Posted on 04/03/2006 7:45:26 PM PDT by aculeus
Doctors from London University have revealed details of what they believe is the largest amount of ecstasy ever consumed by a single person. Consultants from the addiction centre at St George's Medical School, London, have published a case report of a British man estimated to have taken around 40,000 pills of MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, over nine years. The heaviest previous lifetime intake on record is 2,000 pills. Though the man, who is now 37, stopped taking the drug seven years ago, he still suffers from severe physical and mental health side-effects, including extreme memory problems, paranoia, hallucinations and depression. He also suffers from painful muscle rigidity around his neck and jaw which often prevents him from opening his mouth. The doctors believe many of these symptoms may be permanent.
The man, known as Mr A in the report in the scientific journal Psychosomatics, started using ecstasy at 21. For the first two years his use was an average of five pills per weekend. Gradually this escalated until he was taking around three and a half pills a day. At the peak, the man was taking an estimated 25 pills every day for four years. After several severe collapses at parties, Mr A decided to stop taking ecstasy. For several months, he still felt he was under the influence of the drug, despite being bedridden.
Hallucinations
His condition deteriorated and he began to experience recurrent tunnel vision and other problems including hallucinations, paranoia and muscle rigidity. "He came to us after deciding that he couldn't go on any more," said Dr Christos Kouimtsidis, the consultant psychiatrist at St George's Medical School in Tooting who treated him for five months. "He was having trouble functioning in everyday life."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Exactly it's illegal and look whats happening.
"Shouldn't that be "Mr. X"?
Of course it should! The quality of reportage continues to deteriorate.
"The only drug that should be legalized is marijuana. All the other drugs should remain illegal."
Totally, completely agree.
My feeling is that jails should be for people who hurt others, not just themselves. I would treat hard drugs the way alcohol is currently treated. Use at your own risk, and if you dare to get behind a wheel, steal to subsidize your habit, or give in to the voices that tell you to commit violence, you will rue the day you were born.
You're kidding, right? :-D
It's all snake oil and extremely damaging snake oil. The use of these drugs has lead directly to the sad state of affairs we are in today as a nation and society.
This was how we were destroyed.
Alcohol is in general bad for a person, but taking it everyday does not result in the same brain damage as taking ecstasy.
A huge number of the human race use alcohol every day. Winston Churchill for example.
We in the US are not nearly as alcoholic as a lot of other societies. Britain for example has a huge number of alcoholics compared to us.
The damage is not the same.
I would, though, guess this guy also drank which may have also contributed.
no way this guy was dropping 12 a day. He would be dead.
Thanks for the post. I am postive I saw a TV show on the link but a google search indicates that info was wrong.
>>A Bad Batch
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 <<
http://www.maps.org/mdma/bcp121003.html
"Uh, no."
Uh yea some do. My aunt died before she was 40, and my dad (at age 38) nearly died from alcoholism. He had to be defibulated (sp?) 4 times, and was given his last rights because they were pretty sure he'd die.
I'm not going to argue that X is a terrible drug, and it does cause pretty bad side effects. However its not the governments job to save us from ourselves. To do that requires a substantial lose of freedoms that I'm not going to give up just so we can try (and fail I might add) to enforce our morality on others.
But it's "Racism" to call him a drug addict. It's a disease and not his fault. Somewhere, somebody, somehow forced him in someway to take 40,000 pills....somebody...
For nine years the guy didn't understand that he was operating in the real world. Due to the wonders of socialized medicine.
What's the street value of 40,000 hits? $800,000? He must have been dealing also.
This was how we were destroyed.
I think you are mistaken there. The beginnings of the ruination of the western world are (partially) based in the drug war, true, but let's look objectively at the drug war itself.
NONE of the "prohibited substances" were unlawful until the early 20th century. Of course, many of same didn't exist yet, but the point remains valid.
There were very few crimes directly or indirectly attributed to "lack of judgement" caused by the availability of such things as cocaine, marijuana, opium, etc.
The problems ALL occurred AFTER these "evil weeds, Devil's plants, etc. " were suddenly (and it seems irrevocably according to you and your fellow drug warriors) deemed intolerable to the prohibitionists.
OH, there's that word!
Your type, and Carrie Nation are of the identical order. I hope that someday you can see how myopic and shallow your arguments for the continuing nannyism of the drug war(s) are.
People are a LOT smarter than you give them credit for (think of some of the ingenious methods used to smuggle people), and within a few years, the "cachet" of dope would die, along with the underground economy that is wholly supported BY the drug laws you support.
The deleterious effect of such drugs is apparent in our socity today. All the things we lament here concerning liberalism and just crazy upside down thinking.
You're kidding, right? :-D
I wish. I should have remembered the case of the late Carroll (forgetting his full name) the actor who played Archie Bunker. He lost his son to an overdose and shortly afterward the genuinely grief-striken man was on television saying his son would not have died if heroin was legalized! Absolutely batty!
His name would be Ted Kennedy and he would be a Senator.
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