STUDY SUGGESTS EVEN LIGHT USE OF ECSTASY MIGHT DULL INTELLIGENCE

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
clubgoers 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 Leschner, director of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse,
said the study provides the first clear demonstration 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.

Jim O'Callaghan, a neurotoxicologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said that even though the study
showed worse test scores for Ecstasy users, that would not matter if
the effect of the drug was only temporary.

"It's not evidence that brain damage has occurred, that it's not
reversible or that the lower intelligence wasn't there to begin with,"
he said.

Because it is illegal, it is difficult to measure how widely Ecstasy
is used. But a 1998 survey by the U.S. National Institute on Drug
Abuse found that an estimated 1.5 percent of Americans 12 years old or
older, or 3.4 million people, had used it at least once.

Ecstasy users report the drug can break down barriers and make people
trust each other.

Distributed by The Associated Press (AP)