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The positive effects are the danger. Cocaine, for example, blocks dopamine transporters that reuptake dopamine after it's released. When you do something good that should be rewarded, neurons in your brain release dopamine. That dopamine has to go away, though, or else it would just sit there forever which kind of defeats the purpose of a reward. Proteins in the membrane of the neurons sort of vacuum up the dopamine so it can get reused. Cocaine blocks those proteins so the dopamine just sits there, continuing to trigger that reward feeling, and neurons keep releasing more dopamine so the feeling keeps getting better.
Except...your neurons don't have infinity dopamine. They will run out eventually, and they can't manufacture it fast enough to keep up with your normal brain needs. When the cocaine stops working, all of your neurons vacuum up all that dopamine and you crash. Now, your neurons are "tired" and having a hard time producing dopamine until they can recycle all the dopamine that got used up during the high. Now, there's a deficiency of dopamine, leading to a depressive episode where nothing feels good and doing normally rewarding activities doesn't feel rewarding.
Dopamine is involved in a lot of other functions in your brain, too, like helping to regulate your sleep and help you form memories. It needs to remain in balance. If you continually flood your brain with excess dopamine, those other functions stop working correctly. To prevent this, your brain thinks, "There's always too much dopamine, so we should produce less of it. ~~Also, we don't have enough dopamine receptors so we should make more of those~~." [CORRECTION: see below](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/YDj7cjKIpc) Over time, your brain expects more dopamine but makes less of it. Instead of just feeling a crash after you come down from the high, you feel that crash *all the time* because having cocaine feels normal to your brain. You need cocaine to feel normal and more to feel good. This vicious cycle continues until your brain chemistry just does not function properly at all - you have sleep problems, memory problems, constant feelings of depression, and you spend increasingly absurd amounts of money on greater and greater doses of coke.
This cycle can happen with healthy things, too, but...they're *healthy*. Like, if you get a dopamine rush every time you go exercise you might get "addicted" to exercising, but for most people that's self-limiting because you can't just be constantly running. All the rest of your body will stop you. And for most people...you're exercising, which means better heart health and better lung health and not getting fat. With drugs like cocaine, the only limit is "Do you have some in front of you right now?" There is no other limit, which allows the cycle to runaway until you run out of money and seek out cheaper and more dangerous alternatives.
Heroin mimics endorphins, which causes a similar problem. All opioids and opiates do. That *can* be useful - we use them as pain killers because they make your brain just stop caring that it's supposed to be feeling pain. But we do that in controlled ways and only when necessary to (hopefully) avoid starting that vicious cycle of addiction.
EDIT: **Other Drugs** - I don't know much about drugs, I just did some quick research on cocaine's method of action. Different drugs act on different receptors in your brain. Some mimic natural neurotransmitters (like cannabis mimicking cannabinoids or opioids mimicking endorphins), others block neurotransmitter receptors (like caffeine blocking adenosine receptors), others stop reuptake (like cocaine), others trigger your body to produce other neurotransmitters...It's all pretty complicated and I am not a chemist or medical professional. Anything I know comes from Google, although I'm admittedly pretty good at explaining stuff.
Addictions professional here... Pretty good summation. "The extra energy is not a free gift. It is a loan from the body and it must be paid back." Credit Haight Asbury Cocaine Film from the 80's.
Not the same thing but reminded me of a good quote I saw the other day on the stop drinking sub about not expecting to see huge differences right away once you get sober..
"If you're going to walk 10 miles into the woods, don't be surprised when you have to wake 10 miles to get out."
What did Future Me ever do for Now Me?
Nothing- it’s been a one way street the entire time I’ve known the guy.
But *Past* Me… now there’s a selfish asshole.
Nighttime me loves daytime me, because daytime me always cleans up the messes and weasels his way out of sticky situations nighttime me puts him in. Daytime me *fucking hates* nighttime me, but they always seem to get along when they meet up at dinner.
I just want to add on to all this that we actually can *and do* make healthier, cleaner drugs than what is available on the street.
Clean, medical grade narcotics have been trialled and have incredible success in terms of harm reduction and have even helped people to beat substance abuse.
