THERE can be no doubt that the prospect of hundreds of thousands of young people deliberately laying themselves open to Parkinson’s disease is truly frightening. So when a leading journal publishes evidence linking the illness to one of the most commonly used recreational drugs of our time, as Science did last week with ecstasy – it makes sense to sit up and take note.
Doubly so, when the study states that just a single night’s dabbling with the drug may be all it takes to trigger the type of brain damage that could in time give you Parkinson’s.
Triply so, when it bases that conclusion on the fact that monkeys and baboons exposed to “human-like” doses suffered “profound and severe brain injury”.
As news of the research sped round the globe journalists had little need to hype it up to sell it to their editors. For once the typical headline – One night of ecstasy may bring on Parkinson’s – was an almost verbatim summary of the study’s own top line.
Even so, the evidence behind the Parkinson’s link is complicated and, being based on lab animals, indirect. It also hails from a lab, led by George Ricaurte at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, whose previous findings have been the focus of an increasingly acrimonious debate about how science interprets ecstasy research for public consumption.
Put crudely, one school of thought says experts should paint the worst possible scenario to scare youngsters off the drug. The other camp says experts should scrupulously avoid raising false fears, since these could give youngsters an excuse to write-off everything they’re told about the drug as