by David Sheff
Using drugs allowed us an entry into cliques that welcomed us—once we got high. They also helped us relax and feel more confident within those social circles.
In a research project, a psychology professor demonstrated that teenagers are affected by social situations differently from the way adults are. He had groups of teenagers, college students, and adults play a driving video game to see if they changed their style of play when their friends watched them.
The professor scanned his subjects’ brains while they played, and he found that regions associated with rewards were much more active in teenagers when their friends watched them play. With others present, college students and adults took no more risks than they normally would while playing, but teenagers did. They ran 40 percent more yellow lights and had 60 percent more crashes. Just imagine how that would play out on a “real” road.
Buzzed
Why does stress lead to drug use? Drugs can calm people, of course, but it turns out there’s a far deeper connection between stress and drug use.
Dr. Ulrike Heberlein, a neuroscientist at Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, uses fruit flies to study drug use and addiction in humans. It’s weird, but as she explains, “Genetically speaking, people and fruit flies are surprisingly alike.”
In one experiment, Heberlein exposes one group of flies to the odor of rotting apples, another group to the odor of vinegar. The apple smell is accompanied by an intoxicating mist of alcohol; the vinegar smell isn’t. After three ten-minute sessions of exposure, the flies are put into a Y-shaped maze. At the end of one branch is the odor of apple. This time, there’s no alcohol. At the end of the other, more vinegar. Almost all of the flies that were trained to associate the apple odor with a burst of alcohol mist choose it. When Dr. Heberlein reverses it and spikes the vinegar, flies choose vinegar. “Whichever odor is delivered at the same time as a mist of ethanol is preferred,” Heberlein explains. “The implication is that they find ethanol intoxication rewarding. They like it.” And they want more.
How much more? A lot. In a separate experiment, an electrified plate is placed on the path that leads to the odor associated with getting high. This time, to get to the source of the odor, flies must cross the plate. When they do, they’re blasted with 100 to 120 volts of electricity.
It doesn’t stop them. These flies will endure electric shock in order to get to the odor that they remember was associated with alcohol. They’ve become addicted, or at least the fly equivalent of addicted; their drive to procure drugs is greater than the self-preservation instincts that make them avoid pain. There’s no way to know if they “like” the feeling, but they seek it, even if they’re electrocuted along the way. She conducts similar experiments using cocaine mist instead of alcohol. The flies also go for the drug.
Dr. Heberlein is also attempting to understand the connection between stress and drugs beyond the obvious—that is, when a person is high, stress can seem to melt away. Her research is helping uncover why stress can lead to not only drug use but addiction.
For her research, Dr. Heberlein has invented a device she calls an inebriometer to measure the amount of alcohol or cocaine it takes to get fruit flies wasted. Most important, she studies the relationship between fruit fly stress and their desire for, and reaction to, addictive substances. While some fruit flies don’t seem to respond to stress, many react to stressful situations like some people do: they look for a substance that will make them feel better.
We couldn’t resist asking Dr. Heberlein how she stresses flies. She says that she shakes them up, heats them, overcrowds them, and then isolates them. (Sounds like high school!) She can also, as she describes it, “suppress courtship and mating.” No wonder they get stressed!
It’s not difficult to make the connection from flies to people. Stress creates a desire in our bodies and in our brains for relief of some kind, and drugs can appear to be the conduit for that relief. The catch, of course, is that drug use depletes the brain, increases stress on the body, and stunts emotional development. Dr. Heberlein’s flies have no choice, but people do.
HOW MUCH CHOICE DO YOU HAVE?
The survey of adults regarding teen drug use also cited kids’ natural instinct to pursue pleasure. They weren’t wrong. Everyone wants to feel good, but the lag in the development of the frontal lobes—which directs judgment and impulse control—in the brains of teenagers accounts for the fact that, even more than adults, they’re programmed to crave feelings of pleasure.
In kids, the subcortical region of the brain, the part that is associated with pleasure, develops first. Particularly relevant to drug use is that the pleasure-seeking brain regions that develop first in teenagers are also associated with impulsivity, which is another of the many reasons kids use. Teenagers’ curiosity and impulsivity are, it turns out, essential traits that help them step into a new stage of life.
“Adolescent humans are supposed to taste and to experiment,” explains Dr. Steven Shoptaw, a psychologist and addiction specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Toddlers and teenagers have that in common. Curiosity drives them to push boundaries in order to enter a new phase of life. Sometimes their explorations are dangerous. A toddler may touch a hot oven. A teenager may try drugs.
Simply put, though some people have negative reactions when they try a drug—they become ill, paranoid, or disoriented—many others feel good and some feel great. Marijuana makes many people feel calm, and it can heighten their senses. Alcohol can cause a pleasurable buzz. Psychedelics can heighten the senses or distort them. Heroin can cause bliss. Ecstasy? The name speaks for itself. Tranquilizers? They offer tranquility.
