Re cocaine/crack, heroin and meth. What exactly is the positive effect of these drugs that makes them so attractive and addictive? I’ve been drunk more than once in my life, and I did a few bong hits in college in the late 70’s, so I’m familar with those highs. I’m also familar to some degree with the effects of Oxycontin etc. from when I used them a few years ago when I broke/sprained my coccyx.
In all these cases the high is pleasurable (in very different ways) on the front end but, before too long as the drug works itself through your system, it’s just “meh” or even “bleh” (in the case of alcohol). After the fact I have no inclination to chase this experience again and again, and getting somewhat drunk at a party will usually put me off alcohol for at least month or two.
People who are addicted to these drugs must (I’m assuming) have a different (assumedly better and more compelling) experience that brings them back. What are cocaine/crack, heroin and meth highs like that make them so addictive, or is it really more the person’s individual brain chemistry, and not the drug, that does this ?
I don’t think there’s any argument that particular drugs affect different people in different ways, making them either more or less addictive. When it comes to alcohol, for example, I’ve always been able to take it or leave it, but if they started selling Vicodin over the counter, I might have a bit of an issue.
The important thing is to find the drug that works for you. You’ll never find out what crack and meth are like on a message board, so take the train uptown and talk to that shady gent on the corner. Do you have a nephew in college? Call him up and ask for some connections. Or do you have a coworker who’s always late, with dark circles under his eyes and disheveled hair? Make friends. Remember, the drugs aren’t just gong to hop into your lap – you have to make it happen.
Hmmm…I’ve never looked at the illegal acquisition of controlled drugs in such a proactive, “can-do” context. If I don’t score I feel like I’d be letting you down somehow.
Truly addictive drugs don’t have to do anything especially positive to keep you coming back; when you’re addicted, you feel like crap all the time if you don’t take it. You’ll take a minimal “don’t feel it” dose just to make withdrawal syndrome go away. Add to that the ecstasy of crack, the invincibility of cocaine, or the nirvana of heroin, and their lasting appeal is assured.
When a susceptible individual first encounters their drug of choice, they often later describe the experience as feeling like “a hug from God”. All life’s cares and fear and anxieties and sorrows and pains are suddenly swept away, and for the first time the person feels like they’re going to be all right, that they’re good enough, smart enough, and that, doggone it, people like them!
This sort of feeling tends to make these people want to have the same feelings again and again and again and again and again and etc.
Unfortunately repeated experiences lose the strength and intensity of the first high, and eventually the person ends up using to try to stop feeling so much like crap all the time.
Opiates, for example, just hapen to be the perfect shape to form the same chemical bonds in our heads as…most of the other things that give up pleasure. Specifically sex.
The problem starts when the body, noting the excess of pleasure inducing chemicals, stops making them on it’s own. Hence the pain of withdrawal.
Addiction still isn’t all that well understood. I hate to say it, but you cannot ever really understand if you have never been addicted to a substance. It is outside of the normal range of experience. A moderately good analogy would be a computer virus that hijacks normal operation of a computer and causes it to dedicate substantial resources for something that it is not meant to do at the expense of other things.
There has been a lot of work done on different “feedback loops” that cause the brain to demand a certain drug at the expense of all other activities. There is also the purely physical component that means that the use will get sick and maybe even die (in the case of chronic alcohol addiction) if a steady stream of the substance is not delivered.
They affect how neurotransmitters, mostly dopamine, is produced/received/perceived by your neurons. Most drugs do this somewhat differently. A very simple way to say this is that dopamine levels are increased. This is what one typically associates with “pleasure”.
I was briefly hooked on hydrocodone when I was in 10th grade, following a severe broken arm that required surgery. They had me on 10/650s, as I recall, after the operation. A month later, when much to their chagrin I’d taken every one of the pills, they bumped me down to 5/xxx.
Hydrocodone just made me feel absolutely fabulous. Euphoria is a great place to be.
I beg to differ. Drugs and the way they work, and their dangers, are all too well understood.
To greatly simplify, our brain chemistry works so that it rewards behavior that it thinks is good for you. If you’re hungry, then eating feels nice and you get rewarded. If you have to go to the toilet, then doing just that feels nice, not just releived, but your brain rewards you with some ‘drugs’. When you try to solve a puzzle, and after some effort, you manage to do it, you’re rewarded with ‘drugs’ again. All sorts of things that you do affect the way you feel in different ways.
By far the biggest danger of drugs, whether they are physically addictive or not, is that they give you pleasure without the effort. They mess up your normal reward system, so that you no longer care about food, friends, solving problems - the only problem you’re going to want to solve is how to get your next reward. Obviously, anything that gives you reward, including computer games and food, can get addictive this way, but taking drugs directly triggers your natural reward system and therefore is a lot stronger (even a nice response to one of your SD posts can be addictive in this way).
Now different drugs do different things, and your brain reacts differently to them. The closer they are to directly inducing the reward system, the more dangerous they are. Some drugs just alter perception, and they are therefore usually less dangerous. But everything can by psychologically addictive - alcohol, because although it doesn’t give you the instant reward, it raises the drug in your brain that makes you feel good about yourself artificially (which happens to be the same drug that makes you sleepy - both serotonine). Each drug has its own effects and side effects, and if you look on the web you’ll find all of them described in detail.
