Drug Addiction Flashcards
What is the history of drugs over the centuries?
People have always used drugs and always will
What is drug addiction?
Addiction is a chronic, often relapsing brain disease
that causes compulsive drug seeking and use, despite
harmful consequences to the addicted individual and
to those around them.
Why do people take drugs?
feel good, self medication, perform better, curiosity
What are the 4 stages of drug use?
Experimentation, regular use, risky use/abuse, addiction
What is the experimentation stage of drug use?
The voluntary use of drugs without experiencing any negative social or legal consequences
What is the regular use stage of drug use?
Some people will be able to enter the stage of regular use without developing a dependence or addiction
able to stop the drug use on their own.
What is the risky use/abuse stage of drug use?
continued use of drugs in spite of severe social and legal
consequences
thin line
What is the addiction stage of drug use?
withdrawal symptoms and compulsive use of the drug despite severe negative consequences.
What has happened to the rate of drug use over the years?
stayed consistent even with more money being spent on it
Who have been people to blame for drug use? (and proven wrong)
poor, uneducated, minorities
Why do some people get addicted?
kind of unknown, mix of environment and genetics
What are risk factors of addiction?
genetics, gender, adolescence, mental health disorders, bad patterns (binging, needles), early life stress/abuse, community/social acceptance, personality traits (impulsive)
Our inability to effectively treat people who abuse drugs
is tied to ____
inability to treat mental illnesses
If drugs make you feel good, what is the problem?
most drugs are abused and addictive
What are some of the main effect on the brain from drugs?
Addicts have lower levels of dopamine receptors in the brain and is long lasting
Shrinking of gray matter
what is physiological tolerance?
The liver gets more efficient at breaking down the drug before it gets to the brain.
less drugs make it into the bloodstream
what is cellular tolerance?
Plasticity in nerve cells makes them less responsive to drugs.
decreased number of receptors
What is the drug addiction pathway in the brain?
neurons of the ventral tegmentum to release dopamine in the nucleus accumbens.
What does sensitization do?
Increases the response from the brain the more the drug is taken
greater increase of dopamine
What are the methods for modeling drug abuse in animals?
Conditioned Place Preference: Reward
Locomotor Activity: Sensitization
Self-Administration: Voluntary Drug Taking
What happens after an abstinence period of drugs?
the use after regaining access goes up at a higher rate
What does impulsive personality and female rates have in common?
They are higher than normal
Female drug use is though to be higher due to hormones– when reproductive organs taken out they look more like male levels
What is the motivation/reward pathway?
after repeated activation by drugs (plasticity) becomes the addiction pathway. So addiction is a pathology of motivation.
What is the plasticity of accumbens neurons?
Repeated experience with sex or drugs will increase
dendritic spines in the nucleus accumbens. As spines
are the site of excitatory synapses, this means the
nerve cells are more excitable (sensitization).
Why aren’t drug treatments effective?
Failure to treat co-morbid mental illness.
The motivation pathway learns to see drug
abuse as another motivated behavior. Our
brains resist eliminating motivated
behaviors (think anorexia, for example).
