dlowan wrote:Who the smeg is Ricaurte? Never heard of it, nor Stott.
He is the idiot who publishes most of these things (MDMA = devil) is funded by NIDA, and the easiest way to get funding (i.e. lots of $$$$) is to publish anything that even remotely 'proves' that drugs are bad, m'kay.
He has has over a dozen papers published using the exact same cohort of people that he tested a couple of times, calling them mdma users, when in fact they are a group of uneducated polydrug users. He compares their cognitive functioning with a control group that is educated and uses no drugs, finds a minor difference (explained easily by any other difference between the groups), and takes a giant leap to explain that the difference is from mdma.
End result: He gets published, and gets more funding to do the same thing.
I don't know how he even sleeps at night. What he does is bordering on fraud. At the very least, it is bad science. The study published by Ricaurte in Science has nothing to do with typical human patterns of consumption of the drug. First, the primates used were injected--3 times(!!!!!)-- with MDMA: Ricaurte himself showed (Brain Research 1988 Apr 12;446(1):165-8) that injection is 2 to 3 times more neurotoxic than oral dosing. Furthermore, Ricaurte cited in Neuropsychopharmacology (Vollenweider et al (1999 Oct;21 (4):598-600)) notes that squirrel monkeys dosed with MDMA orally every two weeks for four months showed no evidence of reduced neuronal activity. The credibility of the Ricaurte et al. team is at stake when the number of animals they say died from the doses of MDMA administered declines over time (LOL).
Fearmongering and exaggeration of the dangers of ecstasy is perhaps the way to get funding (such as Ricaurte's funding from NIDA), but in the long term, it creates a public health problem insofar as effective harm reduction is concerned, since the cornerstone of effective harm reduction is users receiving accurate information from a credible source.
Phillip Stott is the biotech bitch and ferverent christian paid to say global warming isn't happening and that biotech is humanity's savior. Even though he has little science background.
They'll give anyone the title 'doctor'.
