Greetings.
I’ve often heard, anecdotally - and read in a newspaper editorial this past week - that one use of methamphetamine makes permanent changes to the brain’s chemistry. The paper was in Carlsbad, New Mexico, on Saturday or Sunday, but I can’t find it online for purposes of a cite.
This seems like a Reefer Madness sort of thing - “One toke and you’re an addict forever!” Googling “methamphetamine” and “permanent” dug up only long-term results. Is this a fact?
As a one time neuroscience and psychopharmacology PhD student, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true in the most nitpicky sense. I would be surprised if anyone could show it consistently and demonstrate any significant effect on anything.
Basically what you are asking is if, with the most sophisticated measuring equipment possible, could we detect a in an individual before and after using only one and only dose of methamphetamine.
This question has tons of problems that are probably insurmountable:
You probably can’t compare across individuals because individual differences are great enough to wash out any tiny effects of this size.
What is the dose size of the methamphetamine? I think that would be a crucial factor and yet it isn’t specified in the question.
Things like caffeine and cocaine operate in a somewhat similar matter. Why aren’t they included?
What type of change are you looking for and are the appropriate controls in place?
Given an omnipotent scientist, you MIGHT be able to find some receptor change that is rather permanent for first-time methamphetamine exposure. However, permanent brain changes for low frequency drug use are remarkably hard to show and I have only seen somewhat reasonable evidence for a few (Ecstasy may or may not be one). I say the evidence is likely bunk.
I wonder what you could find, if you looked hard enough, for 1 use of aspirin, or morphine, or propofol, or haldol, or prozac, or…
Shagnasty: It’s so sketchy because meth is the media darling of the 2000s that crack was of the 1980s. Anything goes, at least in the popular press, and the consequences be damned.
How Not To Report About Meth, by Jack Shafer
Crack Then. Meth Now., by Jack Shafer
Check out the links in the end notes on each of those articles.
Also remember that Methamphetamine is sometimes prescribed in pill form, even to children, as an ADHD or weight loss medication under the brand name Desoxyn… but it’s A-Ok then. :rolleyes:
This is unfair, and I’m saying that as an opponent of the War on Drugs. First, many illegal drugs have recognized medicinal uses. Second, it’s a hell of a lot better to get drugs from regulated and competent manufacturers than from a couple of morons cooking in their trailer.
No, in context of methamphetamine having life-changing detrimental effects form one use as an argument against it in mass propaganda (which the OP is obviously referring to) it’s a valid counter-argument. If the medical community feels that in some cases methamphetamine is appropriate as a treatment of psychiatric or other medical conditions, obviously the detrimental effect of first use does not outweigh the benefits thereof in every case.
Now, I have heard what the OP is describing in many contexts, THC, MDMA, methamphetamine, crack cocaine, heroin and perhaps you have not. The first use argument is always the same “Even trying ___ once will have permanent effects on your body that will affect you for the rest of your life”. Technically that is a true statement. It is, in the purest technical sense, a tautological question. Passage of time itself has permanent effects on your body that will affect you for the rest of your life, regardless of what else you do during that time. Now, getting back to the OP, what is the question? Disregarding the fact that the answer to the pure question is always true regardless of substance, the OP is in essence asking “Is methamphetamine significantly different in the strength and consequential effect as compared to other substances upon first use?”.
My answer to that is “It is a prescribed medication for ADHD and weight loss”, implying that its detrimental effect upon first use and controlled use thereafter should be roughly in the same ballpark as that of other ADHD and weight loss medications. Amphetamines, methylphenidate, straterra, bupropion, caffeine, etc. will not have any significant positive or negative lasting side effect in the long term from one dose in most cases, as expected of any mass-marketed pharmaceutical.
If two morons in a bathtub cooking methamphetamine produce pure methamphetamine (which is what the question is about), then equivalent dose that is equivalently delivered done illegally on the street and that which is prescribed by a doctor will be identical in its effects. Of course, street drugs are rarely as pure as pharmaceutical, doses controlled, or delivery methods safe and effective - but that is for another GQ or GD question.
Ah, the whirligig of time. Methamphetamine was also the media darling of the 1960s. Anyone recall Speed kills?
I thought of that the second I saw this thread had garnered more responses. I’m too used to knees jerking in one specific way, I suppose.
This is one person’s experience I witnessed first hand. Some important factors to consider: this girl was not the strongest link in the chain emotionally to begin with; and she was smoking the stuff, not taking it in a controlled time release manner.
While I was living in Hawaii, I was friends with another military dependent who lived with her husband and three kids in the quarters next door to ours. This girl was very young (just turned 21) and had had three kids in three years. She got frustrated being a stay at home mom, so she got a job as a stripper, which is where she was introduced to “ice”. Shortly after this, they were assigned larger quarters on base and moved from the ones next to us. I would babysit for them from the time she left for work at 3 until her husband got home from work at 5:30 or so. After a few months of this, she found a babysitter who lived closer on base (thank goodness!) and I didn’t have as much contact with her, but still saw her 2 or 3 times a week. She kept her use hidden for a good amount of time, but then her husband was sent to Airborne School back on the mainland and she absoutely lost control of it. Her weight dropped alarmingly and she was always a nervous wreck. I was terrified of the stuff and quit seeing as much of her after she yelled at me a few times for trying to discuss her using it so much.
Around 2-3 months after her husband left for the mainland, I stopped by her quarters and no one was home. I saw one of the neighbors and asked about her. My friend was in a mental hospital lockdown, her children were in foster care and her husband had been called back from school to attend to his family. The previous night, the neighbor had heard screaming from my friend’s quarters and gone over to investigate. Every door in the house was open and all the lights were on, and my friend is standing stark naked in the middle of the living room screaming at the top of her lungs while ripping her hair out in handfulls. With her three children under the age of five cowering on the floor watching. The neighbor had tried to reason with her with no success. Other neighbors had called the MP’s.
When her husband got home, I received a lot of blame because “I was older and should have been able to talk to her about what she was doing.” She had not paid any household bills (car payment, furniture payments, credit card bills, etc.) and had spent both the majority of her husband’s pay as well as all of the not insubstantial money she made stripping on ice.
Working in a bar, I have seen people who have lost the battle of addition to meth after the first time they tried it. I have also seen people use it recreationally for years with no apparent ill effects. Does it cause instant changes in brain chemistry? I don’t know. It can cause instant changes in personality, and it scares the hell out of me.