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Critical Review



Ecstasy makes an interesting topic for public discourse due to its increasing popularity and questionable side effects. The public as consumers of the media must decide if any information given about this topic is accurate and reliable. In this paper three articles will be analyzed. The first one, “Bill to Increase Penalties on the Drug Ecstasy” by AnneMarie Tavella, deals with the legal aspects of the drug and argues that a bill should be passed to change possession of 15 grams of MDMA to a class X felony, which requires at least six to 30 years of imprisonment without the option of probation. The second article “A Dose of Generation X” by Paul Glanzrock claims that ecstasy is safe for clinical use in treating Parkinson’s disease and relieving the emotional distress of terminal cancer patients. The last article called “Fine Lines” by Andrew Sullivan, questions the definition of drugs in general from caffeine to crystal meth and argues that taking ecstasy is morally the same thing as taking Prozac. With a closer look at these articles the reader can find out what standpoint the author is taking and draw conclusions about which aspects of ecstasy are true and trustworthy.

Three different perspectives of the chemical MDMA or better know as ecstasy is given in these articles. Tavella writes about the legal aspects of the drug. He sites in his work Representatives and law enforcement groups to back up his opinion that ecstasy needs stiffer penalties. The reason why he believes this is because “It’s led to many deaths” (Tavella 1) and in the last paragraph of the article he states, “You get the instant high, but in the long run the effects are pretty detrimental.”(1) The long run effects he’s talking about are how the drug damages seritonin-containing neurons, affecting emotion, memory, sleep and pain. In using legal figureheads to back his claim and describing how...