E for Ecstasy by Nicholas Saunders
Appendix 1: Reference Section

70 Ecstasy Revisited, by Bruce Eisner, Gnosis Magazine, winter 1993

As soon as MDMA was made illegal, it began to be adulterated, Eisner says. This was due to criminals replacing users and idealists in the manufacture and distribution of the drug.

Eisner makes the following point: "The same experiment that Shuster and Ricaurte did with MDMA and MDA - giving huge and frequent doses to rats - was also performed with a prescription drug, fenfluramine, used in treating eating disorders. No adverse effects have ever been observed from its use, and people who took it frequently many years ago have no observed brain damage or other problems. Fenfluramine is still prescribed, even though MDMA was quickly banned."

"With millions of people having taken MDMA over a 20-year period, some more than several hundred times, there has never been a reported case of MDMA-caused brain damage. Not one single case," he adds.

He quotes Shulgin as predicting that new compounds will inevitably be invented: "teased out of other drugs such as MDMA," which would have still greater specificity in triggering human emotions such as the fear of death, awareness and suppression of anger, and feelings of guilt.