Aug. 1, 2005 -- Amphetamines -- especially the drug known as ecstasy -- may prompt new Parkinson's treatments, based on tests done on mice....

Research at the University of Manchester indicates that ecstasy dramatically reduces tremors in patients receiving L-DOPA treatment for Parkinson's Disease.

A research team led by Dr. George A. Ricaurte at Johns Hopkins University implicated MDMA as a cause of Parkinson's-like brain abnormalities in monkeys. In a now-retracted study, they suggested that a single use of MDMA caused permanent and serious brain damage. These claims were hotly disputed by physicians, therapists, and other experts, including a team of scientists at New York University. Criticisms of the study included its use of injection rather than oral administration; that this type and scale of damage (>20% mortality) would translate to hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths which had not materialized in the real world amidst extremely broad global MDMA usage; and, perhaps most important, that other research teams could not duplicate the study's findings.

On September 6, 2003, Dr. George A. Ricaurte and his team announced that they were retracting all results of their commonly cited and controversial study. The researchers said that the labels on the drugs had been somehow switched, and they had inadvertently injected their experimental monkeys and baboons with methamphetamine instead of MDMA. The chemical supplier, Research Triangle Institute, has publicly claimed that the proper drug was supplied, and Ricaurte has yet to pursue them for their alleged error.

Ricaurte had also come under fire for supplying PET scans to the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy that were used in anti-drug literature (Plain Brain/Brain After Ecstasy) that seemed to suggest MDMA created holes in human brains, an implication that critics called misleading. Ricaurte later asked the Agency to change the literature, citing the "poor quality" of the images.