skip to content
Home  /  . . .  /  Alcohol and Other Drugs  /  What to Know About Other Drugs  /  Sun Editorial

Cornell Daily Sun Editorial: April 3, 2000

"Presenting the Facts"

by Dr. Ronald Harris-Warrick

Last week, Matthew Laflin wrote a column (Opinions, "And Then There Was Ex," Mar. 30, 2000) extolling the virtues of the drug ecstasy. He was right about the facts that he did share with us. Ecstasy does generate an easily controlled high which is characterized by a tremendous feeling of empathy and warmth towards other people. As a derivative of methamphetamine, it gives one a lot of energy to dance all night. Very few people become addicted, and no one gets violent while using ecstasy. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, Mr. Laflin did not give us all the facts about ecstasy use, and the facts he left out include some pretty important ones: ecstasy can cause permanent brain damage, and occasionally it can kill you. Before you decide to use ecstasy or any other psychoactive drug, it is a good idea to get all the facts about the drug.

Ecstasy has been widely used in universities for many years: in 1988, 39 percent of Stanford University students had tried ecstasy, and use is probably higher now. The author of that study also reported, "Freshmen love it, sophomores like it, juniors are ambivalent, and seniors are afraid of it."

Most users find a "day after" effect with drowsiness, difficulty in concentrating, anxiety and irritability, and a depression lasting one to two days. With repeated use, the original positive effects get weaker and the negative after-effects get worse. This is why ecstasy is not addictive, and why seniors are afraid of it. We do not know whether this loss of effect is associated with brain damage.

However, there is no doubt among scientists that high doses of ecstasy can cause long-term brain damage in rats, monkeys and humans. Specifically, the nerve cells that use serotonin lose their long processes, including those to the cortex where we think and feel. After a single very high dose, or a series of lower doses at regular intervals, the cortex can lose most of its serotonin.

Serotonin is a crucial general modulator, playing important roles in depression, control of movement, sleep and dreaming, and appetite; low levels of brain serotonin have been associated with impulsiveness leading to crime or suicide. Once the serotonin processes are lost, they grow back very slowly or not at all. You can see this in Mann Library, in the Journal of Neuroscience, volume 19, pages 5096-5107 (1999).

This paper shows pictures of the brains of squirrel monkeys who had taken a high dose of ecstasy seven years earlier. The loss of serotonin of the cortex and other regions of the brain is only very slightly recovered even after seven years. I have talked to a Cornell student who has taken more ecstasy than these squirrel monkeys did.

Several papers published last year show loss of serotonin terminals in the brains of living humans who took many ecstasy trips (from 25 to 400), and the degree of loss of serotonin correlates with the number of trips. You can check it out at Mann Library, in The Lancet, volume 352, pages 1433-1437 (1998).

Associated with this brain damage, there are subtle but significant losses in cognitive ability in humans who have taken many ecstasy trips. There are small defects in immediate verbal and delayed visual memory, arithmetic calculation, complex attention, and several other cognitive tests, as well as increased impulsiveness.

The subjects are all young people. There are no studies of what will happen to them with aging, when all of us show cognitive declines: will their decline be more precipitous than ours? We will know the answer in about 30 years.

Granted, these studies have been made on humans who really abused ecstasy by taking high doses or many trips. So the big question for us is: what is the threshold dose for any detectable brain damage?

On average, a person takes between 100 and 200 milligrams of ecstasy during a trip, or between one and four milligrams per kilogram depending on your body weight. In monkeys, a single dose at five milligrams per kilogram does not cause any lasting brain damage, although it will cause a huge reduction in brain serotonin lasting up to six weeks.

However, the effects of ecstasy are cumulative: a monkey taking two-and-a-half milligrams per kilogram every two weeks for eight weeks has no long-term brain damage, but a monkey taking five milligrams per kilogram every two weeks for eight weeks does have detectable long-term damage.

Humans may be more sensitive than monkeys, as they are to MPTP, the synthetic heroin analog that causes Parkinsonism. Also, caveat emptor: you do not know how much is in that "100 mg" ecstasy tablet (it is not controlled by the FDA). There isn¹t much of a margin for error, especially if you take ecstasy several times. You can do the math yourself.

A small number of people have died while using ecstasy. Ecstasy raises body temperature significantly, which, combined with overheating from all-night dancing and dehydration, can be lethal. If you take ecstasy, it is essential that you literally "stay cool."

You are students at Cornell because you have a true gift of intelligence and an outstanding brain. Before you decide to use ecstasy, you should determine whether the positives outweigh the negatives. Only you can make this decision for yourself, but please use all the facts, not just some of them.

If you wish more details, I have prepared a list of recent papers about the effects of ecstasy, which I will be happy to send to you.


Ronald Harris-Warrick is a professor of neurobiology and behavior. He teaches BioNB 392: Drugs and the Brain. If you would like more information, you can e-mail him at rmh4@cornell.edu. Guest Room appears periodically.