Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs report on Ecstasy
February 23, 2009 2:39 pm entactogen, humanIn the UK, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has written a review of MDMA (‘ecstasy’), its harms and its legal classification.
It is mostly a good read. But I think it could have benefited from a little editing and checking of the references — it looks rushed in parts. Here’s an example. To a scientist, citations like these are pretty dubious:
Some people with clinical depression find that MDMA can acutely lift their mood, albeit only transiently (B. Sessa, pers. comm.). Although it is unlikely that much MDMA use is for such self-medication, the scheduling status of MDMA has discouraged systematic clinical research work in this area. Recently there have been two clinical trials showing that MDMA can accentuate the benefits of psychotherapy in the treatment of chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Bouso et al., 2008, Mithoefer et al., 2008).
Yes, they’re apparently making recommendations and drawing conclusions based on this unimpressive level of evidence: a personal communication from Ben Sessa; a (mis-cited) paper from José Carlos Bouso and colleagues that summarized preliminary results from an interrupted study (previously blogged here); and a poster presentation describing unpublished data by Michael Mithoefer and colleagues (previously blogged here).
By mis-cited, what I mean is that the paper from José Carlos Bouso actually drew no conclusions about whether MDMA accentuated benefits of psychotherapy. Their study was stopped before it could draw those kinds of conclusions. Instead, they concluded “that low doses of MDMA (between 50 and 75 mg) were both psychologically and physiologically safe for all [six] subjects”.
Regardless of whether the conclusions are right or wrong, this is a bit worrisome. No one should base policy recommendations on unpublished results and the say-so of a few people
Now I have a few bones to pick with the report. But, apparently, researcher Andy Parrott really really disagrees with it. The BBC’s Mark Easton blogs the story here.
Synchronium :
Date: February 24, 2009 @ 4:24 pm
Maybe they’ve just lost the heart for it?
They must have given up all hope of ever being listened to again following this cannabis piss-take.