Thinking Beyond Science

Adolescence is a time of growing independence. As the pre frontal cortex matures, teenagers are beginning to to explore the world on there own. But there judgement and reason are still not fully developed, which makes them especially risky and they experiment with addicted drugs and alcohol.

Addiction is disease of the brain that effects thinking, emotion and behaviour. In this sense it is like many other brain diseases like depression and schizophrenia, only here the pathogen are the drugs of abuse themselves, acting on a vulnerable brain.

Addiction researchers focus on the neural circuitry in the brain’s reward pathway – the network of neurons where our desire arises. Flowing alone this network, continuously stimulating our pleasures and appetites, are neural transmitters that one neuron uses to talk to another. Addictive drugs work by altering the level of these neural transmitters and slowly capturing the reward pathway.

All addictive drugs are Trojan horses, all the chemicals that are addictive are mimics i.e. they look like a neurotransmitter. Many drugs mimic one of the most powerful neurotransmitters in the reward pathway, Dopamine. In the normal brain, dopamine travel across the synapse, stimulate receptors in the target neuron and then it is quickly reabsorbed by tiny molecular vacuum cleaners called dopamine transporters.

When cocaine is abused, trillions of cocaine molecules surge into the synapses, clogging the vacuum cleaners, artificially boosting the level of dopamine in brain, producing a cocaine high. Cocaine, which gets into brain chemically, gives your brain more dopamine, for longer amount of time then it has ever experienced before. With the experience of first drug high, dopamine level rise above and beyond the greatest physiological experience we can have.

Once the drugs and the alcohol are introduced into the addicted brain, the natural system is down regulated i.e. the things that are supposed to make us feel good goes into hibernation. The person has a feeling of hopelessness such that the only thing he can possibly do to have semblance of pleasure in your life is to re administer the drug.

The first high can be exhilarating, but after repeated drug abuse, dark side of addiction begins to take its toll. The brain responds to the repetitive use of cocaine and the dopamine surging in synapse by cutting away receptors in the neurons that are the dopamine’s target. Without the receptors, dopamine can’t stimulate the neuron and the drug high is reduced but so is enjoyment of all normal pleasures as well.

Like cocaine, alcohol is dangerously addicted. One of the major reasons why alcohol dependence is running in families is because people inherit genes that impact on how their brain functions. But a low response to alcohol, is associated with high risk of alcoholism regardless of your family background.

A critical part of the brain has literally been hijacked by drugs of abuse. It’s been rewired so that behaviour is now focused on life of obtaining and using drugs. The abuser’s this behaviour becomes automatic and the trick for the person to recover is to stop these automatic responses, One way is to recruit other parts of the brain to diminish the effect.