1 Jun 2010
Summary
MDMA under the name of ”ecstasy” was first noted in the nightclub scene in the 1980s in the UK, US, Europe, and Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For the first decade of use when the prevalence of use was low, MDMA was regarded as a relatively benign “party drug”. This perception gradually changed for a number of reasons.
First, in the mid-1990s, there were some widely publicised deaths attributed to ecstasy use in Australia and the UK. One case in Australia in particular received huge media attention (that of Anna Wood). An attractive young girl from a middle-class family in Sydney died after taking MDMA and the girl’s parents became very active in efforts to promote awareness of the risks of ecstasy’s use.
Second, in 2002, a study funded by the United States National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) was published in Science that reported apparently devastating effects of “recreational” levels of MDMA on serotonergic neurons in the brains of monkeys. This study was very heavily promoted, and led to understandable concerns in the community about impacts that using this drug would have upon the brains of the millions of young adults. The study was later retracted following the discovery that the monkeys had in fact been mistakenly given a different drug (methamphetamine). The retraction received much less community attention than the original study.
Third, a number of studies have found that regular ecstasy use was associated with subtle impairments in cognitive functioning such as verbal memory. These studies typically compared ecstasy users with non-users on standardised psychological tests of cognitive functioning, and found that ecstasy users performed less well on some tests than non-users.
This monograph arose out of the need for a synthetic review of the existing evidence on the epidemiology of “ecstasy” (MDMA) use and its putative adverse health and psychological consequences.
Date published
Resource type
NDARC reports and monographs
Author(s)
Louisa Degenhardt, Wayne Hall