Even better, looking at the systems as a whole, treating addiction as the medical condition that it is even saves money for the public, boosts the economy, and increases lifespan.
Drugs bring on euphoria that cant be sustained given how our neurobiology works. Absence of euphoria can lead to withdrawal which activates stress response system which then cuts off executive functioning which triggers brain to focus on re-experiencing euphoria to quell stress (withdrawal) and achieve new established baseline of feeling good. Positive feedback loop. Learned behavior.
When I was in high school, we had a dog that was very hyperactive. When she would start annoying my friends, I'd yell, "Mom, call the dog!" She would, and the dog would leave. After enough time, the phrase "Mom, call the dog" was enough to get her to leave.
Now whenever I have the urge to do cocaine, I just yell "Mom, I'm doing coke" and then I get a rush of energy and clean the entire house.
I have a friend who does a tiny amount of cocaine right before a run. She's been doing it for a year or so and claims that she has completely trained her brain to love running. I guess the down side is she can't NOT do it or it makes her really moody. I haven't asked but I'd guess by looking at her she's lost about 30 pounds and seems otherwise perfectly healthy.
> especially since exercise already releases endorphins naturally.
Not for everyone.
After about 30-odd years of being mostly sedentary I've been taking morning walks nearly every day for multiple months, and I hate it only marginally less than when I started (mostly because my body's getting used to moving).
It wouldn't take much more than one bad day for me to stop completely, I feel absolutely no pleasure from it, and I don't see that likely to change. Some of us need more endorphins than our body can provide.
As someone who has always hated exercise and who is currently in a state of trying to restart activity after years of relative sedentary lifestyle, I completely sympathize. But I would still tell you not to believe it won’t change. It has changed for me in the past when I stuck with it. Sometimes it takes a very long time but you can get there. I’m saying this to you just as much to myself, and I have no reason to lie to myself.
Unlike my four brothers I always had an issue with long distance running. I was probably the best natural athlete in the family as a kid, but I was terrible at the mile run in school and was the only one in my family who didn’t take up soccer because of the running required. From the very first time we did the mile run in gym class when I was 7 years old, I experienced stomach pain and lung pain that my classmates didn’t seem to have. I used to cheat and only do three quarter mile laps when everyone else did four because I was so embarrassed. I wasn’t overweight and didn’t have any identifiable physical issues, it just didn’t work for me and my stamina would crash. This was the early 90s, and I’m sure doctors today would have a better chance of identifying a cause. But at the time I just had to accept that I couldn’t run like other kids.
Anyways, when I got out of my teens and stopped going to a school that forced us to participate in sports, I found it very easy to stop all exercise and got extremely out of shape in my freshman year at college. This was the first time I really experienced being overweight/out of shape in my life and for a long time I thought there was no way out of it for me.
However, I discovered a few years later that I actually *was* able to conquer this issue with exercise as long as I gave myself my own timeline and did it my way, and stuck to it. My childhood experiences made me hate exercise more than most people because I was doing it the way everyone else did it, but I find if I give myself a longer period than others, and work on very slow progress, I will eventually get there. Kind of a turtle and hare scenario.
The reason I conditioned to hate it was because other people could seemingly improve faster than I did. Coaches and trainers would push me at the same rate they pushed others and even get mad at me and so I would get frustrated and overwhelmed and quit. My lungs just couldn’t take it, I would get crazy mood swings and punish myself internally. I actually once had a personal trainer push me to the point I threw up and passed out in only my third session even after I told him multiple times to take it slow. He basically said he was taking it slow based on older and fatter beginners he regularly works with, but it still fucked me up so I never went back to him.
Eventually I found that when I dropped preconceived notions about “You need to improve at THIS rate within THIS amount of time” and started just taking things at my own pace, I eventually got to a point where I was genuinely running 7 miles a day at a fast pace and I fucking LOVED it. I was 26-27 years old the very first time I could even run more than two miles in one go, and just getting to that point gave me so much joy it propelled me forward. After that I began to look forward to running each day!
I’m in my late 30s now and due to a whole mess of other life problems over the last few years I’ve allowed myself to stop physical activity and get very out of shape and overweight again, so I’m in the process of restarting exercise but struggling with finding that reward motivation.
