Your brain on MDMA: cognitive Ecstasy.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Citings - Brief article

IN 2003 scientists funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) had to retract flawed animal research that purportedly linked MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy, to brain damage. Perhaps as a result of that chastening experience, NIDA funded a $1.8 million study to take a closer look at the performance of Ecstasy users on cognitive tests. Unlike earlier research, this study, published by the journal Addiction in February, found essentially no difference between MDMA users and controls.

The researchers, led by John Halpern of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry, took into account four factors that may explain why MDMA users in other studies did not score as well as non-users: consumption of other drugs, intoxication during the study, pre-existing differences in cognitive ability, and the rave lifestyle, which often includes sleep and fluid deprivation. After Halpern and his coauthors controlled for these variables, the test gap disappeared.

"We found little evidence of decreased cognitive performance in ecstasy users,"...