Jump to content

Talk:MDMA

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 68.135.33.8 (talk) at 16:40, 11 December 2015 (Added a section describing concerns in the research section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.


Research Section Needs Help

The research section cites Andrew Parrott's 2014 paper. Of particular concern is the line "A review of the safety and efficacy of MDMA as a treatment for various disorders, particularly PTSD, indicated that MDMA has therapeutic efficacy in some patients;[18] however, it emphasized that MDMA is not a safe medical treatment due to lasting neurotoxic and cognition impairing effects in humans.[18]" The lasting neurotoxic and cognition impairing effects in humans was specifically addressed in Danforth et al 2015. It was shown that the literature Parrott cites takes data from users of street Ecstasy (not pure MDMA and not taken in controlled environments) who have used hundreds of times and then wrongfully applies the harms from this literature base to MDMA assisted psychotherapy (which it's only taken 6 times at most per the current literature base). Additionally, the street populations that he cites often "stack" doses which greatly increases harm and all are polysubstance abusers which confounds the source of harm found in these studies. This polysubstance abuse statistic comes from his own data, see Wu et al 2009 which he's one of the authors (full ref in Danforth paper). He curiously leaves this confound out of his 2014 paper even though he's an author on the study which overtly shows that essentially all ecstasy users are polysubstance abusers. Here's a copy and paste of the section I'm referring to from Danforth.

"The Ecstasy user literature base also contains multiple factors that limit the generalizability of naturalistic studies of street Ecstasy to clinical settings in which pure MDMA is administered from one to several times within a psychotherapy paradigm. The most substantial of these limitations are the high quantities of doses taken in nearly all publications on recreational Ecstasy users, often on the order of several hundreds of doses. Critics of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy use this data to suggest a higher level of risk than logically can be inferred from no more than six exposures reported in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy clinical trials (e.g., Parrott, 2014). Additionally, “Ecstasy” refers to MDMA obtained from street sources which currently is almost always cut with other drugs as seized shipments from 2007 show only 3% of tablets destined for North American markets containing pure MDMA (Hudson et al., 2014) (https://www.ecstasydata.org/stats.php). Authors commonly cite Ecstasy user data and use it to draw conclusions about MDMA without citing the above purity limitation (Grob, 2000). Furthermore, Ecstasy users are also almost always polysubstance abusers as indicated in the 2007 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (n = 43,093) ( Wu et al., 2009), and high polysubstance abuse rates confound nearly all of the Ecstasy correlations found in the medical literature to date. Other common notable hazards include adverse environmental conditions, polydrug use in dangerous combinations, and ingestion of high doses or stacking multiple doses to prolong drug effects. Therefore, research on recreational Ecstasy use has limited applicability to determining the safety of clinical investigations of MDMA-assisted therapy."

Please note that Meyer JS (2013) is a much better paper than Parrott (2014) but any data cited would still suffer from the same lack of generalizability to MDMA assisted psychotherapy research populations as nearly all of the research in humans we have showing cognitive or memory impairments is done with street users who've taken hundreds of doses and therefore suffers from the limitations above. Also, the term "neurotoxicity" is a vague term that seems to be used to hyperbolize risk.

The Boston Group - Tenured professors from Harvard and MIT

I'd like to see a better source for this than Playboy Magazine. As a chemist, I can say that its very, very tough to get a position, let alone tenure at MIT or Harvard. And the people who succeed are generally not of the type who will put their careers at risk for social missions of the sort described in the article: they are more typically single minded careerists who would never take this kind of risk. The credibility of this story is not increased by the continuation of the story in the source, which states that "they were threatened by some very dangerous people and had two days to leave the country". A mass departure of tenured faculty from the two of the top five chemistry departments in the country would have made the newspapers, let alone the industry newsletters that I followed religiously during that period. This entire section of the article seems to be based on an urban myth, not scholarly research into the history of the drug. Formerly 98 talk|contribs|COI statement 17:19, 28 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

None of the other sources I have read mention that the Boston Group was composed of tenured faculty. That statement and reference should probably be removed. The sources are fairly consistent about the rest of it though. I'm planning on improving the sourcing for this section in the coming weeks. Sizeofint (talk) 17:55, 28 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
uh, Noam Chomsky MIT, Timothy Leary Harvard. So there's that.

