The Truth About Drugs: What Is It?

This introductory video explains to children exactly why drugs are such a destructive force in society and why they shouldn't be used.

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To help answer that question, he is conducting separate clinical studies using brain imaging techniques to evaluate the possibility of long-term brain damage in humans who have previously used either methamphetamine or MDMA. These studies also are assessing the potential functional consequences of such neuronal damage on aspects of mood, movement, memory, impulse control, aggression, and sleep cycles.

Determining the functional consequences of MDMA exposure may be more complex than previously thought, Dr. Ricaurte says. The long-term study with squirrel monkeys indicated that in some brain areas, such as those containing structures involved in memory and learning, damaged neurons failed to recover. However, in other brain areas, specifically those involved in regulating such functions as sleep and appetite, damaged neurons regrew nerve fiber excessively, resulting in an overabundance of serotonin being released. "This means that when we evaluate humans previously exposed to high doses of MDMA, we should be looking for loss of serotonin function in some brain regions, but perhaps normal or increased serotonin function in other regions," Dr. Ricaurte says.

Determining the possible damaging effects of ecstasy has become more important in recent years because the pattern of MDMA use has changed, points out Dr. Ricaurte. Although ecstasy has been available as a street drug since the 1980s, its use escalated in the 1990s among college students and young adults, particularly those who participate in all-night dance parties called "raves." In 1995, 2.3 percent of college students said they had used ecstasy at some time during the year, more than quadruple the 0.5 percent of students who reported using the drug in 1994, according to NIDA's latest Monitoring the Future study. The percentage of young adults, ages 19 to 28, who used ecstasy in the past year also jumped significantly to 1.6 percent in 1995 from 0.7 percent in 1994, according to the survey.