There are people referred to as “drug burnouts”. Assuming this condition is due mainly to abusing hard drugs what actually happens to your brain to cause this condition? Is it at all reversible?
In this context I’m talking about damage due to hard drugs, not alcohol abuse.
I’m just curious, why do you exclude alcohol abuse from your question in regards to possible brain damage? Alcohol is one of the hardest of the hard drugs.
I wouldn’t know scientifically, but my cousin was once extremely intelligent. Then she became a meth addict for some time. She isn’t all that brilliant any more, I gather.
I asked the same question to myself.
To answer [even with alcohol] your systems begin to degrade, aging or the appearance of aging speeds up and thats it…
This question depending on whether or not you include other factors associated with sustained hard use and/or addiction as part of your question. Any drug abuse can lead to a lifestyle impacts the body and brain. It doesn’t always come through direct cell death during use but it is certainly affected by nutritional or lack thereof and a generally punishing and unhealthy lifestyle.
There aren’t that many drugs that are directly linked to actual nervous system damage although addiction is a nervous system change on its own. Alcohol will certainly do it but it usually takes time and dedication. There are some serious neurological impairments seen in in middle to late stage alcoholics. One is hepatic encephalopathy caused by liver damage and its inability to break down ammonia properly. The effects of that can be severe memory impairment and confusion resembling senile dementia. Two more are wernicke’s syndrome and korsakoff’s psychosis that kill off neurons in the language processing areas of the brain. The first is reversible while the latter two are not.
The last I checked, Ecstasy (MDMA) had good evidence that it could cause permanent brain changes as well. Street meth will also do it because it can destroy just about anything in the mind and body very effectively. It can be made in home labs of various compounds of questionable quality so you could get anything. Inhalants can also cause brain damage by cutting off oxygen to brain cells.
Cocaine and related stimulants aren’t known for inducing permanent effects although there are probably some subtle ones. LSD probably won’t either despite claims to the contrary. You can’t even overdose on LSD in practical terms. Heavy LSD users probably had a few issues going on already. Marijuana is also fairly mild in actual damage. The opiates like heroine and Oxycontin really mess with the endogenous opiate pathways in the brain possibly in a permanent way but they don’t cause what most people would term actual brain damage.
Wernicke’s doesn’t affect the speech and language areas of the brain (Wernicke’s area, both were named for the same Wernicke) and it doesn’t affect speech or language, but eye movements, coordination, and memory. It’s reversible in early stages. Untreated, it progresses to Korsakoff’s. Both it and Korsakoff’s are caused by vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficiency via alcoholism or other forms of malnutrition. Korsakoff’s most well-known symptom is not being able to retain new memories for more than a short period of time (anterograde amnesia), as described in several patients in books by Oliver Sacks.
My guess is that it’s possible to use alcohol at a very low level whereas with typical street drugs, use almost invariably ramps up to very high levels.
Because alcohol is actually a physically toxic substance and it’s long term impacts on the body are relatively well studied and well understood vs other drugs. I’m wondering if non-alcohol “hard” drugs (by themselves) can cause permanent brain damage and how does this work?
The main question is if you get a long term user who exhibits impaired mental functioning off crack or meth or heroin or massive, chronic cannabis use and have them live healthy and drug free for several years will they recover 100 % of their mental function or not? Is there a no return point?
I highly doubt you can find a cite for this statement.
What I’ve seen is that some drugs can bring out psychoses in people. I won’t say they cause psychosis, because drugs affect different people in different ways.
I’ve known people who spent many years as opiate addicts and have not had their intelligence affected in any noticeable way. Really the thing about drug use (and I’ll include alcohol in that) is that it’s a gamble. Some people can use vast amounts of a drug and not suffer any noticeable ill effects. Other people can be permanently and obviously damaged from the same amount of use, or less. Because drugs affect different people in different ways.
[Frye]I already did!![/Frye]
Rather than “mild in actual damage,” cannabis has been shown to encourage new brain cell growth.
Really? Is there a cite for that?
Sure.
You can google this and find a bunch. I read it in several major news sources too.
That doesn’t appear to say anything about cannabis, but it does tell us something about a synthetic “THC-like compound.”
Yeah, I admit to slightly goofing up.
The link I actually posted I did not read til after the post. The news stories, I believe, had called it cannabinoid compounds, which I didn’t bother to check. Another reason to be careful with the news!
I have another argument, though, not about pot regenerating brain cells, but about not harming them–since brain cells have cannabinoid receptors, this means these compounds are supposed to be in the body at some level. The cell would not have a receptor for something that harms it directly would it? I am no expert biologist, but it seems right. Am I wrong?
Well yeah, you are wrong or misguided. That paper will get you an F in a science class. Logic like that won’t get you anywhere in neuroscience. Your car runs on gas right? I guess that means cars are impervious to anything you do with gasoline in or around them. It doesn’t work that way.
Most drugs work on endogenous receptors, including alcohol, LSD, Ecstacy, and especially the opiates like heroine and oxycontin. That doesn’t mean you can’t totally screw up the reason they actually exist by force-feeding them through self-experimentation. Casual use of marijuana probably isn’t that terrible for you but do not ever listen to the scientific claims on pro-pot websites. The logic they give often straddles the line between tortured and completely false.
See the recent Cracked.com article on 5 Pro-Marijuana Arguments that Aren’t Helping.
As an analogy just because we have bitter taste receptors it does not mean that all bitter tastes are OK. Some will kill you dead. Receptors for a molecule does not mean it is equal to being safe. We have receptors for alcohol and it’s a biological toxin.
Amphetamines cross the blood-brain barrier, so they definitely cause permanent brain damage (study here) at various levels. A colleague of mine has submitted a grant proposal in this field and I was fascinated when she told me, so I looked up a couple of papers.
The data on opiate usage and brain damage is coming in. There are studies that show that opiates do cause changes in the brain. In contrast, patients with chronic pain patients also show changes in the brain that may go away once the pain is treated. I have a feeling that there is a lot more work to do when it comes to discussing long-term opiate usage, chronic pain and brain damage.
A study on marijuana and humans shows that that changes may be reversible. Other studies say that usage in the developing brain can cause long term damage.
Personally, I have a feeling that persons seeking out drugs and have addictive personalities may have structural anomalies in the brain that are not seen in persons without addictive personalities. This may account for the differences seen in addicts vs the non-addict controls used in the above studies. This study touches on what I am talking about, but I don’t discount the effect of drugs on the brain, just that there may be an underlying structural/functional anomaly that would predispose one to being an addict.
There are some studies suggesting that marijuana can worsen schizophrenia in people who are already genetically predisposed in that direction
I’ve heard that methamphetamine can cause brain damage in a couple of different ways, and that recovery from it can take a couple of years. I don’t know how reliable this evidence is.