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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Drugs / Science This Is Your Brain on Drugs: An fMRI Scan While High on Ecstasy

Posted by Brendan Kiley on Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:04 PM

We've written in the past about how ill-informed legislators tend to rush towards prohibiting drugs, kicking them into the schedule-one category—which legally declares those drugs to have have zero medicinal value, which makes it much more difficult for researchers to get the resources and permissions to actually study those drugs to see if they have any medicinal value.

Those decisions shouldn't be up to ill-informed legislators hoping to score votes on shoddy science and scare-politics. They should be up to scientists who at least have an inkling of what past research has shown.

And that's my talking point for posting this story in New Scientist about research into MDMA and whether it might be used as a treatment for PTSD. To be part of the study, you have to take a mystery pill—maybe MDMA, maybe something else—then sit in a noisy fMRI machine for over an hour.

That doesn't sound even remotely fun. But science has its demands! (For a first-hand account of some other psychedelic scientific research—by a guy who started out as an organic chemist and became a psychologist—see these excerpts from a talk at the Smoke Farm Symposium I posted earlier today.)

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I'm not sure it's ill-informed legislators. It's the drug companies who lobby to have these things criminalized so they can sell more of their own drugs.

At least, that seems probable.

Posted by Urgutha Forka on September 18, 2012 at 3:09 PM

The article is wrong. The study isn't the first of its kind. I took part in a study in 2004 at a university in Michigan (not U-M or MSU), which was an MDMA nap study, trying to gauge the effects of MDMA on sleep as well as thinking patterns using a bunch of different tests from word/memory games to analytical thought to how many times can you click this button with your index finger in a minute. Paid well. I think I was an outlier because I made the tester cackle, which she wasn't supposed to do and apologized saying she'd never broken character before.

Anyways, they were conducting a secondary test for either CAT or MRI scans, voluntary, and they really wanted me on it. But, I am minorly claustrophobic sober, and very claustrophobic when I wasn't. I refused the test.

I never found out the results of the test, and I haven't found a publication of it, though I've only cursorily looked.

Posted by TheMisanthrope on September 18, 2012 at 5:51 PM