Mistubishi

The previously good reputation of 'Mistubishi's' amongst ecstasy-users has been dealt a blow with the discovery of deadly batches PMA (aka White Mitsubishi in The Shulgin Index Vol 1, pp811), and PMMA (aka Red Mitsubishi).

Also, "According to the London Toxicology Group, ChEckiT in Austria analysed 48 tablets (September 2000) sold as Ecstasy and found that 4 contained about 40 mg PMA in combination with PMMA and amphetamine. They had the Mitsubishi logo, were red, 7 mm in diameter and 5 mm thick and weighed 230 mg. They were sold as 'red Mitsubishi' or 'killer'. PMA is thought to produce no colour change when tested with Marquis reagent."[1] --94.245.53.33 (talk) 16:38, 29 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ http://www.ecstasy.org/testing/pma.html
If this is notable enough we might be able to put this in the History or Society and Culture sections. Thanks for the info. Sizeofint (talk) 18:53, 29 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Sizeofint PMA is listed as White Mistubishi in The Shulgin Index Vol 1, pp811. That should be notable enough. --94.245.53.33 (talk) 01:47, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 9 June 2015

The "Long term effects" under "Adverse effects" section of this page states that MDMA produces "brain lesions, a form of brain damage". Neither of the sources cited describe brain lesions. This initial statement is not adequately supported by the citations. It is important that the material presented in the article is accurate in terms of the source which it comes from.

Cv325 (talk) 15:29, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have access to the textbook cited? Cannolis (talk) 15:43, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
From Malenka, cited in the article: "MDMA has been proven to produce lesions of serotonin neurons in animals and humans." VQuakr (talk) 15:44, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

AlterNet article reliable source?

This AlterNet article http://www.alternet.org/story/16165/controlling_drugs has some details about the Boston Group I have not found anywhere else (namely that it was composed of medicinal chemistry graduate students). Is AlterNet considered a reliable source? I've searched the archives for old discussions (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_125) but I haven't found a straight-forward answer. Sizeofint (talk) 23:17, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Depends on the claim you want to cite. In the past, I've cited somewhat crappy internet sources similar to that one to support statements on slang terms, certain historical/sociocultural claims, and the legality of compounds in small/relatively obscure nations in some articles (provided I can find this information repeated in other sources of similar quality), but I wouldn't use a website like that to cite anything outside of that context. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 02:26, 8 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I'll leave it out. Sizeofint (talk) 20:30, 8 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I am glad, at this point, as I think it "crappy" also. From what I have seen it appears to be an extremely liberal media outlet. Nothing wrong with that, however, I looked at the article and the organization and a concern would be the stated goal of "strategic journalism". This would be "Communication management" or strategic communication. Strategic communication has been quoted as being "the synchronization of images, actions and words to achieve a desired effect.". The site does promote certain agendas and this brings thoughts of:
  • 1)- subliminal messages,
  • 2)- favorable advancement of a cause through directed writing,
  • 3)- deliberate messages to gain a favorable or sought opinion.
No different than government propaganda. The site states (in part http://www.alternet.org/about) "AlterNet has developed a unique model of journalism to confront the failures of corporate media, as well as the vitriol and disinformation of right wing media...", and "AlterNet believes that media must have a higher purpose beyond the essential goal of keeping people informed.". The site advocates that corporate and right wing media only provides disinformation "but" they ..."provide readers comprehensive information..." with ..."concrete action steps towards change.".
I am not saying this is bad or good, in all cases, but it is hard to be objective when an opinion is slanted to an agenda that might not be so obvious, or may be obvious propaganda, so I agree with Sizeofint essentially to use with caution. Otr500 (talk) 14:27, 23 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 3 external links on MDMA. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add {{cbignore}} after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add {{nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}} to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers. —cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 02:19, 26 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:MDMA&oldid=694796201"