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. These are early days. Monkeys are not humans.
Much more research needs to be done.
The scientists cannot be sure how much ecstasy their human volunteers have taken and what other drugs they may have mixed it with. So it is too early to say whether we are heading for a nation of the neurologically impaired - and some think that there is a danger of making the wrong risk assessment. Children are already getting it wrong because of the spin that has been put on information about ecstasy, say some campaigners. After the huge publicity given to the death of Leah Betts after she took ecstasy, and the campaign against the drug launched by her father, research showed that schoolchildren thought ecstasy was more dangerous than cocaine and heroin. Yet among healthy young people there have been only about 80 deaths while taking ecstasy, and nearly all collapsed with severe heatstroke at raves.