Where normal pleasure quickly peaks and then diminishes, drug-fueled euphoria can be more intense and last longer. Because the “crash” when the drug wears off can make us feel terrible—depressed, anxious, and physically ill—it can lead to intense cravings for more of the substance that created the high in the first place.
RISKY BUSINESS
Psychological and developmental forces also come into play in drug use. It’s part of an adolescent’s emotional evolution to begin to separate from their parents, to differentiate from them as a way of carving out their own identity. Drugs can make them feel braver and have fewer regrets.
Younger kids are often horrified by the idea of drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or using drugs. But many of them will go on to do those things. Kids may adopt behaviors they associate with adults to prove (to others and to themselves) that they’re no longer children. Using makes many kids feel mature or liberated, rebellious. Richard a nineteen-year-old in rehab, told a therapy group we visited, “Getting high was a way to say ‘F—you.’ My parents tried to control me, but they couldn’t stop me from getting wasted.”
And even though it’s exciting to grow up, to separate, to become an adult, it can also be terrifying. Most kids aren’t aware of the apprehension, but it’s often present, and drugs can seem to lessen it.
The reason all this is important to know is that though it always feels as if a person is choosing to use drugs, they may not be aware that they’re driven to do so for other reasons, because of the stresses in their life. The stresses are some of what psychologists call “risk factors” for certain harmful behaviors, including drug use.
Some factors that make it more likely that a person will use drugs to get high are also risk factors for addiction, which we’ll address later. Of course, what is a risk factor for one person may not be for another. That is, risk factors don’t always lead to drug use or addiction, but those with certain risk factors in their life are more likely to use and more likely to become addicted if they do.
A major risk factor for drug problems is genetic. If your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or other relatives have had problems with drugs, including alcohol, you’re more likely to as well.
Learning differences—sometimes called learning disorders—are another risk factor. About 20 percent of school-age childre
n in the United States—about eleven million—have a learning difference such as dyslexia.
“A lot of the kids who appear not to care or to be lazy, the ones in the back of the class either fooling around or checked out, have decided that seeming like they don’t care about school is better than looking stupid,” says Kyle Redford, education editor of the website for the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. “Drugs help them not care, or pretend not to care, and help free them from their confusion and frustration.”
Learning differences often accompany other disorders. A child with a learning difference is twice as likely as a child without one to suffer attention disorders, and those with ADHD are one and a half times more likely to suffer a substance-use disorder.
Other risk factors are other psychological disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Those who’ve suffered (or are now suffering) physical or psychological trauma are in a highrisk group too. Trauma can be physical, sexual, or emotional. Kids can experience trauma if they’re bullied at home or in school (including if they’re cyberbullied), when parents divorce, a loved one becomes ill or dies, or when they’re exposed to other stressful family or social situations.
In some cases, drugs do seem to make those problems feel better temporarily, but over the long term they worsen conditions as they further damage already-malfunctioning neurological systems, increase emotional problems, and lessen coping skills.
How do you know if you have a psychological problem or disorder? Unless you see a doctor, you can’t know for certain, but for the two most common disorders, depression and anxiety, you can take self-tests on websites listed in the reference section in the back of this book. We want to emphasize that these and similar self-tests can get you thinking about what you’re feeling, but they can’t replace a visit to a psychologist or psychiatrist. Not only can a doctor determine whether you have a mild, moderate, or serious problem, but they can treat it (and it can be treated).
Millions of us have these and other risk factors, and a combination of them increases the odds that a person will abuse drugs. Add those to the many other reasons people use: the way drugs can, at least temporarily, treat physical pain and lessen inhibitions; the way they can help people cope with loneliness, insecurity, and stress; factors related to peer pressure; and more—not to mention the widespread acceptance of drugs and messages in the media—and we see why many people are drawn to drugs in spite of the dangers.
Warnings about the evils of drugs fade into background noise when someone who’s anxious, overwhelmed, or in physical or psychological pain is offered not only respite but bliss. It’s usually not enough to tell someone who’s stressed because they’re being bullied (or cyberbullied), failing in school, or traumatized by family turmoil to “just say no” to drugs. Cautioning a kid that drug use is detrimental to their future when they might feel they have no future is almost pointless.
Knowing the reasons they’re likely to use can help people understand what they’re going through and help them decide how to deal with it. Again, it’s important to know that drugs don’t solve problems—indeed, they usually make them worse.
Life is challenging for everyone. The last thing a person needs is for it to be harder because of drug use.
CHAPTER FOUR
Your Brain On Drugs
Everything we do, every thought we’ve ever had, is produced by the human brain.
—NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON, ASTROPHYSICIST
THE GO SYSTEM
Drugs make humans feel energized or mellow, inspired or confused, ecstatic or depressed, depending on the person, the drug, the way it’s taken, and the circumstances in which it’s used. Why is that?
