Gone are the days when (illicit) drugs are used under the cover of darkness or away from public glare. These days, psychedelic drugs are served at social gatherings as part of the fun. In fact, it is even said that the deeper the pocket of the host, the more reassuring it is that guests who are interested will get ‘pure stuff.’
However, if someone is trying to push a drug on you, or if you are considering using a drug or are already using it, or if you know someone using drugs, this write-up may interest you.
Experts say people who use drugs, especially by injection, are at higher risk of dying from both acute and chronic diseases than people who do not use these drugs.
This is the conclusion of a group of researchers led by Bradley Mathers of The Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation.
According to the researchers, fatal overdose and infection with human immunodeficiency virus and other blood-borne viruses transmitted through shared needles and syringes are the most common causes of death in this group.
They aver that understanding causes of death is important when setting priorities for programmes designed to reduce deaths from the use of drugs.
Illegal substances are subject to drug prohibition laws; and, according to the World Factbook, they are broadly categorised to include cannabis, hallucinogens, depressants and stimulants. Every drug of abuse fits under any of this categorisation, depending on their effects in the human system. Top on the list is tobacco — or its more modern presentation, cigarette.
Next is cannabis (Cannabis sativa), a common hemp plant, which provides hallucinogens with some sedative properties, and includes marijuana, hashish and hashish oil.
Another group is hallucinogens. These are drugs that affect sensation, thinking, self-awareness, and emotion. The commonest form of hallucinogens is LSD, though there are other drugs under that category.
Depressants (sedatives) are drugs that reduce tension and anxiety and include barbiturates, among a long list of others.
Stimulants are drugs that relieve mild depression, increase energy and activity, and include cocaine (coke, snow, crack), amphetamines, ephedrine, ecstasy, methylphenidate and others.
Physicians say when a pregnant woman takes any of these illicit drugs, it can cause a baby to be born too small or too soon, or to have withdrawal symptoms, birth defects or learning and behavioural problems.
Worse still, they say, due to the sharp practices that attend their distribution, illicit drugs may be prepared with impurities that may be harmful to a pregnancy.
Abusive drugs have varying degrees of addiction, experts say. Next to methamphetamine, they say, cocaine creates the greatest psychological dependence of any drug. “It stimulates key pleasure centres within the brain and causes extremely heightened euphoria. A tolerance to cocaine develops quickly, as the addict soon fails to achieve the same ‘high’ experienced earlier from the same amount of cocaine.”
To buttress this fact, here’s the confession of a drug addict, as published by drugfreeworld.org: “I had no more future. I did not see how I could escape my cocaine dependence. I was lost. I was ‘exploding’ and unable to stop myself from continuing to seriously abuse cocaine. I had hallucinations that animals were crawling under my skin. I felt them each time I shot up and scraped myself with the point of my syringe until I started bleeding in order to make them leave. I was once bleeding so heavily from this I had to be taken to the hospital.”
Psychologists contend that substance abuse carries many risks to adolescents and society. They say the effects and risks of substance abuse include traffic accidents, risky sexual behaviour, juvenile delinquency, sub-par academic performance, death or permanent injury or disability.
What about their effects on the brains of youngsters? Physicians warn that other effects, including developmental effects that hinder the proper development of the brain, can have a lifelong impact on a person’s ability to reason and/or use sound judgment. “It could cause developmental problems in the adolescent brain,” they warn.
Adolescents are defined as children between the ages of 12 and 17.
At an interactive session, Consultant Psychiatrist and Medical Director of the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos, Dr. Rahman Lawal, said cannabis use among adolescents could lead to permanent brain damage.
He said, “Teenagers who smoke cannabis regularly could be permanently damaging the development of their brain and are likely to end up with significantly lower IQ scores than teenagers who do not use the illicit drug.”
According to biologists, “Many important brain structures achieve much of their growth during adolescence. They say the prefrontal cortex, which controls planning, impulse control, risk assessment, consequence prediction, and organisation, develops in adolescence.
They further note, “The limbic system controls emotions, dreams and goals. The cerebellum controls coordination, movement, emotional maturity, and cognition or understanding. The corpus callosum controls the neurotransmitters and receptors in the brain and dictates how quickly we can access information. The hippocampus controls memory functions. Each of these essential parts of the brain primarily develops during adolescence. Interrupting the development of these brain functions can have lifelong effects.”
This corroborates a major study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which warns that cannabis use in adolescence can cause a significant long-term decline in IQ that does not appear to be reversible when people stop using it.
Yet, the researchers, led by Madeline Meier, of Duke University in North Carolina, note that “IQ is a strong determinant of a person’s access to a college education, their lifelong total income, their access to a good job, their performance on the job, their tendency to develop heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and even early death.”