In the Wake of a Major Retraction of a Report that Linked Parkinson's Disease
to Ecstasy Use, Some Critics Wonder if Politics is Poisoning Science

By Rebecca Alvania, Baltimore City Paper, December 10 - December 16, 2003

In September 2002 there came a frightening revelation about the drug Ecstasy: Dr. George Ricaurte, a professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, had published a study claiming that just a single dose of the club-drug Ecstasy could put users at risk of developing Parkinson's disease--a degenerative nervous-system disorder that causes tremors, loss of coordination, and difficulty completing simple tasks. A little more than a month ago, though, Ricaurte and his colleagues admitted that the study was faulty, that his research results, which were trumpeted in major media across the nation, were wrong. It turns out, the researchers on Ricaurte's team had neglected to do one crucial thing in their study: test the right drug. Instead of Ecstasy, Ricaurte and his fellow researchers had actually tested methamphetamines.

When Ricaurte originally released his dire findings in 2002, it sent waves of panic through the drug-science community. Ecstasy is a popular drug worldwide, especially among young club-goers, and if his conclusions were on target, the world appeared to be only years away from a Parkinson's disease epidemic. Alan Leshner, head of the federal National Institute on Drug Abuse, said at the time that Ricaurte's work proved that taking Ecstasy was like playing "Russian roulette with your brain" (Leshner has since retracted that statement). Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Times of London, and Wired magazine, reported the story. Congress was in the midst of debating the controversial Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act (RAVE) legislation, which proposed holding club owners personally responsible for drug use on their properties, and Ricaurte's revelation added fuel to its fire.

But this past September, the journal Science shocked scientists and politicians again when it reported that the $1.3 million study had been retracted. Somehow, Ricaurte admitted, the drug he'd intended to use on primates in his study--MDMA, otherwise known as Ecstasy--had been switched with methamphetamine, rendering his results false. Experts in the drug-abuse field note that they've been criticizing Ricaurte's work ever since it was released, and since the retraction some are questioning how it became such big news in the first place.

"Even before we were aware that it wasn't MDMA the monkeys were getting, there were some serious concerns with how that original paper was presented," says Charles Grob, a psychiatrist at the UCLA School of Medicine.

Prior to the Ricaurte study, there was no evidence at all that Ecstasy could cause such devastation to the human brain. It was commonly known, however, that methamphetamines could result in Parkinson's-like brain damage. That alone, Grob says, should have made Ricaurte's peers suspicious of his study's dramatic results.

Rick Doblin, president of the Sarasota, Fla.-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, agrees: "They certainly were aware of how unusual their findings were," Doblin says. "And the part they were irresponsible about was the leap they made from what their findings were [in primates], to what the implications were in humans."

Ricaurte's study was ambitious from the very beginning. He set out to show what, exactly, happens to the human brain after a person consumes a common recreational dose of Ecstasy. A survey done in the early '90s published in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated a typical Ecstasy dosage to be 1.6 to 2.4 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Ricaurte used these estimates to determine an equivalent "common recreational" dose for a primate, gave his monkeys some drugs, and waited to see what happened.

His first observation was that an awful lot of monkeys died. Ricaurte reported a 20 percent mortality rate in his subjects after Ecstasy dosage. However, research from the United Kingdom on Ecstasy toxicity published by psychologist Russell Newcombe in Nicholas Saunders 1997 book Ecstasy Reconsidered puts the mortality rate at .002 percent. In October 2002, Doblin wrote a letter to Science criticizing Ricaurte's result, commenting that "since human MDMA users very rarely die from MDMA use, the high mortality in Ricaurte's primates suggests they failed to administer a 'common recreational dose.'"

According to the Hopkins study's results, the animals that did survive Ricaurte's dosage of the drug suffered a type of brain damage similar to that seen in Parkinson's patients. Ricaurte asserted that "recent cases of young-onset Parkinson's disease might be related to MDMA exposure."

Critics like Doblin felt the leap to link Ecstasy to Parkinson's was premature. Though Ricaurte's findings were trumpeted worldwide, similar but less publicized studies had been released prior to his 2002 report that conflicted with his results.

Stephen Kish, a researcher at the University of Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, for example, authored a paper on Ecstasy in 2000 and reported no brain damage in Ecstasy users whatsoever. "We autopsied the brain of an Ecstasy user and we found that [in terms of Parkinson's damage] they were perfectly normal," he says.

Kish, who has studied human Ecstasy subjects, says he has never seen evidence of movement disorders or Parkinson's in even heavy users. "We examine Ecstasy users here and we do include a test for Parkinson's disease," he says. "In my opinion, there's no evidence of Parkinson's in Ecstasy users."

