Some of this is about--marijuana. Just so you'll know, there's nothing in here about what we were all doing back in the day (though of course, we never inhaled). The reason to give marijuana some attention here is a legal case that has wedged open an important chapter in the relationship between law and science. It pits some health activists against a law in the United States called the Data Quality Act (DQA). The turnaround is that DQA has usually helped industry fight off regulation. Not this time; here's the background.

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We write to retract our report "Severe dopaminergic neurotoxicity in primates after a common recreational dose regimen of MDMA ("ecstasy")" (1), following our recent discovery that the drug used to treat all but one animal in that report came from a bottle that contained (+)-methamphetamine instead of the intended drug, ( )MDMA. Notably, (+)-methamphetamine would be expected to produce the same pattern of combined dopaminergic/serotonergic neurotoxicity (2) as that seen in the animals reported in our paper (1).

The originally published report (1) presented results from multiple studies performed in our laboratory over a span of approximately 2 years demonstrating that a novel systemic dose regimen of what we believed was MDMA produced severe dopamine neurotoxicity in two species of nonhuman primates, in addition to the previously reported serotonin neurotoxicity (3-6). Subsequent to the publication of those findings, we were unable to extend the dopamine neurotoxicity to orally administered doses.

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