Okay in your article, “Does an ‘ecstasy’ overdose raise your body temperature to 108 degrees?” you painted PMA to be the real evil of the ecstasy debate. What about MDMA? I have lots of friends that tout it as safe as pot. Does MDMA have a dark side or is PMA giving it a bad name?
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Does an “ecstasy” overdose raise your body temperature to 108 degrees? (06-Mar-2001)
This is an often-discussed topic at the SDMB. Take a peek at these threads:
Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome (NMS) is a serious and potentially lethal reaction to antidopaminergic psychotropic medications. In my 10+ years as a clinical neurologist I have seen about a half-dozen fatal cases of NMS,
NMS is characterized by: 1)hyperpyrexia (often to 106F+ fever), muscular rigidity, and subsequent rhabdomyolysis and renal failure. Death is often due to acute renal failure.
I am not surprised to hear that Ecstasy could result in NMS.
That article said
It might not have been covered by the laws against cocoaine, but wouldn’t selling crack be prosecutable under laws against selling drugs that haven’t been approved by the FDA?
I think as long as you do not proclame to heal or cure any sickness your okay in that respect. That’s how herbal medicines get sold. They “improve” you way of life, not cure the flu…
I thought Hawk’s answer was extremely informative and detailed, not to mention very well researched. Most illuminating overall, and another great reason to fire up this Web site.
I have just one request to make on behalf of non-Americans: is it possible in these reports to include temperatures in degrees Celsius as well as Fahrenheit? Many on this planet don’t have a clue how to make sense of the Fahrenheit scale. Miles, inches, yards, etc., we can handle most of the time. But Fahrenheit is just too wacky, if you’ll forgive my cultural insensitivity!
I gotta agree. This was a hell of a job by Hawk.
Just for reference, by the way:
98.6F = 37.0C
106F = 41.1C
108F = 42.2C
109F = 42.8C
115F = 46.1C
Thanks for the suggestion, and our apologies for being so US-centric. We’ll edit in the C-temps.
Thanks to all for the compliments on this piece. It was big and daunting, but an enjoyable piece of work. To answer the question about long-term effects, I’ll defer to Neurodoc’s reply. My research did mention long-term effects, but I excluded them because it was a little off-topic on a piece that was already long enough. I should mention that, from what I understood, MDMA causes the brain to release its serotonin (a neurotransmitter that our brains can interpret as “happiness”) all at one time, which produces a euphoric state. Imagine, all that “happiness” at one time. Surely, however, this can’t be good for your noggin long-term.