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Welcome back. In our previous article, we explored what is a disease in a bid to understand how addiction can be classified as one of them. Today, we look at the other side of the coin. We will try to identify what is an Addiction to better understand how it influences human body in the same way a disease would.

What is Addiction?

Drugs affect your body in a myriad of different ways. There are uppers and downers, relaxants and energizers. Whatever you want to call them, they all affect the dopamine levels in your brain. What is dopamine? It is that sweet content feeling you get after a good meal. Your brain rewards you for taking care of it, so to speak. If you eat something that is beneficial to your body, your brain releases dopamine that provides a good feeling, to promote this kind of activity. Is there something that you like doing that makes you feel happy and content? Being thirsty and having a nice cool refreshing glass of water can be the best feeling in the world, right? It’s because you are dehydrated and as soon as you rehydrate, your brain tells you “that was good, when thirsty, please do that again”. Having sex feels good as well because it is a survival mechanism. During intimate moments and especially at orgasm, your brain is flooded with dopamine so you feel good and would do that again, as soon as possible preferably. The need to procreate is a very basic and strong instinct in everyone, ensuring that you enjoy this process is just nature’s way of making us understand, that it is something we should be doing.

Various drugs, cocaine, for example, cause an extremely high amount of dopamine to be released in your brain. The human brain is a remarkable organ and can learn and recognize patterns subconsciously. Over time, this repeated boost of unnecessary dopamine confuses the brain and rewrites itself to cater to this new external stimuli.

For example, let us imagine a child that gets rewarded for doing good and helpful deeds by his parents. He washed the dishes, mowed the lawn or cleaned up his room and his parents gave him some pocket money. Now, all of a sudden, parents start giving him large amounts of money for nothing and before too long the child considers this the norm. He expects this money to be given to him for no reason and when that does not happen, the child is upset.

When an addict’s brain is repeatedly flooded by dopamine, it begins to rewrite itself in such a way, that it considers the dose of drugs the ultimate survival behavior. It suddenly needs drugs to survive, or so the brain has been tricked to think.

Addiction and dependence.

To touch up on differences of addiction and dependence from the previous article, with long enough fake dopamine boosts, the brain forgets how to properly self-regulate and can bring with it a long list of other complications. This depends on the drugs very widely, but there are some substances that if abused for a long enough period, and then suddenly stopped can cause life-threatening problems. One such substance is alcohol, the most wide-spread drug known to man. If a severe alcoholic is suddenly denied alcohol, the person can suffer fatal cardiac arrest, breathing complications or even stroke. For this very reason, every rehab facility has a detox program, which slowly and delicately reduces intake of these brain altering drugs, in an attempt to re-teach the brain how to function properly. Once dependence is taken out of the picture, the rehabilitation of addiction can begin.

A disease, by definition, alters or impairs a function of a specific organ or cell type. Since drugs have such a profound impact on how organ of the human brain functions, addiction is without a doubt a disease. An odd one at that, since it is one of the very rare types of diseases that is consciously self-imposed, yet operates and does its damage subconsciously. It is impossible to contract it from an animal or insect bite, nor is it a sexually transmitted disease. It is non-contagious and very hard to identify as a disease because the organ that needs to be used in its identification is the very same organ that is being affected. That is why denial is such a popular stance among addicts when someone looking in from outside, points out symptoms of addiction.

 

 

Fighting dependence is hard enough. It is very stressful and physically taxing ordeal. Your body is struggling to remember how to self-regulate and operate at normal capacity. Fighting addiction, however, is a whole different kind of demon to slay.

Join us in our next article where we will learn what cravings are and what kind of role they play in the human brain.

When someone tells you, that they have a disease, most likely you will recoil and think twice before shaking their hand. A disease in most people’s interpretation is something that is dirty, disgusting and most importantly – very contagious and can be spread to others. The truth of the matter is, that there are many different types of diseases and only some of them are truly contagious.

What is a disease?

A disease is a type of sickness, to put it simply. There are few ways to get a disease, the most popular being harmful bacteria or viruses. These types of diseases are contagious and can spread through direct transfer or air. They include such diseases as The Flu and Strep Throat for example. The best way to avoid such diseases is to regularly wash your hands and avoid contact with confirmed sick individuals. This type of disease has a sub-section that is impossible to catch from another sick human being but are rather transmitted only from animals and insects. They are considered non-contagious. A Lyme disease is a prime example, as the only way to contract it is to be bitten by an infected tick.

Then there are sexually transmitted diseases, which as is implied, are usually passed to another human via sexual activities. Prime examples are HIV, HPV, and Syphilis. To avoid catching one of these, protection is paramount, the most effective being the condom. Use a condom whenever you engage in sexual activities and you will be very unlikely to catch a sexually transmitted disease or STD for short.

