidate the study, Malberg and her colleagues devised a temperature-controlled box out of a dorm room refrigerator.

Next, they built an AM radio device about the size of a jelly bean, and implanted it in the rats. The radio signal beamed the temperature of the rat to the researchers.

As expected, the researchers found that in cold temperatures, the rats' body temperatures decreased significantly under the effects of MDMA, and in warm temperatures it went up.

Ultimately, many of the conference attendees hope for broad legalization of MDMA.

"I hope it will be like the Berlin wall, and it will come down in a big crash and it will be a whole new world," said an elderly man at the conference.

Doblin of MAPS agreed.

"People should be able to decide on their own to take these risks," he said.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41457,00.html

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