…and Listening to Phish Causes Pop-Tart Consumption

The headline on this article declares "Ecstasy affects memory, new international study shows." Now, it doesn't seem implausible that this is true, I guess, but how on earth can you tell on the basis of this kind of questionaire? Without controlling for a whole bunch of other factors, there's some obvious selection bias going on here: the population that chooses to pop rolls and take bonghits regularly is probably rather different from the population at large from the outset, in any number of ways. To actually spot causations, I'd think you'd need a longitudinal study measuring people before and after starting E use. And then figure out whether memory loss was a function of the drug, or of the fact that the user was probably out dancing 'till 8 am the night before.