Ecstasy to be tested on terminal cancer patients

FDA approves study to see if drug helps people face final days
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:49 a.m. ET Dec. 28, 2004

WASHINGTON - The illegal club drug Ecstasy can trigger euphoria among the dance club set, but can it ease the debilitating anxiety that cancer patients feel as they face their final days? The Food and Drug Administration has approved a pilot study looking at whether the recreational hallucinogen can help terminally ill patients lessen their fears, quell thoughts of suicide and make it easier for them to deal with loved ones.
“End of life issues are very important and are getting more and more attention, and yet there are very few options for patients who are facing death,” Dr. John Halpern, the Harvard research psychiatrist in charge of the study, said Monday.
The small, four-month study is expected to begin early next spring. It will test the drug’s effects on 12 cancer patients from the Lahey Clinic Medical Center in the Boston area. The research is being sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit group that plans to raise $250,000 to fund it.
MAPS, on its web site, touted the study’s approval, saying “the longest day of winter has passed, and maybe so has the decades-long era of resistance to psychedelic research.”

S**t!

Doctors in the USA are even afraid of giving morphine to terminal cancer patients because "they may get addicted"!

I tell you folks, eveyone in my family has my living will:

If I get some God given curse where I know I am gonna end up depending on someone to change my diapers, I am flying first class to Amsterdam, will go to every café and smoke all the s**t I can get my hands on, drink all the Heinkens in the country, screw every Red Light district hooker and then as a final act, I will visit one of them caring and loving Dutch doctors so that he can put me out of my misery!

Amen. For you all are now witnesses.

- T -

Hahaha you sound like my kind of guy

Living wills are great. Everyone in my family has one as well.

It's so much easier to make those kind of decisions now when everyone is relaxed and sane.

but still not marijuana.

Fascinating.

This is a good start, but before MDMA (Ecstasy) was illegalized, it had been used successfully (albeit only anecdotal evidence of its success) by practicing physchologists and psychiatrists. There are lots of potential medicinal uses for this drug.

The FDA really does have to get its head out of its ass when it comes to how some of these drugs which also are used recreationally are handled. Marijuana, MDMA, and LSD all have potential (and sometimes known) benefits, yet Schedule IV doesn't even allow them to be studied.

PLUR...

- Ace

like when hospitals want to have rave parties.


I think the FDA bows to politics and the "War on terr.. " errrr sorry, dammit, I keep confusing them... the "war on drugs". Still, I would hesitate to group Marijuana, a naturally growing plant, with synthetic hallucinagens. No one's had a bad trip on marijuana and jumped out a building thinking they could fly, or stabbed themselves thinking they had roaches crawling all over their arms.

WOOOOT! (Um, that was the smartest reply I could manage). Damn, my mom will be mad when she reads my living will. Seriously (not really) all I've heard about this drug is lack of spinal fluid and daim bramage. Who needs spinal fluid anyway?

From the smiley, I can't tell if that's facetious, but the horror stories about what people do under the influence are pretty uniformly urban legends. On the other hand, garden variety ethanol and bravado has been known to make kids on spring break think they can jump from the 7th floor balcony into the hotel pool.

"Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right." - P. J. O'Rourke

Agreed Rose!

One Brompton Cocktail Please!

"As a rule of thumb, it is profoundly unwise to take crack-cocaine. The brain has evolved a truly vicious set of negative feedback mechanisms. Their functional effect is to stop us from being truly happy for long. Nature is cruelly parsimonious with pleasure. The initial short-lived euphoria of a reinforcer as uniquely powerful as crack will be followed by a "crash". This involves anxiety, depression, irritability, extreme fatigue and possibly paranoia. Physical health may deteriorate. An intense craving for more cocaine develops. In heavy users, stereotyped compulsive and repetitive patterns of behaviour may occur. So may tactile hallucinations of insects crawling underneath the skin ("formication". Severe depressive conditions may follow; agitated delirium; and also a syndrome sometimes known as toxic paranoid psychosis. The neural aftereffects of chronic cocaine use include changes in monoamine metabolites and uptake transporters. There is down-regulation of dopamine D2 receptors to compensate for their drug-induced overstimulation. Thus the brain's capacity to experience pleasure is diminished.

The social consequences of heavy cocaine use can be equally unpleasant. Non-recreational users are likely eventually to alienate family and friends. They tend to become isolated and suspicious. Most of their money and time is spent thinking about how to get more of the drug. The compulsion may become utterly obsessive. The illusion of free-will is likely to disappear. During a "mission", essentially a 3-4 day crack-binge, users may consume up to 50 rocks a day. To obtain more, crack-addicts will often lie, cheat, steal and commit crimes of violence. Once-loved partners and children may be callously cast aside. Whole communities can be disrupted by crack-abuse. Whereas "empathogens" such as MDMA / Ecstasy - which trigger the release of more serotonin than dopamine - will typically promote empathy, trust, compassionate love and sociability, "dopaminergic" drugs such as cocaine or amphetamines, if taken on their own and to excess, can easily have the reverse effect. This story has complications - cocaine's affinity for the serotonin transporter is actually greater than for the dopamine transporter. But simplistically, cocaine tends to be a "selfish" drug.

There is perhaps a single predictable time of life when taking crack-cocaine is sensible, harmless and both emotionally and intellectually satisfying. Indeed, for such an occasion it may be commended. Certain estimable English doctors were once in the habit of administering to terminally-ill cancer patients an elixir known as the "Brompton cocktail". This was a judiciously-blended mixture of cocaine, heroin and alcohol. The results were gratifying not just to the recipient. Relatives of the stricken patient were pleased, too, at the new-found look of spiritual peace and happiness suffusing the features of a loved one as (s)he prepared to meet his or her Maker.

Drawing life to a close with a transcendentally orgasmic bang, and not a pathetic and god-forsaken whimper, can turn dying into the culmination of one's existence rather than its present messy and protracted anti-climax.

There is another good reason to finish life on a high note. In a predominantly secular society, adopting a hedonistic death-style is much more responsible from an ethical utilitarian perspective. For it promises to spare friends and relations the miseries of vicarious suffering and distress they are liable to undergo at present as they witness one's decline.

A few generations hence, the elimination of primitive evolutionary holdovers such as the ageing process and suffering will make the hedonistic death advocated here redundant. In the meanwhile, one is conceived in pleasure and may reasonably hope to die in it."

Something's 'naturalness' has nothing to do whatsoever with its potential harmfulness. That always boggled my mind, people saying "Oh, it's natural, it won't hurt me..." Try chewing on a castor bean, sometime. In the same light, just because something is 'synthetic' does not somehow enhance its harmfulness. "Natural" is marketing, not science. They're all chemicals.

The most dangerous thing about ecstasy is people's tendancy to drink too little water while raving about... or too much. That... and they cuddle. That's terrifying.

Can you smoke castor beans? I will have to try that!

You can in SL Darko - I'll drop a plant on your inventory (I actually have a castor bean plant in SL). RL ingestion of ricin is not recommended though.

Haha.

I am simply blown away after reading this thread in it's entirety.