C'mon Folley, you can do better than that!
The "study" that E Tarded mentioned was a lesson plan for teachers to tell their students how bad Ecstasy is, and it says this, right under the photo:
Figure 4.2: Photographs of serotonin axons in the cerebral cortex of nonhuman primates labeled with a fluorescent marker. The number of serotonin-labeled axons is dramatically reduced in the cerebral cortex at 2 weeks (B) and 18 months (C) after the last drug exposure. The brain of the control animal that did not receive MDMA (A) shows the dense network of labeled axons. Images E and F show changes caused by MDMA use on a different brain region, the hypothalamus. The control showing the hypothalamus in the absence of MDMA is shown in D. Photographs courtesy of G.A. Ricaurte, with the permission of the Journal of Neuroscience.
I should correct myself. It appears this image is
NOT from the study which Ricaurte et. al retracted, but from an earlier one. It's safe to say that MDMA was used here, though if I am not mistaken it was used on monkeys at doses so high that their relevance to normal human use is questionable (see below.)
The first image you provided seems to be from
here, where there's not much information about it, but if the study that produced that image was anything like
this one by the same guy,, it involved giving rats doses of around 40 mg/kg, while
Erowid recommends 2 mg/kg for humans.
Your second image seems to be from
here, where Ricaurte is clearly credited and there is a link to
this article. It suggests that the 7-year image and the 18-month image Etarded provided are related. The page the image came from says:
Ricaurte compared the data from monkeys who were given ecstasy dissolved in a liquid twice a day for four days to other monkeys who received the same liquid WITHOUT the ecstasy twice a day for four days.
Now, that doesn't tell us exactly how much MDMA he gave the monkeys, but it sounds like an awful lot.
Aha! I found
the study! It says in the methods section:
Racemic MDMA hydrochloride, dissolved in a sterile 0.9% sodium chloride solution, was injected subcutaneously at a dose of 5 mg/kg twice daily (9 A.M. and 5 P.M.) for 4 consecutive days.
Again, that's 40 mg/kg over 4 days, while most of us recommend only about 2 mg/kg per month. This is why I think it's very hard to extrapolate from Ricaurte's work to normal human use.
There are at least a few perfectly good studies on MDMA out there, I'll see if I can find an example. Unfortunately, it seems that there simply aren't many images of the effects of MDMA on the brain from reliable sources.