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The Arizona Republic, AZ Journal retracts Ecstasy story Brain damage claims created by error in study Donald G. McNeil Jr. New York Times Sept. 6, 2003 12:00 AM 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." SOURCE: The New York Times / The Arizona Republic, AZ http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0906ecstasy06.html * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn