What is the legality of drugs that naturally occur in the human body?
To wit:
dopamine
tryptophan
adrenaline
And I’m sure there are more… seratonin and melatonin?
Can just anyone buy drugs that their body makes naturally? What would be the effects of taking, for example, dopamine? For some reason I seem to remember it being linked with schizophrenic effects.
List of controlled substances in alphabetical order.
http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/schedules/alpha/index.html
dopamine - no
tryptophan - no
adrenaline - no
seratonin - no
melatonin - no
Well, they’re not on the DEA’s controlled substance list, so they’re not actually illegal. But as for being able to buy them OTC, I dunno.
Why would you want unlimited access to dopamine? It’s a neurotrasmitter that increases your heart’s ability to pump blood. If you have low blood pressure, it’s a good idea. Your symapthetic nervous system kicks into high gear when you’re in danger/stressed. Think how you react: racing heart, shallow and fast breathing, stomach clenchs. Dopamine mimics these reactions. But when you have a lot of dopamine in your system, you can’t ‘calm down’. And you do’t want your heart going 120 beats per minute for any sustained amount of time. It will lose it’s rythmn and you won’t like it. Can you imagine taking this stuff like you do Tylenol?
Can just anyone buy drugs that their body makes naturally? What would be the effects of taking, for example, dopamine? For some reason I seem to remember it being linked with schizophrenic effects.
Well, first off, you probably couldn’t ingest some of those substances and actually have them turn up in your body- they would get digested…
Quick List:
dopamine -
You can increase your dopamine level with several classes of drugs. If I recall correctly, L-Dopa (synthetic dopamine) was and probably still is used extensively in the treatment of many psychiatric disorders
tryptophan - no
melatonin - no
Visit any heath food store and you can buy either of these- tryptophan is in any protein supplement, and they generally sell melatonin separately (who knows if it really DOES anything, but it doesn’t need to in order for it to sell).
adrenaline - no
seratonin - no
Again, several prescription drugs are used to raise both of these, although I don’t think they’re actually ingested seratonin or adrenaline…
Oliver Sacks used L-Dope for his patients, and it woke them up from their catatonic states, hence “Awakenings” 
Also, a friend of mine used to take melatonin or something because he thought it helped him to sleep better. Don’t know if it still does…
Hi Shawn!
Tenebras
I know with a lot of brain chemicals, you can’t just “take them”. Many times there’s some sort of blood/brain “barrier” that prevents it from really working. This is why, in many cases, you take a precursor (for instance, 5-HTP, the serotonin precursor), since it won’t be “rejected” as the straight-up chemical would.
You certainly can’t here and I doubt you could in the States either. HGP, renal erythropoiteic factor and testosterone are all restricted substances because of their abuse by ‘sportspeople’. There are any number of drugs produced by the human body that are also heavily controlled, including alcohol.
I’ve never heard this. I thought we lacked the enzyme to make the transformation from lactic acid to ethanol. Could you dig up more info?
Tryptophan is a precurser to both melatonin and serotonin. You find it a lot of food, like bananas and nuts. Tryptophan depletion is a common way of reducing the serotonin turnover in the brain for research purposes. (Keep a rat on a diet with no tryptophan, and study the effects of the decrease of serotonin in the brain.)
Occ is right, serotonin does not penetrate the blood brain barrier, so even if you could buy serotonin and take an oral or injected dose, it would not reach you brain. (Even if serotonin is an important transmitter in the brain, 99% of all serotonin in you body is actually at other places like your heart and stomach.) It is sometime used for treatment of heart disease. But if you’re looking for psychotropic effects, you have to increase your serotonin level in the brain by other means.
If you are healthy, you certainly don’t want to increase either the serotonin or dopamin levels in your brain, it has some nasty side effects.
Melatonin is connected to the so called “circadian rythm”, ie what is sometimes called “the biological clock”. Melatonin affects sleep and wake, and is sometimes used to reduce the effects of jet lag, although the efficiency is dubious to say the least.
@jacobsta: Disturbances in the dopamin are indeed related to schizophrenia, and most treatment of schizophrenia and other psychosis involves blocking of the dopamine receptors in the brain.
There are drugs available that treat imbalances of these chemicals, and any other chemicals your body needs. I take several, due to my endocrine system being generally good for nothing on its own. Some imbalances are treated by giving the patient a drug that contains or mimics the relevant chemical, others are treated by giving a patient a drug that increases or decreases the sensitivity of the receptors for the chemical. The latter is often necessary because, as occ points out, your brain may not respond at all to simply ingesting the chemical itself.
