Ecstasy During Pregnancy | Pharma Mirror Magazine

Taking drugs while pregnant may cause serious developmental problems for the baby, even for over-the-counter medications. Imagine how much more dangerous a street drug can be, when the dosage, purity, and composition are unknown. Not surprisingly, recent studies have shown that amphetamine or MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine)  has serious detrimental effects in a developing fetus. In 2001, a group of researchers at the University of Cincinnati showed that when Ecstasy was given to rats during the developmental period corresponding to the third trimester of a human pregnancy, they suffered memory and learning deficits that persisted for the rest of their life. The results were even more disturbing because the dosage used for this study was similar to what people ordinarily take in a single Ecstasy pill.

When the rats reached young adulthood, they were tested on a series of mazes and memory tasks. In one task, for example, a rat had to learn to swim to a hidden platform by first finding it and later remembering where in the pool the platform was hidden. In this task, a normal rat will remember where the hidden platform is located and use it to climb out of the water. By contrast, the Ecstasy-treated rats took much longer to find the hidden platform. Remember, these rats had not been treated with Ecstasy recently, yet they were substantially inferior to their peers that had never been exposed to MDMA. The effects of Ecstasy use during the first two trimesters of pregnancy have not yet been studied. However, hopefully a pregnant woman would choose not to expose her unborn child to this potential risk.