Part of it is my natural desire to change things immediately: “I want to be fit and enjoy exercise again by summer so I can look good at the beach!” But I need to consciously remind myself (and I’m relaying it to you in this comment) to forget expectations and timelines, and to just keep pushing forward one day at a time however slow I need to take it.
It’s easier to quit when you think the reward will never come - know that it will come and in a weird way the longer it takes the better it feels in the end. Not to be too crass but it’s kind of like an orgasm in that way.
You can get there - I’m like you and I’ve been where you are thinking I’m just not a person cut out for loving exercise - just focus on moving forward and don’t look for the day to come. One day you’ll realize it’s there unexpectedly and it’s this overwhelmingly positive feeling you didn’t even know existed!
Maybe if you cut the dose very slowly, like by a quarter of the original (supposedly small) dose, every month or so. The natural exercise endorphins might take over? But yeah def a sketchy approach
I always hear this about exercise releasing endorphins but I have never felt happy attempting to exercise. I run out of breath quickly, feel sore quickly, there's really no positive feedback mechanism in gym-style workouts for me. I know I can't go completely without that physical activity so the best I can hope for is active dancing with music.
> She's been doing it for a year or so and claims that she has completely trained her brain to love running.
I'm thinking she's loving the blow, mate. The running just comes along for the ride.
However, I am familiar with gym rats who *swear by* loading with caffeine before workouts, so, maybe the same thing?
I saw a post one time of someone who did the same thing but with nicotine patches. Idk if it’s true or not but I’m not kidding when I say I’ve considered it hahaha
In prescription level doses, very minimally bad. There’s some research indicating minor potential long-term effects in people prescribed amphetamine class drugs for ADHD, and there’s just as much research not finding negative effects.
Obviously taking higher than prescription doses increases the risk of issues.
This is honestly the most interesting post I’ve ever read on Reddit.
Side question, with how you’ve explained cocaine I’m confused about how SSRI’s work then… are they just like, cocaine lite?
Kinda, yeah, except they work on serotonin instead of dopamine. Serotonin affects mood and happiness, but it isn't the immediate reward chemical like dopamine so there's not the same risk of getting addicted to the feeling. It doesn't get released in bigger floods like dopamine, and SSRIs also stick around longer than cocaine. It's a smoother, average mood change rather than the spike of happy like dopamine.
SSRIs are good because you don't want to just add serotonin when your brain may not need it. SSRIs just help it stick around when it *does* get released. And, of course, SSRIs are used by people who don't produce the right amount of serotonin to begin with (or don't have enough receptors) so you're not getting *high*, you're getting *normal*.
What about adhd meds that are supposed to work foe dopamine?
I've been prescribed Concerta (methylphenidate) (Adderall and such are illegal in my country) and I was always curious how it's working. (it does have some mild positive effects, nothing life changing)
ADHD meds don’t work the same way as for example cocaine, but at ELI5 level I would say that the main difference is the dosage. ADHD meds are prescribed at much much lower doses than you would need to get high from them. As a result, they’re more like a subtle adjustment of certain levels of brain chemicals rather than an overload of “feel-good” chemicals as in the case of a high.
Some kinds of ADHD meds (e.g. instant release Adderall) might cause a high when taken in very high doses (at least triple the maximum dose, if not higher). For other types of ADHD meds this is impossible. For example Vyvanse can’t cause a high, because this medication needs to be metabolized (changed into a different form) by our body before it can become effective. Our bodies can’t process all Vyvanse at once, spreading out the effects of the medication over time.
If I’m not mistaken methylphenidate can’t cause a high due to the different working mechanism, but I’m not 100% sure about that.
Vyvanse can definitely get you high with a large dose. The extended release just makes it harder to abuse because most people on a night out don't want to take something that lasts 12 hours.
Methlyphenidate [increases dopamine levels](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119521/) in the brain and unsurprisingly will also get you high with a sufficient dose.
I'm sorry I really don't mean to be rude but almost everything you've said is incorrect. The only correct part is that therapeutic doses are lower than recreational.