What makes all this even more tricky, is that your brain has a natural balance it tries to maintain because if such a balance is disturbed the brain’s functions can easily get messed up. As mentioned above, if you artificially raise your general feel good drug (serotonine), then the brain may slowly stop making that drug by itself, increase the speed at which it removes this drug and so on. This is why for instance therapy against depression can never be based on medication alone - behavior needs to be altered so that the brain gets into normal gear again and enough natural stimulants occur to keep a normal level by itself.
If this doesn’t happen, the brain will simply become ever more dependent on the drug until it no longer helps. Safer anti-depressant drugs are therefore those that only slow down the uptake of serotonine that is produced by the brain itself. But in order for them to work, you still need to undertake activities that produce it. In short, the drugs will help you get out of the passivity and reinforce positive behavior (note however that you’re usually not allowed to drink alcohol when you take anti-depressants, and this is for good reason).
Note, finally, that some of your stress hormones can only be burnt by physical activity. That is why exercise is healthy for both body and mind (which obviously aren’t all that separate anyway).
My stance in all this is that drugs suck. If you use them at all, you have to be very strong to be able to use them properly, have a very good life, and only use them once or twice, just to expand your horizon, your experience. It may be fun to learn how to smell colours. But that’s most definitely something you can live without. And you never really know how you’ll react to them - people who are sensitive to drugs can get into a psychosis as a result of them. I know someone who experienced this, and it is no fun. Once you’ve been admitted to a mental hospital, your career opportunities are even more altered than your state of mind.
I prefer to experience pleasure the way nature intended, and keep a check on keeping my body in balance. So far, it feels great. I see a lot of people happily using marijuana, or getting drunk every once in a while, but I also see enough people getting addicted to either one, and I have never felt they had one bit more fun than I did. Added to that, I remember the fun a lot better.
Don’t kid yourself. I have plenty of academic work in neuroscience under my belt. I dropped out of an Ivy League Ph.D. program, in behavioral neuroscience but I completed all the course-work. Nothing in the brain is that well understood. Also, I am a recovering alcoholic that was paralyzed by the inability to quit despite internal suffering and external consequences. You may referring to the causes of addiction in a vauge, rambling kind of way by I am referring to the root causes and definition.
Just chiming in to support Shagnasty. I trained under Sol Snyder, the discoverer of the opiate receptor. I’m also recovering myself. What we know about the neurobiology of the disease of addiction is miniscule compared to what we don’t know.
Its not the pleasurable aspects of the drug experience that are the most important factor in making some of them addictive. Its the physical aspects. For example, nicotine addiction is mainly caused by the fact that your body becomes dependent upon nicotine. Nicotine dampens down your nervous system, so that your brain has to send a stronger signal to your muscles to acheive the same effect. Keep on taking nicotine and your brain becomes accustomed to it, and sends stronger signals all the time. Stop taking nicotine, and your brain keeps on sending those strong signals, leading to feelings of too much energy, heightened emotions, and cravings. Amphetamines and cocaine can produce a similar effect, where your body actually needs the drug to function normally.
Addiction, for most people, has very little to do with the pleasurable aspects of drugs. My girlfriend has taken crack cocaine once. She certainly didn’t describe it as an “intensity of pleasure completely outside the normal range of human experience”. She said it had pleasurable aspects, but also not so pleasurable ones. She also said she could see how easily people get addicted to it, when you come down you crave more of it. I’ve taken ecstasy, which i definately would describe as an “intensity of pleasure completely outside the normal range of human experience”. I still take it every now and again. I’m not addicted to it, although i am addicted to nicotine, despite the fact that ecstasy is a million times more pleasurable than nicotine. Why? Because nicotine is physically addictive, while ecstasy is not.
Nicotine is one of the most physically addictive drugs out there, for the reasons you’ve given. I think I read somewhere that based on similar dosis, nicotine is about 1000 times more addictive than heroine. If you’d take as much nicotine as there is heroine in a typical shot, you’d die. In fact, if you’d directly infuse the nicotine of just one cigaret into your blood, you’d die.
@Shagnasty: I’m sure there’s a lot of detail we don’t know yet, but the fundamental principles of most drugs are pretty well known. I think you’re letting a specialist’s view of the world get in the way of the bird-eye’s. We do really know quite a lot of detail on how most drugs work. A lot of this has been uncovered in the last decade, each year more than the year before.
One important aspect in addiction is the difference in personalities. For instance, say that ADHD really describes a fine line of a certain way the brain works, from very much not ADHD, to very much ADHD. The closer omeone is to the very much side of the scale, the more attractive a drug becomes that slows the brain down and thereby weakens the sensory inputs, with which an ADHD person can generally not deal very well.
One interesting tidbit I came across (must have been in Natural Prozac, by Dr. Robertson) was that chicken contains something that has the exact same effect on the brain as cocaine (which speeds up your brain by raising dopamine levels, one of the reasons why it is linked to creativity). Eat 300 grams of chicken, and you will have the same effect as a small sniff of coke.
