of MDMA and calls them “mild unpleasant side effects.” These include, “loss of appetite, trismus (jaw clenching), bruxism (teeth grinding), nausea, muscle aches, stiffness, ataxia (impairment of motor control), blurred vision, increased sweating, anxiety, tachycardia (increased heart rate), insomnia (sleeplessness), and fatigue.”Neurotoxicity is the more dangerous of the two toxic effects that have to do with MDMA. Neurotoxicity occurs when aspects of the brain are damaged so that their function is lost or inhibited. For a time, Ecstasy was thought to be harmless because, when taken in small doses, the only isolated effects were the acute systemic toxicity, which were shrugged off as people who “couldn’t handle” the drug. Well, the truth is that too much MDMA can cause major, lasting damage to the serotonergic system and thus the entire organism.The cause of this damage is that MDMA prohibits the reuptake of the serotonin, which allows for so many receptors to be filled and created, but inversely the reuptake transporters are left vacant, and are not functioning as they should be to help actively diffuse serotonin back into the cell. As was indicated before, there are also other neurotransmitters in the synapse being released at all times. The most important of these for this discussion is dopamine. Dopamine relies on a more sturdy recovery and release system than serotonin, and is therefore called a robust system (Sferios). The neurotoxic effect most prevalent in the study of MDMA is the process of axon degeneration. The cause of which is dopamine. When the receptor sites have absorbed all the serotonin, the dopamine is in high concentration in the synapse, and the inside of the serotonin axons is in a very low concentration. Because there is nothing to inhibit its entrance at the reuptake transporters, dopamine is transferred into the serotonin cells. This is extremely damaging to t...