Contrary to what jacobsta said, you can get adrenaline in a pill. I know because I take it. It is available by perscription only, as are almost all drugs relating to hormones and brain chemicals. This is a good thing. Believe me, you DO NOT WANT any of the natural chemical levels in your body to be out of whack. A healthy person should not attempt to tweak things, and a person suffering from a genuine medical imbalance should be under the care of a trained specialist.
As others have affirmed, high dopamine levels (or a high sensitivity to dopamine) produces schizophrenia-like symptoms. Ergot and its derivatives increase the brain’s sensitivity to dopamine; many of the ill effects of ergot poisoning can be attributed to this.
I have heard on this very board of people abusing adrenaline, believing that it will give them the edge in a fight. I consider this unlikely. If you take adrenaline in a pill or as an injection, your body will reduce its natural production of adrenaline to compensate. This makes it difficult to boost your adrenaline levels very far above what is normal. However, your body will not know when the pill or shot is due to wear off and so will not be prepared with natural adrenaline when it does. Anyone who takes adrenaline supplements must be constantly on guard for the signs of acute adrenal withdrawl, which is the nasty and potentially fatal “crash” that comes when your body runs out of adrenaline.
Thanks for the responses all… I shoulda known the testosterone one, heh.
FTR, melatonin is a chemical released by the pineal gland, supposedly, which also, supposedly, induces sleep. Whether or not taking it helps anything is beyond me.
To all those who question melatonin’s efficacy in inducing sleep, I can say from experience that it does indeed do just this. I used to have a lot of trouble falling asleep and I used melatonin to help. It’s not a sleeping pill in the sense of what we normally think of as this chemical which puts your lights out for a drug-induced, mostly dreamless sleep. With melatonin the feeling of sleepiness comes on very naturally and the sleep itself is very natural. How do I know this wasn’t simply a placebo effect? I have a few reasons, but since this isn’t really what the thread is about I’ll quit hijacking it now.
[hijack]
As far as not wanting to through hormone levels out of wack goes, I think it’s interesting that one of the most intense (INTENSE) drugs that people use is DMT, which produces brief but absolutely unreal psychedelic episodes when smoked, but is always present in measurable quantities in your brain.
[/hijack]
Oh, please don’t tease me about DMT-- I’ve wanted to try that for years! I’ve never known anyone who has tried it, known anyone who knew anyone that tried it, knwon anyone who knew anyone who had it, etc ad nauseum.
sigh
You’ll note the question about “tryptophan” though… 
This is too funny. Apparently Cyn has never exercized before. Personally, I can raise my heart rate into the 160’s and hold it there for over three hours. Of course, there’s no dopamine involved, just glycogen.
Adrenaline or Epinephrine is the ingredient in Primatine Mist. The asthma medicine.
Also when my doctor was in the process of changing my blood pressure meds off of a beta blocker my pulse went up to 120 a minute resting. It was concerning but it isn’t necessarily dangerous.
It isn’t good but no it won’t kill you, just an indication something is wrong. I just got dependent on the beta blockers.
This is what I get when I try to keep it short and sweet.
Although you are correct on a personal level: I never exercize.
Adult dosage is 1-5 micrograms/kg/minute IV titrated to desired response with >10% patients suffering from ectopic heartbeat, conduction abnormalities, widened QRS complexes and ventricular arrhythmias.
I take melatonin to help me fall asleep at night. It takes twice the bottle’s recommended dose to knock me out. I’ve noticed a result, but I will cheerfully admit that I am just as vulnerable to the placebo effect as any other human.
Following up on the Ergot mold: Ergotamine Tartrate is the (one of) key ingredient in many pain killers and the base , in conjunction with lysergic acid, to Lysergic acid Diethylimide. (LSD) which directly effects serotonin levels causing an altered perception of, well, everything, nothing, both at once…
I was talking more about the fact that alcohol is produced naturally in the digestive tract as a result of microbial fermentation. That’s why we have the capacity to digest acohol after all. The body is still producing alcohol even if it’s not doing it directly.
As for converting lactic acid to alcohol, that’s appparently possible as well. Alcohol is converted initially to acetaldehyde via alcohol dehydrogenase, and the reaction is totally reversible. Acetaldehyde is then converted to lactate via aldehyde dehydrogenase, a reaction that is slighly reversible. With high enough levels of lactic acid it’s possible to produce some alcohol internally.