Recent Study Reveals That Ecstasy Is Lethal

TokyoHigh said:
I agree with Brian Oblivion on the importance of this distinction. However the issue is not entirely medical. It really depends on what you are after:

1) Suppose I am a psychiatrist trying to legalize MDMA for therapeutic use. I want to know what the chances of a fatality are when I give the medicine to the patient during a session. Obviously here the statistics of the number of deaths caused by heat stroke is not going to be a factor, as one can expect to be able to control and prevent this in a clinical environment.

2) Suppose I am an average Joe and I have a teenager kid named Bobby. Bobby has just made some dodgy looking friends and I am concerned after overhearing their plan to drop some E and dance the weekend away. To me as a parent, the most relevant statistic is the one that includes both MDMA neurotoxicity deaths and MDMA related deaths such as hyponatremia, heat stroke, and crashing your car into a brick wall due to impaired judgment.

3) Suppose I am a mature responsible adult user of E. I carefully watch the dosage, use pure E crystals only, and always have a reliable sitter for the group, who can watch the temperature, make sure everybody drinks water and sports-drinks, nobody gets into a car while still under influence, etc. Then I would estimate that the risk is somewhere in between (1) and (2).

Would be quite interesting to see accurate estimate for (1) and for (2), especially with links showing where the original numbers come from.

TH
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That's an excellent post TokyoHigh. You've raised some very good points. :)
 
John_Paragon said:
Well, if someone got too drunk and dropped dead of alcohol poisoning, would you say he died because he was an uneducated drinker?

It doesn't matter what effects of whatever substance the person ingested caused the death, the bottom line is: the person took the substance, and as a result of taking that substance, they died.
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The problem with your black & white argument of this is that we don't learn anything in the aftermath. That is the kind of statistics gathering that the War on Drugs movement loves to use. It helps them get their politically oriented viewpoint across without the need to justify it.

Unless we can learn WHY someone has died, and make such distinctions as direct neurotoxicity or secondary effect, we can not prevent future deaths. (read that sentence again, will ya please?)

Making such distinctions can reduce future deaths.
 
John_Paragon said:
driving a car and ingesting a drug that alters your reality / chemistry can't really be compared, it's two totally different things.
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OK, so, care to explain?

They're really not that different. By waking up in the morning, I am embracing a reality different than that I would encounter had I stayed in bed all day. By getting behind the wheel, I present to myself a reality of driving, and I must adjust myself accordingly, psychologically.

Everything in life will adjust your reality. How you interpret something -- rather, everything -- will affect the activities of neurons within your brain... directly affecting your brain chemistry.

Ingesting a mind-altering drug is an action, just like everything else you do. The same rules of cause-and-effect apply as you would encounter anywhere else.
 
The blame for the death can be placed squarely on the decision to take the drug, and it's subsequent effects on the mind and body.
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I don't think that's true. Not all people who take this drug die, so we can't say unconditionally that this drug causes death. There are other factors at work here.

But the car analogy isn't totally invalid. Just like MDMA, if you didn't get in the car, you wouldn't be dead. But you also wouldn't be dead if you didn't have bad luck or any other number of conditions that pushed the situation over the edge, so to speak.

It ends up being a hindsight thing. I died in a car accident... where did I go wrong? Getting the car, maybe. Looking at the CD player while doing 90 on the freeway, maybe. You change a condition, you may not die.
If Fred was looking back and wondering "gee, where did I go wrong?", dropping the E is the first and most obvious place, but I'm sure there are any other number of things he could pick from that night to change his fate.

Does this mean E is safe? Not necessarily. But it's not quite like putting a loaded glock to your head.
 
What it comes down to is this:

There ARE risks associted with taking Ecstasy, just like there are risks associted with doing pretty much anything. But because ecstasy is an illegal drug, the bad aspects often get more attention than the good in mainstream media, and a lot of people's attitudes at that.
 
17 per cent of ecstasy-related deaths resulted when the victim had taken ecstasy and no other drug
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yes but how many people, of the total mdma users, actually died?

When we talk about _those_ numbers, i think ull find mdma is the least of our problems! (MDMA is has one of the lowest death rates per user of all drugs, second only to things like lsd, shrooms and marijuana)
 
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