Whaat with angry parents, alarming headlines and crusading politicians proclaiming the dangers of MDMA―a recreational drug more commonly known as Ecstasy-it takes a brave, or foolhardy, individual to go against the grain. Jon Cole, an addiction researcher at Liverpool University, in England, denies that he is either, but his unorthodox views about the long-term effects of Ecstasy are still kicking up a storm. In this month's issue of the Psychol-ogist Dr Cole and his colleagues argue that experimental evidence suggesting a link between Ecstasy use and problems such as nerve damage and brain impairment is flawed, and that using this ill-substantiated cause-and-effect to tell the "chemical generation" that they are brain-damaged when they are not create public health problems of its own.
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