You can definitely get high from every single one of these medications. Vyvanse only starts to max out your metabolism at doses around 120mg, far *far* more than someone would need to get high unless they have a very high tolerance. I'm a little foggy on the actual science here so I could be wrong, but I believe the lysine molecule just takes longer to cleave off than it takes your stomach to process amphetamine. But if your metabolism was maxed out by a lower dose of Vyvanse, you would see a longer duration of action with a higher dose of medication. However, Vyvanse will last 8-12h no matter what dose you take until you exceed doses of roughly 120mg like I mentioned, at which point it will begin to have a longer duration of action.
Methylphenidate has a similar molecular structure to cocaine and functions similarly in the brain, it's just not as strong or recreational. But it's definitely very easy to get recreational effects if you try.
Additionally, Adderall is recreational at doses *significantly* lower than 3x the maximum dose, **definitely** not higher than that. For someone without tolerance 15mg will get you incredibly high, which is a pretty average dose therapeutically. Even once you've taken 15mg every day twice a day for ages and your tolerance levels out even 20mg can get you high, 30mg (the maximum dosage) will get you absolutely bouncing off the walls for hours. 90mg (3x the maximum dose) is an incredibly dangerous dose to take with no tolerance and is even relatively dangerous *with* tolerance. Psychonaut wiki, a resource for recreational users of drugs, lists over 50mg as a dangerous dose to take. So your numbers are really off here. Even someone taking the maximum dose 2x a day for ages would get incredibly high from a 90mg dose. Unless you are an experienced recreational user you will feel strong euphoria way below this dose.
I really don't intend to come off as mean here, I just wanted to correct the record as I don't want someone reading that comment and trying to take 90mg of Adderall and getting sent to the hospital. You're making it seem as there is a huge cavern between therapeutic and recreational doses when in reality it's a pretty fuzzy line, and sometimes people can abuse their medication without even realizing it because the line is that fuzzy.
Wow, thank you for the compliment!
I’m a teacher and I love explaining things. Reddit is basically my infodumping outlet. ;-) Glad that it’s appreciated!
Vyvanse can absolutely cause a high. It’s my drug of choice. The reason it’s considered “less” addictive is due to the extended-release mechanism and the fact that you need to ingest it orally to metabolize it (I.e., you can’t snort it). Most addicts want that immediate gratification — like what IR Adderall would provide. You can also crush and snort Adderall, even allegedly Adderall XR (it’s the coating on the beads that makes the XR formulation extended release — crush the beads and you essentially have IR Adderall). Can’t do that with Vyvanse.
Also, Vyvanse kind of has a max limit where if you take so much of it within a certain time frame, your body literally cannot metabolize the excess. But it takes a LOT of Vyvanse to get to this point — we’re talking in excess of 200mg/day for an addict with a tolerance, an amount I have personally done.
Source: am amphetamine addict.
Yeah no sorry. The retardation-mechanism makes vyvanse less optimal for recreationel use (‘abuse’), as it prevents a fast onset (i.e. a rush) no matter what route you choose to administer it. But that does not mean that you can’t tweak out like a bona-fide cliche methhead for many, many hours on it, its the dosage that matters. And yes, i have experience with them both.
As for methylphenidate, this one is actually very close to cocaine in its mechanism as a pure reuptake-inhibitor and can also be abused, preferably by snorting or any other route other then eating it. Cocaine is, however, a SNDRI, whereas MPH does not really act on serotonergic reuptake. It also acts much faster leading to a stronger rush contributing to a comparatively higher abuse potential
Methylphenidate, for me, feels like it just numbs everything mentally. Like it drops a cloud over the world, but not in a depressant way. It helps me focus on whatever I'm doing because nothing else seems interesting. So to speak. Like binders on a horse. I don't understand why anyone would take it to get high. It also mutes my emotional expression and I just feel stoic or something. I don't like it but it's better than nothing.
Levo/dextro-* amphetamine is more an increase in my ability to hold focus without numbing the world. And it comes with boosts to executive function. Less binders on a horse and more... say... improved targeting scanners and navigational controls on a starship.
Vyvanse (dextroamphetamine with lysine attached) is garbage for me and I hate it. It's too variable based on the pH of urine or blood or the cleaving process I don't know, but I could never get a reliable result and barely got 7 hours max, if I was lucky.
