What would happen if you got a person addicted to cocaine, while they were asleep?
What I mean is this: somehow give a person regular doses of cocaine while they were sleeping (without their knowledge, of course)…enough to create a chemical addiction.
What would happen?
Would they crave … sleep???
coke negates sleep.
Administering any signifigant dose would awaken the person.
FWIW, most people already crave sleep daily.
I think the OP is asking about how a objectless chemical dependence manifests itself in a subject’s behavior. By my limited reading, addiction is related to a object, such as a drug, or gambling, or sex, or whatever.
I have found nothing about this sort of thing. I’m sure it’s purely my ignorance of the correct terms that I have failed. With hope, a behaviorist will be along shortly to tell us all about some landmark study and we’ll be enlightened.
So… the idea here is that one day you wake up and you are addicted, with all the symptoms and side effects.
…without having any idea what you’re addicted TO, and perhaps no clear idea that you are in fact ADDICTED.
…is this what you’re asking?
Well, addictions vary. The side effects and symptoms are not the same for all drugs. Since the OP mentions cocaine, we will go with the known symptoms: depression, some physical illness, and a craving for the drug in question.
If the person in question didn’t know he was addicted, much less to what, it seems like the “craving” would take the form of an irritable restlessness… wanting something without knowing what it was you wanted.
Depression and physical illness would, of course, be unchanged.
There could be some question about craving, of course. A behaviourist might well argue that since you didn’t know you were addicted, how could you crave anything? Consequently, you might well interpret the symptoms differently than someone who knows he’s addicted.
Illness is subjective, after all. One man’s high is another man’s “yeesh, I feel weird.”
All these years I’ve just attributed this to a general, existential angst.
Back when I used to work at a drug rehab clinic, we had one “client” who disappeared on us. Well, that’s not an unusual occurance, but she turned up several months later with a very interesting tale.
Seems she had some sort of stroke or brain-damaging incident that gave her amnesia (she was not, of course, able to recall how her lack of memory came to be). Somehow or other, she wound up in the hospital where, in addition to various other medical problems, she was plagued for several days by muscle spasms, nasal congestion, diarrhea, body aches, and various other symptoms no good cause had been found for.
A month later, the “Jane Doe” was identified and family members showed up. It was then everyone on the medical team learned she was a long-term heroin addict. She learned it to - then forgot it again about three minutes later. (Repeat several hundred times)
Upshot? She felt like crap for a few days during withdrawal, but didn’t remember she was an addict. Once it was out of her system she seemed “cured” - she just never thought about getting high, never remembered getting high, etc. Whenever she pulled out the notebook she kept with important facts about herself (like birthdate, address, telephone number, medical history, etc.) she would be surprised (again) to learn of her addiction history.
As you might guess by now, her memory never functioned normally again. She was rehabilitated to the point of being able to dress herself and carry on a casual conversation, but was never thereafter truly able to care for herself.
But, relevant to the OP - at least in this case, once the withdrawal symptoms were over, she literally didn’t remember she had ever been an addict. Not sure lack of memory is a good tradeoff for cure of addiction. Both seem to be very nasty conditions.
Of course, that’s just one anecdote. But food for thought.
Crack cocaine addicts will experience a mild high (a small release of the chemicals that the cocaine itself will release in abundance) between the time they expect the drug and when they get it. For instance, if an addict goes to buy crack he will get a small buzz between the time he buys the crack and when he actually gets to smoke it.
Given that, the subject in the OP will always want to go to sleep.
But do you think the subject would “know” that sleep would fix the symptoms? I mean would there be any association between sleep and relief?
Might this spur an addiction to sleeping pills also???
That is one hell of a germane anecdote Mr. Broomstick. “Useful anecdote” is quite the oxymoron around the SD these days. Good one.
I’m not sure that higher brain functions are necessary for Pavlovian conditioning. The subject wouldn’t have to “know.”
Addiction is divided into physical and psychological each with a 0-4 scale 0 being no addiction.
Cocaine is a physical 1 and psychological 4. Withdrawal will cause minor physical discomfort for a day even after long use. The psychological withdrawal can be devastating.
The only compound that has a 4 on the physical scale is alcohol. One can die from unsupported withdrawal
What are the specific scale terms? I’d love to look up this measure for other substances.
I think this is correct.
The premise is that they are an addict without ever realizing they were high? In any drug addiction, there’s more to it than the physical dependency. I mean, if that’s all there was to it, addiction woulod be pretty easy to lick.
One of things that makes it hard for addicts to stop using is called euphoric recall. Addicts will remember what the high feels like, and crave it, while also remembering the ‘good parts’ about getting loaded. It’s selective memory that disregards the ‘bad parts’. (i.e., the consequences) Addicts crave not only the euphoria from the drug, but also ‘the life’.
You wouldn’t have that here. There would be no euphoria to recall, no lifestyle to miss, no learned behaviour to overcome. The subject would probably only percieve an illness that would pass a few days after you stopped slipping them the drugs…
My understanding was that barbituates fall into roughly the same category. Or at least so my professor on drug chemistry claimed while relating a story about a cat and a medical class.
I think this is very true except I would say that all there is to addiction is things other than the physical dependency. My personal experience is that one of the most damaging modern beliefs is the power of addiction.
I think that in my time working with substance abusers I never met anyone using a substance to avoid the effects of stopping. Your description explains all the behavioural triggers that lead to habituation and I think you have correctly identified why the OP’s presumption of addiction is erroneous.
I’m sure a little research would find that many patients who require long term opiate treatment can stop immediately. In fact the heroin addicted Vietnam vets confirm the same point. Many landed on the West Coast having been “addicts” a day or two ago and never used again.
In terms of withdrawal I may add that picunurse is correct. Big time alcohol abusers going cold turkey can die at the drop of a hat. Most junkies have the equivalent of a cold compounded by sooky behaviour. I must admit I never dealt with crack addicts.
Cocaine addiction is mainly psychological, there really is very little physical addiction. Also it is harder than you would think to get addicted to, its addictive qualities could be likened to say gambling or shopping but with the added addiction of the euphoria. I think that someone who was unaware they were taking cocaine would not miss at all as they would not be aware of its presence. The main ‘pull’ of cocaine is also the lifstyle surrounding it, it is a lifestyle drug. What I mean by this is that the trappings of the cocaine lifestyle are what contribute to its appeal: the ritual of chopping and snorting, the paraphanalia that goes with it, the status it is perceived to imply. Crack cocaine on the other hand is far more addictive, a single hit of crack to a first time user will leave them craving for more almost immediatley in fact the buzz for the long term user pretty much comes from quenching your need, much like nicotine. Although crack leaves the user with a craving which is exceptionally intense it is fairly short lived, there are little or no physical side effects but the mental addiction can last for years, again much like nicotine. The only drugs which could be administered whilst the ‘victim’ was sleeping would be from the opiate family (coke would almost certainley wake them up immediatley as i’d imagine delivery would have to be IV) and these would certainley lead to a full on inexplicable withdrawel symptoms. The thing is these would be relativley easy to get over as the main hurdle in overcoming addiction to any substance is the reason why you start in the first place. Basically people usually get addicted to coke (less so) crack/heroin (more so) due to a deep seated problem. Without the problem the need for taking the drug is diminished, the physical addiction is pretty much the easiest part.
If i’m right the OP is trying to find out if its possible to make someone addicted to sleep? basically I doubt it as there wouldn’t really be anything for the person to connect the withdrawel being diminished to sleeping as the point of relief would be experienced whilst unconscious.