The colossal DEA failure that prevented a potentially major medical breakthrough

[unhappycamper]

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/the_colossal_dea_failure_that_prevented_a_potentially_major_medical_breakthrough/



Once upon a time, researchers hoped to explore the promise of ecstasy for treating PTSD. Then the feds stepped in

The colossal DEA failure that prevented a potentially major medical breakthrough
Tom Shroder
Sunday, Sep 21, 2014 06:58 AM EST

The therapeutic properties of the synthetic compound MDMA, which would soon become known on the street as Ecstasy, were discovered by Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a leading researcher for Dow Chemical in the late 1950s and early 1960s who had been so awed by the psychoactive effects of mescaline that he decided to devote his life to experimenting with similar compounds, which he concocted in a backyard lab at his home in Lafayette, California. When he cooked up MDMA and “taste-tested” the drug in the 1970s, he thought he’d discovered a pleasant “no-calorie martini.” Then he increased the dose. The world cracked open.

~snip~

“We write to retract our report ‘Severe dopaminergic neurotoxicity in primates … following our recent discovery that the drug used to treat all but one animal in that report came from a bottle that contained d-methamphetamine instead of the intended drug, racemic MDMA.”

~snip~

The irony wasn’t lost on Rick and Michael:

The drug that had been “mislabeled” as MDMA and proven so horribly toxic that it had stopped Michael’s study cold; the drug that was far more toxic than actual MDMA, methamphetamine, already was a prescription medicine.