JOURNAL RETRACTS ECSTASY STORY

Brain Damage Claims Created by Error in Study

A leading scientific journal on Friday retracted a paper it published
last year saying one night's typical dose of the drug Ecstasy may
cause permanent brain damage.

The monkeys and baboons in the study were not injected with Ecstasy
but with a powerful amphetamine, Science magazine said.

The retraction was submitted by the team at Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine that did the study.

A medical school spokesman called the mistake "unfortunate" but said
Dr. George A. Ricaurte, the researcher who made it, was "still a
faculty member in good standing whose research is solid and respected."

The study, released last Sept. 27, concluded that a dose of the drug a
partygoer would take in a single night could lead to symptoms
resembling Parkinson's disease.

The study was ridiculed at the time by other scientists working with
the drug, who said the primates must have been injected with huge overdoses.

Two of the 10 primates died of heat stroke, they pointed out, and
another two were in such distress that they were not given all the
doses.

If a typical Ecstasy dose killed 20 percent of those who took it, the
critics said, no one would use it recreationally.

In an interview on Friday, Ricaurte said he realized his mistake when
he could not reproduce his own results by giving the drug to monkeys
orally. He then realized that two vials his lab bought the same day
must have been mislabeled: one contained Ecstasy, the other
d-methamphetamine.

Ricaurte's laboratory has received millions of dollars from the
National Institute on Drug Abuse, and has produced several studies
concluding that Ecstasy is dangerous. Other scientists accuse him of
ignoring their studies showing that typical doses do no permanent damage.

At the time Ricaurte's study was published, it was strongly defended
against those critics by Alan I. Leshner, the former head of the drug
abuse institute, who had just become the chief executive officer of
the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, which publishes
Science.

Leshner had testified before Congress that Ecstasy was dangerous and
Ricaurte's critics accused him of rushing his results into print
because a bill known as the "Anti-Rave Act" was before Congress that
would punish club owners who knew that drugs like Ecstasy were being
used at their dance gatherings.

Ricaurte on Friday called that "ludicrous."

His lab made "a simple human error," he said. "We're scientists, not
politicians."

Asked why the vials were not checked first, he answered: "We're not
chemists. We get hundreds of chemicals here. It's not customary to
check them."