ECSTASY USERS DO WORSE ON TESTS

STUDY: Their Cognitive Skills Were Reduced Weeks After Ingesting The Drug.

LONDON - Even light weekend use of the party drug Ecstasy might harm
intelligence, a new study suggests.

German scientists report that weeks after partying, those who used Ecstasy
along with marijuana performed worse on intelligence tests than people who
just smoked pot or took no drugs at all. Their results are reported this
week in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

Ecstasy, a hybrid of the hallucinogen mescaline and the stimulant
amphetamine chemically known as MDMA, has been popular among young
club-goers in Europe for years and recently has become increasingly
widespread in the United States.

Previous studies have suggested the drug can cause a long-term decrease in
a brain chemical involved with thought and memory. Other research has
indicated Ecstasy can impair brain function, but mostly investigated people
who used it more often or with other drugs.

The latest research, by scientists at the University of Aachen in Germany,
also assessed a broader range of cognitive functions than any other study
to date.

Alan Lescher, director of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, said
the study provides the first clear Leschner of what was predicted from
earlier studies linking the drug to changes in the brain.

"If your brain is getting zinged, then you ought to have some kind of
deficit in cognitive ability, and here it is," Leschner said. "There is
this misconception that it's a benign, fun drug, and it's not."

The study involved 28 Ecstasy users in their mid-20s recruited off the
dance floor of a nightclub. They also were pot smokers, but did not get
drunk often and did not regularly take other drugs.

"Because almost every Ecstasy user smokes cannabis, it was impossible to
recruit a reasonable number of exclusive Ecstasy users," the study said.

The researchers therefore compared the group to two others of the same
size, age range and education level - one consisting of drug-free people
and another of people who smoked about as much pot as the Ecstasy group but
did not take any other drug.

Ecstasy users abstained for about three weeks and everybody in the study
passed urine tests for traces of other drugs.

The subjects were given general knowledge tests to make sure one group was
not naturally more intelligent than the other. They then spent three hours
taking psychological tests that evaluated everything from immediate memory
to logical thinking.

The Ecstasy group performed just as well as the other two on simple tests
of alertness, but worse in more complex tasks of attention, in memory and
learning tests, and in tasks reflecting aspects of general intelligence.

The more Ecstasy they used, the worse they performed on the tests, but
their scores still were in the "normal" range.

Those who only smoked pot performed no differently than those who were
drug-free.

"These were not heavy Ecstasy users. On average, they took four tablets a
month - that's one every weekend," said Dr. Euphrosyne Gouzoulis-Mayfrank,
the neurologist who led the study.