ET

ISSUE 2134 Thursday 29 March 2001

Ecstasy users 'are damaging their brains' By David Derbyshire and Celia Hall

THE dance drug ecstasy, thought to be taken by half a million people a week, has been found for the first time to damage a part of the brain that allows people to remember what they have to do next.

Heavy users became unreliable and liable to forget things such as brushing their hair in the morning, locking the door, zipping their trousers or making a necessary telephone call. In some ways their behaviour mimicked the forgetfulness of old age or early dementia. The research into the drug and "prospective memory" found that users suffered significant impairments in three types of memory to do with things in the future.

Researchers told the British Psychological Society conference in Glasgow that their work provided more evidence that ecstasy was dangerous and should not be made legal. They said between 200,000 and five million ecstasy tablet a week were used in Britain and that there was growing concern that the drug may damage frontal and pre-frontal lobes of the brain, which in teenagers may not have fully developed.

The conference was told that regular use may damage parts of the brain associated with planning and remembering daily activities or destroy certain neurotransmitters which pass information around the brain. A team of psychologists, Dr Tom Heffernan, Dr Andrew Scholey and Dr Jonathon Ling, tested 40 adults who took ecstasy regularly - at least 10 times a month - and compared their memories with 39 adults who did not use the drug.

The researchers looked at short term habitual memory, such as forgetting to turn off the alarm clock in the morning or lock the car; long term episodic memory, such as forgetting to pass on messages and internally cued memory such as forgetting what they had come into a room to do or say. While all the participants were familiar with some memory lapses, the drug users were significantly more forgetful on all three measures.

Dr Heffernan said: "There is a belief that soft drugs - which many consider ecstasy to be - should be legalised when in fact research including our own suggests that regular use can have a very damaging effect on your cognitive health." He said there was mounting evidence that ecstasy could produce lasting effects but it was not yet known if the damage would be apparent years after a person stopped taking ecstasy.

Harry Shapiro, the head of communications at DrugScope, said: "This adds to the growing body of scientific evidence that ecstasy seems to produce neurological damage, even though the samples have been quite small."

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2001