Hallucinogens, painkillers, depressants, stimulants. Illegal and legal drugs alike come in all shapes and sizes, in liquid, gas and solid forms, and can be found in a cabinet at a doctor’s office, the commercial refrigerators of a 7-Eleven, or in the jacket pocket of a shady businessman. In every person’s life, drugs affect you or play a part in some chapter, existing between the lines.
Drugs have an impact not only on individuals and society, but on the economy, amounting to billions of dollars lost in productivity, absenteeism, and death. Drugs affect men, women, and children from all walks of life. And there is no clear answer on how to deal with the problem.
However, on an individual level, there’s a lot that can be done about how drugs affect you. Treatments and therapies exist to help people turn their lives around and start fighting addiction. The physical and mental effects of drug use can be mitigated, and even partially reversed. Over years, diligence and support can turn a tragedy into a story of personal triumph – and all it takes to begin with is the will to take a brave first step into a different kind of living.
But to really fight drugs on an even playing field, you have to understand what they do and how drugs affect you. It’s no secret that drugs affect the mind, but understanding how can give you the comfort and power you need to do something about it, and motivate you to keep moving forward even when times are tough.
Substance Use And The Brain
In essence, all drugs have a distinct negative impact on the brain, and achieve this in much the same way. While drugs can be ingested, inhaled, injected, and otherwise consumed, they all eventually make their way into the bloodstream through one method or another. It’s there that drugs cross the blood-brain barrier – an incredibly selective membrane that usually protects the fluid in the brain and CNS from most things in the bloodstream – and begin to affect the brain.
When drugs affect you they must cross the blood-brain barrier to actually do anything. And that is what makes them dangerous. Drugs mimic the body’s own pre-existing neurotransmitters, and attach themselves to neurons, sending certain signals throughout the brain. For example: cocaine is an incredibly popular drug because it causes an elevated state of happiness, excitement, and motivation.
It does this by binding to transporters in the neurons that are responsible for transmitting dopamine from one cell to the next. Dopamine accumulates in your synapses, prolonging its effects in the pleasure center of the brain.
This interaction with the brain is not what makes cocaine physically dangerous – however, it is what makes cocaine so addictive. This same principle goes for all other cases where drugs affect you, but in different ways. Alcohol and benzodiazepines, for example, are depressants. They are opposite to a stimulant like cocaine, but still addictive.
Alcohol works on three levels, or three separate neurotransmitters, throughout different parts of the brain. It increases the effects of GABA (causing slurred speech and lack of coordination), inhibits glutamate (causing a slowdown in movement and thinking), and increases dopamine release (causing pleasure). By spreading throughout the brain, alcohol will affect your balance, your breathing, your senses, and even your sexual performance.
Yet only one of these effects contributes to the addictive properties of the drug: its effects on the pleasure center of the brain.
Stimulants can excite your body and heighten your senses, depressants can slow you down and make you sluggish, and painkillers like morphine can greatly reduce or eliminate pain signals – but all of these drugs affect your pleasure center in the same way, increasing the release or retention of dopamine in your cells, and causing feelings of pleasure, joy, and euphoria.
These positive emotions mask the darker side effects of each and every drug – namely, their deleterious effects on both mental and physical health, and the nature of addiction as self-destructive behavior.
Stimulants can stop your heart and damage your brain when the drugs affect you. Alcohol greatly damages the liver and kidneys, and leads to cancer. Opioids like morphine and heroin cause respiratory depression, and death through oxygen deprivation. And because of the interaction between these drugs and the pleasure center of the brain, all drug use eventually leads to addiction, unless it stops beforehand.
How Drugs Affect You & Your Thinking
Drug use not only causes feelings of joy, but can damage your mental health and put you on the path of an addictive loop. For example: excessive use of drugs affect you and will corrupt the pleasure center and make most other activities meaningless or unenjoyable. Old habits fall away, and even the most basic wants can slip away in favor of drugs. The biggest difficulty for many who choose to give up addiction is finding something else to make them happy, because continuous drug use makes the brain forget what normal pleasures feel like.
Most drugs affect you and your thinking in other ways, namely dampening your cognitive abilities and cutting into your memory. Frequent black-outs from excessive drug use will also affect your ability to recall even the most basic and recent memories, and prolonged usage leads to both long-term brain damage and higher chances of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and personality disorders like paranoia. If a person has a genetic predisposition towards certain mental health issues, addiction may drive these disorders into the forefront.
Addiction Needs To Be Fought
Addiction exercises a powerful hold over a person’s mind, because of how drugs affect you and the strain on the brain. The pleasure center is highly involved with concepts like will, motivation, and reason – we work hard to satisfy our emotional and physical needs, and addiction overwrites many of those needs with a new protocol.
Driving that out, denying it and building a whole new life around sobriety does not happen overnight, or even just in a matter of a few weeks. It takes months and years, and the journey is harder for some than it is for others. However, while addiction never fully goes away – and resisting any urge to use again is something former addicts have to live with – it does get easier with time. And in time, even the worst days of the addiction can become just another detail in a long life lived well.