It's a pilot study with a relatively small sample. We have to balance that with our responsibility as scientists to point out potential dangers that we discover. The problems that we found in working memory emerged when people worked under pressure and, most notably, under time pressure. For normal working circumstances there was no problem. In December came the really scary news, published in the highly reputable Lancet medical journal, that a group of scientists in the US had scanned human brains and found damage to serotonin neurons caused, they believe, by ecstasy.
All drugs cause mood swings.
If you go high, you must come down low. But the most alarming part of the research is the suggestion that some of the changes caused in the brain could be permanent. Professor Una McCann of the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, described a series of experiments on monkeys carried out in laboratories around the globe. Each was given a four-day course of ecstasy. Every single animal was showing signs of brain damage seven years later.