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MDMA: Myths & Misinformation

Trance Addict Htx said:
Everytime a coversation about E comes up there is always someone that says "Dont do that stuff man...it eats holes in your brain..."
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I know what u mean , i try to avoid discussions ;-)
 
I just posted this in a different thread related to suspected connections between MDMA and anxiety.

Rather than writing yet a second such post from scratch, I am going to simply copy it here.




Source: The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

How Common Is Panic Disorder?
  • About 1.7 percent of the adult U.S. population ages 18 to 54—approximately 2.4 million Americans—has panic disorder in a given year.
  • Women are twice as likely as men to develop panic disorder.
  • Panic disorder typically strikes in young adulthood. Roughly half of all people who have panic disorder develop the condition before age 24.
NOTE: As best I can recall, no anxiety/panic attack related affliction has ever been reported in this forum by a female. However, the ratio of women to men, in the Ecstasy Discussion forum, is disproportionate to the overall population. Which is what I believe accounts for this disparity.




Bluelight does not maintain a record of visitor traffic. So I am basing my estimates on other web sites which are equally busy, and feature public forums.


I guestimate that the total number of visitors to the "Ecstasy Discussions" forum per day is greater than 1,000 individuals, with the majority (75%?) of those being non-registered visitors. Judging from the level of participation (actual posts) in the forum, visits from 250 registered members "seems" about right (within any internet population for every post made by an individual, there are roughly 20 visitors who visited but did not post.).


Where am I going with this?

Glad you asked! I would estimate that ED is visited by at least 250 "registered" members (i.e.,visitors with posting rights) per day. Given the nature of the forum's topic, I would guess that at least 50% of these visitors have tried MDMA at least one time in their life. Out of that 50%, I would guess that about 1/3 use MDMA more than 2 times per year.

This means that 41.25 registered visitors in any given day are regular MDMA users ("regular" meaning anywhere from a few pills per year, to more than once per month).

These 41.25 registered visitors are NOT the total population of visitors fitting the "regular MDMA users" category. They are simply the ones who have visited the forum on any given day. Some may visit once per day, others may stop by once per week, and others may visit only occasionally, still others may have frequented in the past but no longer visit. I would suspect that the majority of those fitting the "regular MDMA users" category either visit infrequently, or no longer attend.

At any rate, I am not willing to attempt guess the total population of those who are registered Bluelight members and "regular MDMA users," and who are currently Ecstasy Discussion visitors, or were Ecstasy Discussion visitors but are no longer active in the forum.

But I feel safe in saying that it well exceeds 1,000 persons (and chances are that it could very well greatly exceed 10,000 persons). But to err on the very safe side, lets use 1,000 persons.

Given the statistics provided by the National Institute of Mental Health, we would have 17 members who are prone to a panic attack disorder. That is solely based on population averages, and has nothing to do with MDMA use.


Given all of that, the number of cases reporting anxiety/panic attack disorders due to suspected MDMA use is incredibly small. Thousands and thousands of people come through this forum, and only on rare occasions do we see someone who's concluded that they've acquired an anxiety/panic attack disorder as a result of their MDMA use.


For the record I do think, just as s0nic said, that someone with a disposition to having a panic attack disorder could find that heavy MDMA use aggravated it (and I have never said anything contrary to this). It could very simply be that such a person's brain keeps the disorder below threshold by counter balancing it with serotogenic actions. Take the serotonin away and the coping mechanism is disabled.

But I do not believe that anxiety/panic attack disorders are induced by MDMA in people who are not disposed to it.

Furthermore, if it was the case that MDMA induced anxiety/panic attack disorders in otherwise healthy individuals, we would be seeing numerous incidences of the condition.

As I've said (and this is beginning to sound like a broken record), worldwide over 30 million doses of MDMA are consumed each and every weekend. And this has been going on for over 10 years. Yet, the occurrence of anxiety/panic attack disorders are almost parallel to that of the general population. (1.7 percent of 30 million is 510,000 - so these incidences would be in addition to that number of suffers.)

Given all of this, and going back to the Ecstasy Discussions forum as a population sample, if there were a problem then we would be receiving countless reports of people who have acquired an anxiety/panic attack disorder. But the fact is that there are only a handful of persons who have ever reported it (squeaky wheel or not). And it is not reasonable to conclude that MDMA causes these problems when so few experience them. It just doesn't fit into a public health model.


And anyone reading this, PLEASE understand that I am not attempting to make light of a very life crippling malady. Anxiety/panic attack disorders essentially hijack your life, leaving you in a situation where at any moment this monster could strike. I know it very well as I once suffered from agoraphobia, and I have also lived with panic attacks.

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