This isn’t a science book. You can find more about the science of drug use and addiction online (some websites are listed in the back of this book), but it’s useful to understand how drugs work and what they’re doing to you, and that involves knowing at least a little about how our brains work.
What’s happening inside our heads is wildly complex. There’s a sort of electrochemical dance going on. Or more accurately, about a trillion dances. Not only are they going on at the same time, but they’re interacting with each other.
Imagine our brains are like the Internet, with information coursing between various hubs and terminals in a million directions, all at lightning speed. Our brains can send data along many more circuits and at much higher speeds than those found on the Internet. The physicist Michio Kaku says, “The human brain has one hundred billion neurons, each neuron connected to ten thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.”
The complexity is such that it’s nothing short of miraculous that it works at all, let alone that it works relatively smoothly most of the time, or at least within a range we consider normal and healthy.
When added into that balanced system, drugs wreak havoc.
Your brain on drugs is like a highway where all the automobiles are out of control, some supercharged with jet fuel. Speed limits, one-way signs, and stoplights are ignored. It’s thrilling, but it’s dangerous.
Drugs overstimulate and overload the neurological freeway system. People can feel energized, excited, omniscient, unstoppable—fantastically alive. But the part of the brain that normally manages everything and keeps it all in relative balance—traffic central—is going haywire.
Our brains weigh only three pounds, but those hundred billion neurons connect a quadrillion synapses—the connections between nerve cells. These neurons continually release chemicals called neurotransmitters, which travel between receptors, delivering messages.
Each neurotransmitter has many functions, but they specialize. One floods in when there’s imminent danger, igniting what’s called the fight-or-flight response, which developed to ensure our species’ survival. It’s what helped our ancestors know to run from a charging saber-toothed tiger.
Another aids in memory storage and retrieval, emotions, moods, and sleep. A neurotransmitter called dopamine is associated with movement, but its main job is to reward useful behaviors so we’ll repeat them. How does it get us to repeat them? It seduces us with pleasure.
Dopamine flows in response to sights, sounds, tastes, or even thoughts related to essential behaviors like eating and sex. Humans feel pleasure when dopamine flows, which reinforces whatever behavior caused the pleasure in the first place. We want more.
It turns out that pleasure isn’t merely a fringe benefit of being human. Like everything else inside us, pleasure has an evolutionary purpose. Like the fight-or-flight response, it was critical to our early survival. Berries tasted good, so the action of seeking berries was reinforced. Sex felt good, so humans wanted more. Food and sex are, of course, necessary for sustenance and procreation. Through pleasure, our go system—as in “Go for it; get more”—is turned on.
But humans lived in groups, which takes compromise and restraint. Without some moderation, chaos would reign.
THE STOP SYSTEM
Enter the stop system.
The stop system, or frontal lobe, puts the brakes on impulsive and uncontrolled pleasure-seeking. It helped our ancestors survive, too. It tells us, “Stop. If you eat too many berries, you’ll get sick.” It allows rationality to kick in. “If you eat them all and don’t share, others in your group will starve, and if you’re going to survive, you need them to survive, too.” It helps when the saber-toothed tiger charges, too. “Running may not be the best response—the tiger is too fast. Instead, maybe you should climb that tree.”
Simply put, the go system is behind our hunger for pleasure. The stop system keeps the go system in line. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but the go and stop systems are linked. They talk to each other all the time.
Most of the time, for most people, the interactions back and forth serve pretty well. We enjoy eating, but we stop before we’re ill. We restrain our sexual impulses, and though w
e may be excited to see a friend on the other side of the street, we wait for a break in traffic before crossing to them.
When people take drugs, they feel a rush of sensation because drugs artificially turn on and overstimulate dopamine flow, turning the go system way, way up. It can be like a fire hose of dopamine, and it brings with it a powerful reward: intense pleasure.
We experience intense pleasure because the go system is on full blast, with dopamine flooding the receptors, and, as we explained earlier, the stop system in teenagers hasn’t fully developed to moderate the feelings. Unfortunately, as they’re increasing pleasure, drugs also mess up the reward system. “These aren’t just good berries, they’re the best berries you’ve ever tasted in your life.” You want more and more and more.
Which is why many people who try drugs do it again.
Restraint? Moderation? The stop system can have a hard time doing its job. At some point, it can go completely haywire.
Imagine playing baseball. In a fair game, someone pitches a ball and the batter is able to take a swing at it. In this case, the ball is a pulse of dopamine. The stop system can bat back most of it. But drugs launch a thousand balls. Maybe millions. There’s still only one batter.
When drugs bombard the system, another survival mechanism kicks in. Human bodies work to mend, to return to what’s called homeostasis. That is, the body wants to restore itself. That’s why cuts heal. People take a drug and feel the euphoria, and meanwhile, the brain is trying to fix the disruption, turning everything back to normal. It happens as the drug wears off. The brain returns to the way it was—or tries to, anyway.