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What Are They? • Stimulants are a class of drugs that elevate mood, increase feelings of well-being, and increase energy and alertness.Examples include cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamines, methylphenidate, nicotine, and MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), better known as “Ecstasy.”
How Do Stimulants Produce Euphoria? • Stimulants change the way the brain works by changing the way nerve cells communicate. Nerve cells, called neurons, send messages to each other by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters work by attaching to key sites on neurons called receptors
How do they work • There are many neurotransmitters, but dopamine is the main one that makes people feel good when they do something they enjoy, like eating a piece of chocolate cake or riding a roller coaster. Stimulants cause a buildup of dopamine in the brain, which can make people who abuse stimulants feel intense pleasure and increased energy. They can also make people feel anxious and paranoid. And with repeated use, stimulants can disrupt the functioning of the brain’s dopamine system, dampening users’ ability to feel any pleasure at all. People may try to compensate by taking more and more of the drug to experience the same pleasure.
Physical Effects • The user will experience constricted blood vessels, fast heart beat, a rise in blood pressure, mucous membrane in the nasal passage dries and deteriorates, cilia is destroyed, sexual side effects, and kidney infections. • Other effects include dilated pupils, perspiration of chills, nausea or vomiting, chest pain, impaired movements or muscle tone. • Those who smoke or inject cocaine can develop a dependence within weeks, those that sniff the drug may not become dependant for months.
Psychological Effects • Users feel they have enormous physical and mental ability, yet are also restless and anxious. • Users develop psychiatric or neurological complication. • Repeated or high doses of cocaine can lead to impaired judgment, hyperactivity, nonstop blabbing, feeling of suspicion and paranoia, and violent behavior. • http://www.hulu.com/watch/41289
Stimulants • Cocaine is the most powerful of the natural stimulants, cocaine is found in the leaves of several coca plants native of the Andes Mountains of South America. • When the Spanish conquistadores entered that area in the early 16th century, they found the indigenous people chewing the leaves. They had discovered the pleasure that cocaine brings.
Stimulants • The active ingredient cocaine was first isolated in the mid-19th century. Famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud partook of cocaine and advocated its use to treat a variety of ills including asthma, digestive upset and morphine addiction. • Fraud participated in finding the one medical use of cocaine-- a local anesthetic.
Cocaine http://www.hulu.com/watch/315391
Cocaine • Cocaine enters the body and the user will start to feel effects within minutes. • The drug is rapidly metabolized by the liver, so the high is relatively brief, typically lasting only about 20 minutes. • A white crystalline powder known by users as white lady, blow, snow, and nose candy. • Cocaine can by snorted or it can be injected alone or with heroin, which is called speedballing.
The key to cocaine’s addiction is dopamine, a neurotransmitter that controls pleasure sensations. Cocaine causes the release of more dopamine but also blocks reuptake from the brain. • As a result, neurons make less and less of it, and gradually the user tries larger and more frequent doses of cocaine to recapture the feeling of pleasure.
How users feel • Cocaine targets several chemical sites in the brain, producing feeling of soaring well-being and bound-less energy. • After a brief period of euphoria, users slumps into a depression. They often go on cocaine binges, lasting from a few hours to several days, and consume large quantities of cocaine. • Cocaine may cause changes in the brain that affect a user’s ability to sense pleasure and may contribute to depression.
How users feel • Eventually users may reach a point at which they no longer experience euphoric effects and crave the drug simply to alleviate their persistent hunger for it.
Psychological Effects • The brain never learns to tolerate cocaine’s negative effects; users may become incoherent and paranoid, and may experience unusual sensations, such as ringing in their ears, feeling insects crawling, or hearing things.
Withdrawal • Symptoms include fatigue, vivid and disturbing dreams, excessive or too little sleep, irritability, increased appetite, and physical slowing down or speeding up. This initial crash may last one to three days after cutting down or stopping the heavy use of cocaine. Some individuals become violent, paranoid, and suicidal. • Symptoms usually reach a peak in tow to four days, although depression, anxiety, irritability lack of pleasure in usual activities, and low-level cravings may continue for weeks.
Did you know • The drug’s effects seem to be long-lasting. Former users who have been drug-free for at least a year have lower test scores than people who never used stimulants like cocaine.
Cocaine Facts • The father of American surgery, William Halstead, had an intense addiction to cocaine that threatened his career. • Sherlock Holmes’s character suggest cocaine use. • Ground coca leaves used to be sold as tonics. Coca Cola took half of its name from the cocaine in it. When the dangers of the drug became obvious, cocaine was removed from the beverage just before the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1907. • The federal government classified cocaine as a narcotic and outlawed its use with the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914.
Amphetamines • Amphetamines trigger the release of epinephrine which stimulates the central nervous system. • They were once widely prescribed for weight control because they suppress appetite, but they have emerged as a global danger.
Amphetamines • These drugs have a number of medicinal uses. • Still used today for the following: narcolepsy, components of nasal inhalants, enhance alertness, short-term weight control and used for those suffering for ADD. • Amphetamines use became widespread during the 1920’s, eroding the popularity of cocaine. They produced a similar high and their effects lasted longer, and more important they were cheap and easy to obtain.
Did you know? • Legal amphetamine use peaked about the end of World War II, when billions of pills prepared for army use became surplus and were made available in Japan. Within 10 years, Japan, a country with no history of drug abuse, had an epidemic of amphetamine dependency.
How users feel • Users feel confident in their ability to think clearly and to perform any task exceptionally well-although amphetamines do not boost performance. • Higher doses make users feel weird- talkative, excited, restless, irritable, anxious and moody. • If injected the drug will produce a rush of elation and confidence, as well as adverse effects, including confusion, rambling, or incoherent speech, anxiety, and headaches.
How users feel • Individuals may feel paranoid, increased sexual interest, experience unusual perceptions. • Crank users may feel high and sleepy or may hallucinate and lose contact with reality.
How users feel • Meth, when inhaled produces a rapid high with exceptionally long-lasting toxic effects, including psychosis, violence, seizures, and cardiovascular abnormalities.
Physical Effects • Elevated body temperature, dry mouth, irritability, slurred speech, repetitive movements, nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, aggressive behavior, and insomnia. • Smokeable methaphetamine, or ice, also increases heart rate and blood pressure. • High doses cause permanent damage to blood vessels in the brain.
Physical Effects • The most dangerous form of meth is ice, which is smoked in a glass pipe, or injected. • If first brings on intense euphoria, which may be followed by vomiting or nausea. • Blurred vision, dilated pupils, dry mouth and increased breathing rate. • Over time ice is associated with aggressive behavior, paranoia and psychosis, weight loss, kidney and lung failure, and possible death. • Increased heart rate and blood pressure, and permanent damages to blood vessels in the brain.
ICE • A powerful addictive stimulate that comes in three forms-powder, crystal, and pills • Many first-time users become addicted instantly. • The high can last as long as 24 hours in a regular user and as long as seven days in a novice user.
Long Term Use • Chronic use produces a psychosis similar to schizophrenia, characterized by paranoia, picking at the skin, preoccupation with one’s thoughts, and auditory and visual hallucinations. • Symptoms can persist for months or even years after discontinuing use. • Other effects will include: malnutrition, skin disorders, ulcers, insomnia, depression, and in some cases, permanent brain damage
Withdrawal • Crash- the users will crave the drug and become shaky, irritable, anxious, and depressed. • Symptoms will vary between depression, cramps, sleepiness, apathy, irritability, mental confusion, and hallucinations • Users will take large doses to prevent crashing. • Symptoms usually reach peak in two or four days • Depression and irritability may persist for months. • Suicide is a major risk