And then there are hereditary diseases. They are relatively rare but widespread enough that most people have heard of them or perhaps even know someone who suffers from it. There are many different kinds, but some of the most prominent ones are Down Syndrome and Haemophilia. These cannot be transmitted in any conventional way. They are not contagious and cannot be caught during sex either. People with these diseases were born with them and the disease developed as they reached maturity.

Where does addiction fit in?

A disease involves an infected, defective or otherwise damaged organ in a human body. It can be a specific type of tissue that is targeted or an entire organ. Leukemia is a type of cancer but is also classified as a disease because it spreads in bone marrow, which is responsible for producing white blood cells. This is an example of a disease infecting a certain type of cell throughout the human body. As an example of an organ contained disease, diabetes is a direct result of malfunctioning pancreas.

So when a person is addicted, what type of disease is it? Before we tackle this question, it is important to understand the difference between an addiction and dependence.

Dependence and addiction go hand in hand, so it’s not unheard of to have people refer to both as if they are one and the same thing when in fact, that is not strictly true. A dependence is when a human body is physically dependent on a chemical or substance. Sounds like addiction does it not? Yet addiction is the psychological aspect of dependence. An addict in recovery will go through rigorous detox procedure when first admitted to an inpatient rehabilitation center. In this stage, the addict fights the dependence his body has for a drug or alcohol, for example. It can take days or months, but eventually, your body will no longer require the substance that caused the imbalance and will be able to safely function without. That said, any addict will tell you, that you are not out of the woods just yet. Addiction is a mental state, due to prolonged abuse of certain substances your brain can no longer function properly without them and thus your behavioral patterns of the well-functioning brain are re-written to cater to this new, dramatic and very destructive change.

So to recap, when an alcoholic needs a drink to stop his hands from shaking it is dependence, whereas if the drink is needed only to calm nerves and feel better, its addiction.

 

Join us in the next part of our blog where we will dive deeper into the human brain and pull apart facts why addiction is considered a disease.

 

A meal in a restaurant is great, but a home-made feast is so much better, right? Even if the quality is on par, it’s the sense of satisfaction that one gets from something that has been made or prepared by themselves. Grandma’s home-made jams and preserves are neck and shoulders above anything you could buy in a store. Drug addicts have been attempting to apply that same idea to their hobby of choice, by growing, processing and using their own product, cutting out the dangers of dealing with shady people. Little do they know, but they are risking much more than if they would simply buy the poison.

Self-Driven Addiction

For as long as people have been using drugs, there is always those that will make them. The age old saying “if there is sheep, there will be shearers” rings true even today. People who make it their business to produce and distribute substances that promote degradation, despair and addiction have mostly been met with disdain. There are tribal communities in Africa, that will take law into their own hands and viciously deal with this kind of individuals their own way, usually burning down the lab and lynching the suspected drug dealer. President of Philippines Rodrigo Duterte has begun a bloody and vicious vigilante approach to root out the drug problems in his country. While the legitimacy and ethicality of Philippino war on drugs are questionable at best, most will agree that the end goal is to clean up the perceived global image of the country to the rest of the world. Sober people don’t want drugs, drug addicts, producers and dealers anywhere near their children and people they love, that is a universal fact.

For drug addicts in hiding, the “Do It Yourself” or DIY approach to obtaining their choice of drug is the best option in these and many other cases. Let’s look at some illegal drugs, that can be made at home and the ingredients required.

Marijuana.

The most popular in this category is most definitely “weed” or marijuana. It is still very illegal in the majority of the world, but their seeds, however, are not. There are plenty of dubious online seed shops that will sell you great varieties of seeds, their official stance for doing so is that they are a collector’s item. Apparently, there are marijuana seed collectors out there and these fully-fledged online stores are for that kind of people. All five of them, no doubt. The rest use them to get their seeds to grow their own weed. Lucky for upstanding citizens these home-made grow-ops use ALOT of electricity and generate plenty of heat, so it is pretty easy to find and bust these. Most of the time these DIY weed farms have no more than a few plants, but the law is the law and they get the book thrown at them as if they had a whole farm since growing the drug is producing it and by definition production and distribution of the drug are the biggest offenses.

Psychedelic mushrooms.

In a very similar fashion to weed, magic mushrooms can be grown in-house. They require practically no attention and the legal part that needs buying can produce large quantities of it. You can buy the mushroom spore solutions in syringes and pouches online. Some even sell an entire, ready to go growing set, with the growth medium, supplements and everything else that is required already included in the package. The law governing psilocybin-containing mushrooms is pretty vague, as only the ready product is illegal. It usually takes for someone to go running naked in public, flinging their own feces at bystanders or a suicide or two for people to remember that psychedelic drugs are just as dangerous, if not as addictive as any Class 1 drug.

Heroin.