Since Ricaurte's report was released, there has been a steady clamor from the scientific community suggesting that the study was flawed. Doblin wrote a letter to Science in late 2002 to that effect, and the Times of London published a letter on Oct. 2, 2002, written by Leslie Iverson, a pharmacologist at the University of Oxford, that said Ricaurte produced his study in a "flawed American laboratory" and that his "evidence was not convincing."

Shortly after that, Ricaurte purchased a new batch of Ecstasy and set out to prove his detractors wrong. However, after months of giving monkeys Ecstasy during the second trial, he could not replicate the results of his research. Frustrated, he returned to the monkeys he used during the earlier study, and after testing he realized that those monkeys had never even ingested Ecstasy. Instead, they tested positive for methamphetamines.

Somewhere along the line, somebody mixed up their narcotics. Ricaurte says that the drugs used for his Science paper, which he purchased in 2000, had been mislabeled at the drug company he purchased them from, North Carolina-based Research Triangle Institute International. Reid Maness, a spokesman for RTI International, says that the company has found "no evidence of labeling error on our part. We're disappointed that Dr. Ricaurte chose to blame RTI for the circumstances that led him to retract his study."

Hopkins stands behind Ricaurte and his allegations that the drug company was responsible for the mix-up. "There's no repercussions to Ricaurte because he didn't mislabel the drug," Hopkins spokesman Gary Stephenson says. "His research is valid, and we stand behind him prior to this, and subsequent to this."

Still, some Ricaurte critics are not satisfied with the explanation. They question the rush to publicize his study, and Grob notes that "there's been this pattern of hyping Ricaurte's work."

In 1998, for example, the Hopkins researcher produced a study using imaging techniques that allowed him to observe the brains of Ecstasy users and compare them to non-drug users. In the images it appears that the brains of Ecstasy users contain large holes of inactive tissue. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has helped fund much of Ricaurte's Ecstasy research, incorporated his results into its anti-club-drug media campaign and passed out thousands of postcards depicting the image as the brain on ecstasy. This study has since been heavily criticized as well.

"It's based on totally flawed science that's now clearly considered to be methodologically flawed," the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies' Doblin says. "Larger and better-controlled studies have not found anything at all like what Ricaurte claimed to find. A new study published in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine in 2003 showed that former users of MDMA, some of whom had used 799 tablets, had no differences [in their brains] from [the control group]."

The National Institute on Drug Abuse no longer uses Ricaurte's brain on ecstasy images. Institute spokeswoman Beverly Jackson says that the organization has no problem with the images or with Ricaurte but is simply updating its Ecstasy information campaign.

Some say Ricaurte was overzealous in his interpretation of data that would support the initiatives of his benefactor, the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"I fault him for choosing not to disclose the fact that [conflicting] studies had been conducted," Kish says. "I fault him much more for being misleading than for making an honest mistake."

"George . . . panders to [his] grantmakers and to the prohibitionist ethic," Doblin agrees. "As long as these drugs are illegal we need to present them as poisonous or else how do we justify these incredibly harsh penalties?" Those penalties became even harsher when, in January 2003, the RAVE Act was passed. Although he did not personally testify before Congress, opponents of RAVE feel the media attention surrounding his Parkinson's story contributed a lot to the bill's success.

"It was in the climate," Doblin notes. "It was so highly publicized that one would suspect that the people in Congress . . . who were working on these bills, as well as their constituents, had this erroneous impression."

Grob agrees that Ricaurte's work "lent an urgency to the proceedings" of the congressional debates.

Ricaurte himself was unavailable for comment for this story. However, a fellow Ecstasy researcher at Hopkins, Una McCann, has flatly denied any political motivation in their publications. In an interview with The Washington Post shortly after Ricaurte's Parkinson's-Ecstasy study was retracted, she said she regrets any effect their study may have had on Congress.

"I feel personally terrible," she told the paper. "You spend a lot of time trying to get things right, not only for the congressional record but for other scientists around the country who are basing new hypotheses on your work and are writing grant proposals to study this."

Despite this and other statements Ricaurte's research team has made to explain away the errors in its work, Grob feels this incident highlights the fact that political motivations are inherent in the field of drug-abuse study--especially when grant money is involved.

"I think politics is at work in terms of what studies . . . are promoted," the UCLA psychiatrist says. "We have a vicious longstanding war on drugs, and unfortunately [there] is an effort to develop the science that supports the war on drugs."

© 2003 Baltimore City Paper. All Rights Reserved.