Diseases, Disorders information

We’re going to move now into specific substances of abuse. Cocaine has a long history of use. The cocaine problem absolutely preceded George W. Bush’s youthful indiscretions. Actually, it even preceded Henry Hyde’s youthful indiscretions and I almost wish, it’s as old at least as Benjamin Franklin but he was public and he didn’t really stop his indiscretions just for political life and I respect a man like that. Some people would say that our president hasn’t really stopped his youthful indiscretions for his political life either. Cheap nexium without prescription.
But it does show that this is a ubiquitous problem. All classes are affected. Cocaine has really gone through the gamut from people at the highest level of society to the bottom and it tells you that one’s morals, one’s upbringing, one’s wealth, education is no defense against the physiological processes of these substances. So when I talk about cocaine I want us to understand what these physiological processes are.
The neuropharmacology of cocaine has been important for understanding addiction but also for understanding how the brain works and that’s partly why there’s such a big investment in this. Reinforcement is so powerful with cocaine in animal laboratory experiments that rats, given freedom to press a lever to get a full squirt of cocaine into the brain or the bloodstream will press it continuously until they stop eating, stop mating, stop drinking and begin dying in 14 days mostly of cardiopulmonary disease. They also develop rapid infection and 90% will be dead in 30 days and that is the most deadly of the common drugs of illicit use. So that’s an important factor to have in mind. Viagra professional canadian medications.
Administration of drugs that are rewarding isn’t limited to the drugs themselves. How do we know where this happens? Well, we know by putting electrodes into the brain at different places and giving the animal free rein to move around the cage and hit the lever once in awhile and get a little microampere jolt, not to do damage but to see is there a synapse that likes this stimulation.
What we find is there is a nucleus accumbens capsule that is the most potent site of the brain. That is, it takes the least amount of current for self administration to be rewarded so the rats or mice or whatever animal we choose will press that lever again and again to get that little tiny bit of current. So we have a site. We know that lesions of this site will block the acquisition of that self administration behavior. So this is convincing evidence.
What else is involved here? Well, endorphins are not primarily involved. Opiates have actually some bearing on it and we’ll talk about that later but they’re not primarily involved and the anesthesia is not the reason that the animal does this. That’s a peripheral effect.
What about other substances? Well, heroin will yield that kind of rapid self administration too. To get a squirt of heroin, animals like rats will press again and again hundreds of thousands of times in a day believe it or not and if they’re given free rein every time they press they get a squirt, about a third will be dead in a month. So you can now compare cocaine’s lethality to heroin’s lethality which is opposite to what we thought in the ‘80s, by the way. We thought heroin was the real killer and cocaine, you know, yeah it’s fun. Some people get carried away with it. Now we know different.
So we have this problem but there are some other physiologic processes with stimulants of cocaine as well. One is stereotypy. What is stereotypy? It will show up on the boards and it is a process of compulsive repetitive purposeless behavior. In a cat, it might be grooming to the point that the cat actually wears off its fur and digs into its skin and is bleeding from it. In human beings stereotypy with cocaine is pacing around the coffee table in the den where he uses his cocaine and wearing out a track in the shag carpet. Generic pharmacy blog.