Hold up, you can make heroin at home? Not the most potent version of it, but it is doable. While the vile substance made on the slopes of Afghanistan is much more potent, a determined addict can make do with a much more crude and dirty method of preparing it. The Czech Republic is the biggest exporter of poppy seeds in Europe, used for culinary and food preparation these seeds contain only trace amounts of alkaloids required to produce the drug, however, addicts across the country have found better ways to get free “smack”. There is an astounding number of bush-labs across the country that become operational when the annual poppy plant crop is close to maturing. These addicts piggy-back on farmers efforts by making daily raids to almost neverending poppy fields and gathering poppy milk, by scoring the still unripe poppy seed pods and collecting the viscous sap that comes oozing out. Unfortunately, most of these drug users have only heard how to properly prepare this raw sap into something that is “safe” to use, so there are hundreds of overdoses and self-poisonings every year. Severe cramps caused by the burned and unfiltered chlorofil can break bones, provide excruciating pain and eventually death if used repeatedly.

 

As anyone who has ever attempted to produce home-brewed beer or even just tried to grow some tomatoes, it is not easy to do. Combine the effort with the extremely poisonous nature of the product you end up with, it is a very stupid idea to produce your own drugs. Not only are you more prone to overdosing, you are at constant risk of being charged and tried as a full blown drug manufacturer, not just the user. Do not make the mistake and hope that in the case of being caught, smaller quantities will allow you to go free. Drugs are illegal and should not be toyed with.

What do you have when your product is easy to make, perfectly legal to sell and distribute, highly addictive and very appealing to wide range of demographics? A goldmine. One that has been shut close since, but just a few years ago the reign of synthetic drugs were felt across the globe. The result of it can still be seen and felt by millions who got hooked because of them. But why would people jump at the chance to get some of these drugs, if they are so obviously bad for you? Clever marketing.

Secrets of the trade.

All that is needed for a new type of product to succeed in the volatile drug market is for everyone to buy it at least once. If a new flavor soda comes out, and everyone buys at least one of them to try it, it already made its money back, if not more. The people who enjoy it and continue to purchase the product is just a good bonus, but usually not the main focus. The designer drug world was cannibalizing conventional marketing techniques to further their goals. So now, drug industry had professional chemists, savvy lawyers and genius marketing specialists to boot! That is a scary thought, is it not?

Peak rise.

Over time, people started getting wise, though. The promises that “this new stuff is the bomb man, and it’s perfectly safe too” just did not cut anymore. There were plenty of high-profile overdoses of this presumably safe party drug and media descended on the synthetic drug industry like vultures, picking it apart and finally educating people about the dangers of their use. It took a fair amount of overdosing and aggravated assaults for people to start coming to their senses.

One such case stood out above them all, though – the infamous “Miami zombie”. The dramatic name was given by media to a troubled young man who was shot dead by police while under presumed influence of bath salts. Later research revealed that he had noted mental illnesses as well, which sure did not help during the delirium that this drug can bring to the surface. The man was spotted seemingly cannibalizing another man – a homeless person. The assailant was identified as Rudy Eugene and has been confirmed to be chewing on the unconscious homeless man’s face when police arrived at the scene. The victim, Ronald Poppo was later confirmed to have lost almost 80% of his facial skin, evidently chewed and ripped off by the assailant. When police arrived and shot Rudy dead when he refused to comply, the homeless man was hospitalized and lived, even though he was left permanently disfigured and lost sight in both eyes.

Turncoats and imitators.

It did not take long for the synthetic drug dealers to realize, that this kind of publicity is not good for business, so during their continuous re-marketing and re-branding process, they made sure to label their new products as safe to consume and non-addictive. This drove already hooked and apprehensive people to them in large quantities. Returning to our early comparison with a new flavor of your favorite soda, everyone was eager to try the new stuff out.

At this time, a new and untapped market emerged. For those who were too smart to snort unknown chemical powders by the handful a new type of product was brought forward to appeal to this kind of demographic – the now infamous “Spice”, implied to be legal marijuana. Officially it was sold as incense but it did not take long for everyone to catch on, why suddenly head-shops had started selling incense. It was a dangerous mixture of various types of plants, usually soaked in dangerous chemicals that are the actual drug. The plant matter is just a disguise and a method of delivery. There are plenty of marijuana advocates out there, but they still don’t wish to break the law. Medical marijuana is becoming decriminalized in more and more countries around the globe and in many states in the US, but that was not the case just a few years ago. For the aspiring pothead to get their “weed”, they still had to break the law and thus synthetic marijuana or “spice” was a no-brainer choice. This decision often lead to brain damage, respiratory arrest, stroke and heart failures.

Three things all these synthetic “legal” drugs had in common.

