FWIW, some of the potential damage and danger from the drug can come from the fact that it DOES raise body temprature considerably, like a bad fever. I don’t know of any controlled studies that compare X to Cocaine, but my impression from reading the medical journals is that X produces higher temp elevations per dose, and that these temp rises last longer.
If you search WebMD for:
Popular Drug Ecstasy Not Harmless Like Many Users Think
Effects of the Drug Just Now Being Understood
By Elaine Zablocki
WebMD Medical News
Reviewed by Dr. Jacqueline Brooks
July 24, 2000
…you’ll find some good info that is quite pertinent. This includes the mention of a specific case:
“…a person who used Ecstasy over a nine-year period, and died at age 26. He started out using the drug once a month, but from age 23 onward, used it four or five nights a week. An autopsy of his brain found serotonin levels 50 to 80% lower than in people who had not used Ecstasy.”
The Harvard Brigham RAD teaching case files (Available on the web) under “Anoxic/Toxic Brain Injury” David Cheng, MD
Liangge Hsu, MD September 8, 1997 show a really good case of visible brain damage in a user of the subject drug. Apparently, the damage came from one fairly big use.
IMHO, when you get unregulated drugs, you’re getting drugs that could be very weak, very adulterated, very contaminated, or excessively strong. Imagine if your prescription drugs had such varability in them; you’d likely be quite reluctant to take them. Yet (I believe) one seldom sees this caution in users of illegal and/or unregulated drugs.
If you still want to use the stuff, good luck and may God have mercy on you.
actually there are ways to tell, besides the god awful bitter taste of MDMA. You can buy testing kits that can tell you what compounds make up each pill.
Actually, those testing kits just give you an approximation of what family of chemicals may be present in the test pill, and most basic tests can’t test for such dangerous designer substances such as PMA. From my experience, the most commonly used method of testing a new batch of pills on the street is to give a free sample to someone who’s experienced in the scene and see how they react to it. Not the most objective of tests, but it is used much more often than anything else resembling the scientific method.
note: I know this seems more like IMHO, but I can’t really list my relative qualifications on this subject on the public board.
As Quagdop said, there is not enough evidence to conclude that these drugs do or do not cause lasting changes in the brain.
But since they work by alterring the neurochemical milieu of the brain, I would guess that they can have some lasting effects if taken long enough. Most psychiatric drugs affect dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, or acetylcholine (the major clinically important neurotransmitters). For example, neuroleptics (major tranquilizers…something of a misnomer) like Haldol or Thorazine, block dopamine. The rationale is that dopamine excess produces hallucinations and psychosis.
Unfortunately the long term use of neuroleptics has many undesired side-effects. A rather large number of patients referred to me for movement disorders, mainly Parkinsonism, chorea, and dystonia, have these problems because of exposure to psychoactive drugs. The pathology seems to result from lasting changes in the neuronal receptors for the affected neurotransmitters, through a process of up-regulation or down-regulation of the targeted receptors.
The evidence for this pathology is greatest for the dopamine blockers, but it is plausible that similar lasting changes could occur in the number and activity of the other types of receptors.
For example, it is plausible that prolonged exposure to a serontonin-enhancing drug (like Prozac) could lead to a severe and prolonged down-regulation of the native 5-HT receptors. One could imagine all sorts of clinical consequences of that.
[[For example, it is plausible that prolonged exposure to a serontonin-enhancing drug (like Prozac) could lead to a severe and prolonged down-regulation of the native 5-HT receptors.]]
Yikes. So everyone is freaked out about Xstasy and half the population is quietly taking anti-depressants. Have there been any studies that show this re. serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, and/or how widely is this being theorized?
Is there any connection between progressive supranuclear palsy (“PSP,” what Dudley Moore has and my mother died from) and use of psychoactive drugs? Sorry for the highjack, if it is one. - Jill
This isn’t neuro info, and i’m not trying to scare anybody out of abusing themselves however they see fit, but be mindful of your kidneys if this is your drug. My significant other is a nephrologist at Johns Hopkins, and just told me about a young guy who will be on dialysis the rest of his life after his FIRST experience with X. Yipes!
all right, now for a personal experience:
i used to go to a lot of raves, and only ate e a few times. i am on prozac. my severe lack of seretonin caused me to fall asleep because as the drug is supposed to “dump all the seretonin reserves into your brain at once,” my brain was confused and exhausted trying to find my seretonin reserves.
for a person with normal seretonin levels, i believe that the danger lies in finding dirty drugs or accidentally taking one with an ingredient you may be allergic to. beware the little red dots. . . .
Based on a quick skim of the literature and a few questions to some shrinks, I don’t believe there has ever been ANY study done on the effects of long term use of SSRI type drugs (Prozac, Paxil, etc.). I do know it’s a major pain to try to get off the SSRIs if your psychiatrist and you agree you may not require the drugs any more. I understand indirectly that the psych community tends to think that dealing with whatever long term side effects come from SSRI use is preferrable to not dealing with the suffering that depression causes.
But I, like you, am interested in knowing more about this long-term use issue. If anyone knows something we don’t —if they know about studies of long-term SSRI use — please post the links!
The PSP thing is interesting, too. It seems to be a good idea, but I don’t know much at all about it.
This is getting somewhat off-topic (though it keeps coming back to the OP) and I probably should start a new thread about SSRIs, but since we’re sitting around talking about this… There was an article about 4-6 months ago in Discover magazine about anti-depressants and their possible long-term effects on the brain. The cover title was alarming: “Can SSRIs Permanently Re-Wire Your Brain” or something like that. But the article itself only presented theories. There did not seem to be any evidence of long-term changes in the brain from use of SSRIs.
[[I do know it’s a major pain to try to get off the SSRIs if your psychiatrist and you agree you may not require the drugs any more.]]
You hear this, and yet Prozac has been approved for treating severe PMS, and it is prescribed for half the month. Presumably women take SSRIs just during the second half of their cycles and go off it the other half the month. I don’t quite understand this, as I have heard that it can take 4-6 weeks for these drugs to start working.
Jill
I remember this article, part of it can be found here. IIRC, there was some evidence of permanent change in the brain. It seems to me, that there was a picture of some brain scan that showed a "serotonin pathway’ that had been created by SSRIs, and it was clearly much different than other similar brain structures.