The Guardian, Thursday April 18 2002
Article history
Scientific evidence that ecstasy damages the brain is fundamentally flawed and has misled politicians and the public, according to New Scientist magazine. It says in a report that many of the findings published in respected journals cannot be trusted.
In an accompanying editorial, the magazine says: "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."

At the centre of the controversy are scans which allegedly show that ecstasy destroys nerve cells involved in the production and transport of serotonin, a brain chemical.

In 1998 a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore published a paper in The Lancet, based on brain scans, showing what looked like lasting brain damage in ecstasy users. But two independent experts told New Scientist there was a key flaw - the way brains reacted to the scan varied with or without ecstasy.

The magazine also criticised two other studies.

New Scientist said it was an "open secret" some researchers who failed to find impairment in ecstasy users had trouble getting findings published. It said many antidepressant drugs also acted on serotonin and were taken by millions, yet very few studies had explored their potential to cause lasting damage to the brain.

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