ECSTASY BLUNDER 'WILL ERODE TRUST'

A flawed scientific study which suggested that the "ravers' drug" ecstasy could
lead to Parkinson's disease may have damaged the trust of young people in
research, one of Britain's leading scientists warned yesterday.

Colin Blakemore, of Oxford University and the chairman of the British
Association which is holding its annual festival in Salford, said a paper
published in the US journal Science last year - and formally withdrawn in the
same journal today - had contained errors that should have been spotted before
publication.

It described damage to brain cells in monkeys that could not have been caused
by the kind of doses that drug users were believed to take in clubs. In
withdrawing the paper, the US researchers said the monkeys had been mistakenly
dosed with methamphetamine, or speed, supplied in a wrongly labelled bottle.

The paper had seemed important because it was the first study of the effect of
ecstasy on primates. Between 500,000 and two million young people in Britain
are thought to use the drug every weekend.

The research said 40% of the animals had died or been close to death after
"weekend raver" doses of ecstasy.

"There is such a glaring mismatch," said Prof Blakemore, who is shortly to
become the head of the Medical Research Council.

"Clearly 40% of teenagers do not die every weekend. It should have been spotted
by any decent refereeing process," he said.

"As far as the safety of ecstasy is concerned, I still think the jury is out ..
I certainly would not be recommending the use of ecstasy to anyone."

"But what worries me most about this paper is that I suspect it will have an
entirely negative effect on the attitude of young people to the evidence that
they read about drug risks," he said.

"One has to say: how was this paper reviewed? Was the fact that 'anti-rave'
legislation was being discussed in Congress at the time a factor in the
deciding whether to publish this paper? Who were the referees?"

Science said last night that US legislation had no bearing on the date of
publication, and the manuscript had undergone the same rigorous peer review as
all other papers it published.