 
Teen Substance Abuse
By Sam Parker
Substance abuse, is intentional drug overuse or misuse. It also means poor judgment about using illegal drugs,
inhalants or prescription medicines too much, too often. The main characteristic of drug abuse is that people will cut down or stop using when they decide that the adverse consequences are worse than the desirable effects of using.
But another problem is pathological drug
dependence, the disease of "addiction". This is a brain-chemistry disease characterized by the inability to consistently stop using, even under adverse consequences.
Drug problems are complicated because of the people who take drugs and the different drugs themselves.
Marijuana, for example, is less toxic to the body than alcohol. Some people have interpreted the relative safety and lack of toxicity of marijuana to mean that the drug should be legalized, like alcohol.
However, there is no unbiased, scientific research on marijuana's effects, compared to the large number of studies on alcohol pharmacology and toxicology.
Both drugs produce dependence in susceptible individuals, and leads to a pattern of chronic compulsive drug-taking behavior that requires treatment.
Some major signals of addiction in adults don't seem to apply to teenagers, who may have no history of using chemicals too much.
Any use of intoxicants by adolescents and children could be seen as abuse because such is illegal (illicit.)
Furthermore, children and most adolescents are vulnerable to the pharmacology and toxicology of drugs.
Signs of addiction may be overlooked because children and adolescents are good at hiding behaviors they want to hide, and good at mimicking behaviors of older peers and adults, many of whom are wholly into the drug plague we now have.
Teen Addiction and Blackouts
How do "blackouts" occur? Blackouts are an apparent result of depression of activity in the part of the brain known as the hippocampus.
The function of this brain area concerns cognitive learning and memory. It is known to be very sensitive to the effects of central nervous system depressant drugs such as alcohol, opioids, anesthetics, and even some stimulants such as cocaine.
The rest of the brain is not as sensitive to such drugs, so that an intoxicated person may appear fine - until the next day when certain events of "the night before" are not remembered.
Can drugs other than alcohol cause "blackouts"?
While the alcohol-induced "blackout" is most well known, other drugs can cause it.
A blackout is nothing more than a brief period of drug-induced short-term amnesia.
Thus, some anesthetics used for surgery cause blackouts, but the term is not used with this therapeutic use of drugs, since short-term amnesia of the surgical event is a desired outcome.
Other drugs that cause intense intoxication, such as opioids (powerful analgesics such as morphine), cocaine, LSD, and ecstasy can also cause blackouts.
Drug Craving
What is drug "craving"? Drug craving is an urge or desire to continue taking a drug. In the drug research arena, the word "craving" does not have a solid scientific meaning. It is also difficult to measure.
When patients are asked to describe drug craving, scientists receive widely different answers.
Thus, the words "urge" or "desire" are often more meaningful. Craving is one of the causes of, but not the same as drug dependence ("addiction").
"Jonesing" or withdrawal woes, is also not a surefire sign of addiction, complicating the picture further.
How do drugs produce "craving"?
No one really knows. Craving is a complex phenomenon that scientists have difficulty describing and measuring.
Craving probably leads to relapse in recovering people. Craving may arise from brain structures including the medial forebrain bundle (pleasure pathway), the limbic system, the amygdala, and the cerebral cortex.
The precise brain areas involved in craving have not yet been fully studied.
Evidence shows that drug taking changes the brain.
Clearly Harmful, Use Continues
What are the effects of smoking cigarettes?
People who smoke report that cigarettes make them more relaxed, or sometimes more energized.
Beyond that, there are no beneficial effects of smoking. The detrimental effects of smoking far outweigh the few beneficial effects.
The detrimental effects include
a) Greatly increased risk of lung cancer and heart disease,
b) Increased incidence of other cancers (particularly oral-pharyngeal),
c) Halitosis (bad breath),
d) Early signs of aging (wrinkled skin, etc.), and
e) Side-stream (second-hand) smoke effects on those around the smoker, which can be particularly detrimental to young children.
Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer.
Why, then, do people smoke? Three factors are traditionally cited as being important reasons for beginning to smoke: peer pressure (acceptance), poor education about the negative effects of smoking, and advertising.
Thus, teen-age women are the fastest-growing segment of the American population of new smokers.
Of these, up to 40% will become dependent (addicted) to nicotine, and will be unable to stop without help: some sort of smoking cessation program will be necessary.
The Disease Keeps Itself Alive Defying Rehabilitation
We often hear the term relapse. It is a common medical problem for patients to become less compliant with treatment when they feel better, or when treatment is difficult to obtain.
However, alcoholics and other drug addicts are just as compliant with their treatment as are people with more popular diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or asthma.
When people relapse after being clean and sober for a period of time after treatment, it's called treatment "failure".
When people regain symptoms of any other disease after treatment, it's called non-compliance or disease progression (for example, diabetes, hypertension, asthma).
Why the difference? Stigma! Addiction is not considered "nice" illnesses like those are!
Abusing Drugs in Combinations
People "abuse" many drugs. A few that we're hearing about these days include Ritalin, Vicodin (often used by health professionals and people who begin using it for rational therapeutic reasons such as back pain), club drugs (GHB, rohypnol, ketamine, and others that are taken because of peer group acceptance), OxyContin (a non-opioid-like analgesic that is abused by health professionals and at least one radio talk show host), and codeine (a mild opioid antitussive, or anti-cough medication).
Club drugs and codeine, especially, have been taken with other drugs such as alcohol, which makes the complications of their abuse even more problematic.
Some of these drugs have a large addiction potential, while some have a low addiction potential.
Some psychoactive drugs are associated with powerful dependence (e.g., cocaine) and some are associated with minor dependence production (e.g., marijuana).
This is because their ability to affect the pleasure pathway of the brain varies, for reasons that are incompletely understood.
One possible explanation for this variation is the ability of the drugs' receptors to adapt to the presence of the drug to produce sensitization, which is one of the component causes of dependence.
Inherited From Parents
How is genetics involved in addiction? Genes, passed from one generation to another, may cause
dysregulation of neurotransmitter function in the "pleasure pathway" of the brain.
This neurochemical dysregulation probably causes a potential addict to "connect" with certain drugs in a special way, so that the drug fills a "need" that the individual interprets as "pathological craving" directed toward the drug's pharmacological actions.
©2008 Sam Parker |
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