1. They are marketed as safe because they are “legal”.
2. They had short shelf life and were made to be sold as many as possible before that particular product was banned.
3. They are highly addictive despite openly being marketed as non-toxic and extremely detrimental to human organism and its functions.

Aftershock.

These chemicals, be it in spice or bath salts – they are all dangerous. Studies revealed that a bath salts user of only two months had the same amount of damage to his mental capacity and bodily functions as 6 months of methamphetamine abuse. The neverending stream of overdoses and particularly violent and grotesque assaults later, a federal law was passed by president Barack Obama in mid-July of 2012, that effectively banned all “legal” highs, bath salts and spice included. This law banned more than 30 already identified synthetic drug compounds and pre-emptively included their variations and analogs – substances that are different in composition but affect the end user in very similar ways.

 

So what happened to those metric tons of pre-manufactured spice and bath salts? Most were seized and destroyed, but a large amount of it is still available on the table, just like cocaine, meth, heroin and all other illegal drugs. There are still countless addicts out there struggling to keep their life together after they were convinced that this new high will not get them hooked. People are gullible and hear what they want to hear, but they are still people with dreams and future plans. Most of these plans are shattered to splinters, but with professional help it is possible to salvage their lives and put them together even better, having learned the bitter lesson. Do not hesitate to seek help today, if you suffer from addiction and its side-effects.

What is it, that makes illegal drugs so hard to get? The answer is in the question and quite obvious – because they are illegal. The drug industry has grown and moved on from the old days of smuggling trucks filled with cocaine “a la Pablo Escobar”. Most self-respecting governments have cracked down on drug abuse and its illegal production and distribution rings. Long gone are the days when a drug manufacturer had dirt under his nails from farming and a small collection of household chemicals to refine the crop in the slopes of Colombia. Law has been becoming increasingly strict towards illegal production and sale of drugs, and with it, the drugs have risen in price because it is now more dangerous than ever to produce “organic” drugs. The farmers got an education, swapped their sunhats for face masks and goggles while working in labs most research facilities could only dream of. Drug dealers have become lawyers looking for loopholes in drug laws. It is the age of designer drugs and none of them have become more infamous in the recent years as the “Bath Salts”.

What are Bath Salts?

To put it simply, it’s a term used to broadly describe designer drugs that mimic amphetamines and cocaine effects on the human brain. Drug distributors got smart. Why make and sell an illegal drug, that has been classified, researched and placed “in a frame”, if you can pay an aspiring chemist a modest sum of money to put together a chemical, that is completely different in its build from the “real deal” but effects are the same, if not stronger?

The term “bath salts” came from the practice of selling these highly dangerous substances as actual bath salts or in some cases plant feeder mix. The dealers and chemists realized that branding your product with the label “DRUGS” is a social suicide as the majority of sane people realize that drug use is detrimental and physically dangerous. So they started selling these seemingly innocent products under disguise and those who were in the know understood what they are for. When you bought a gram of bath salts, they often provided you with a glass straw for crying out loud, so the general society caught on pretty fast and the governments got busy raiding these laboratories and distribution centers only to be met by a brick wall. A wall with letters THE LAW on it. They took the law that condemned their business practices and turned it around to work for them instead. You see, even though these chemicals affect the human brain in almost identical ways to illegal drugs, their composition is different and therefore they are not the same substance and cannot be classified as illegal. Well, not right away at least. So all the seized chemicals, lab equipment and people working with them had to be released because the law had no grounds to detain them.

The law caught up with them rather quick after this, new laws were passed and the new designer drug was outlawed. For a while. Once again the drug world was ahead of the law and made some minor changes to the formula of the drug and the resulting substance was once again completely legal because its composition was yet again different from that of the previous version of the drug. This tango continued for years, a new law was made to outlaw the latest version of the drug, a month later a new version of this drug would appear on store shelves. Beauracracy and the lengthy time required to pass new laws meant that the creators of designer drugs simply bought extra time to sell their drugs as much as possible before a new type of drug had to be synthesized.

What are designer drugs?

I have mentioned this term a few times already. Most drugs that we all know come from some kind of plant or a combination of existing chemical cocktails. Cocaine is produced from the coca plant leaves, heroin is made from poppy plants. These drugs were discovered rather than invented. The active substances in these plants developed in nature and humans simply discovered them and abused them for recreational use. Designer drugs are different. They are usually made from various chemicals and put together with a specific effect in mind. Much like pharmaceutical companies make a new pill for that headache, designer drug chemists make a new drug to mimic the effects of cocaine, for example.

 

Designer drugs are a menace. A very smart and adaptive menace at that, because it is so hard to nail it to the wall, so to speak. Every time a type of designer drug is classified and outlawed, it is altered until it is no longer illegal.

Join us in our next article, where we will examine the differences of long term abuse between conventional and designer drugs, as well as confirm if traditional rehab practices cater for such addictions.