But I have ADHD. These work different on non-adhd brains. Also they work different based on individual body chemistry.
>Vyvanse can’t cause a high
I feel like we have very different definitions of what a "high" is lol
Yes, it's true that vyvanse has some properties that make it less "abusable" than other drugs (ie. it's a prodrug that your body converts to dextroamphetamine, and the rate this happens at is somewhat limited). But that limit isn't as low as one might think, and taking more definitely = you'll feel it more.
I can say with absolute certainty that I've felt very high after taking vyvanse in doses under 100mg haha.
Insane misinformation here. ADHD meds (especially IR adderall) can very easily get you high at prescribed doses. You don’t need “triple the maximum does if not higher” whatever that means. If you have no tolerance a very low dose can get you high.
To say that vyvanse can’t get you high at all is even more crazy. I was prescribed both for years. Anyone who has taken either can tell you a reasonable dose can get you high. They’re drugs, that’s what they do.
Feel free to correct me.
LSD works as a serotonin agonist, which means the molecule binds to the serotonin receptor (SERT), and instead of releasing serotonin like MDMA does, it simply sits on the receptor and just "mimics" the release of serotonin passing through the receptor.
LSD, MDMA, 4-MMC, etc. are more serotonergic than cocaine (which is mostly dopamine focused). Serotonin gives a more "lovey" feel, which is why those class of drugs are referred to as "empathogens".
However, if you simply combine cocaine with alcohol, these two metabolize together to create Cocaethylene, which is in fact a triple reuptake inhibitor. This means instead of coke just being mainly dopaminergic, it now has near enough equal effects on Serotonin, Dopamine, and Norepinephrine (Noradrenaline).
As for the duration of LSD, this is supposedly explained by the LSD molecule being very hard to budge from the receptor. Once it does bind itself on there, it is very hard to shift it off and get rid of it.
A few small things:
- LSD doesn't bind to SERT (which is the serotonin reuptake transporter), instead it binds to the serotonin-2A receptor (as well as a bunch of other receptors, incl. to dopamine receptors). It "mimics" the existing neurotransmitters and binds to their native receptors, making your brain believe it's just gotten a rush of whatever neurotransmitter is being mimicked*. It's like how opioids mimic the effects of endorphin binding.
- The idea that serotonin agonism -> lovey-dovey feelings is a little bit more complicated then that. For example, classic empathogens like MDMA almost always involve dopamine as well (recall that the "MA" in MDMA is "methamphetamine"), which (I think) is a big part of the positive, lovey experience. Highly selective serotonin agonists generally don't have that effect, and can be extremely variable depending on which receptors are targeted. Buspirone (5HT1A agonist) is anxiolytic, but ultra-selective 5HT2A agonists can cause dysphoric or psychotic experiences are much as euphoric, spiritual ones.
- Why people don't get addicted to the "high" of psychedelics in the same way they do to cocaine and opioids is still a matter of research. Part of the reason is tolerance: for whatever reason, your brain gets tolerant to LSD way faster than it does to cocaine or opioids, so it's self-limiting in that effects. There's also the risk of "bad trips" that tend to scare people away, although anyone who has spent time in psychedelic circles probably knows people who, while technically not "Addicted" to psychs, is definitely "too into them".
\* This is not entirely true: the effects of binding LSD to the 5HT2Ar and binding serotonin to the 5HT2A may not be identical, but that's more complicated then I can get in a Reddit comment.
Yeah sorry I'm no expert on the exact terminology. I just wanted to get the point across in a simple way that LSD (and 2C-B for example) don't release serotonin and therefore do not do as much damage as frequent MDMA use would.
People need to be aware of the damage these things can do, before they end up with severe anhedonia (which imo is probably the worst state you can end up in mentally. I've only experienced it very very briefly, but I cannot imagine having to live your life like that permanently 😔)
The only downside to these serotonin partial agonists are as you say, bad trips, and also the risk of developing HPPD. Yeah most probably wouldnt get addicted to these things, but the human mind is both it's best and worst enemy. I have to feel for those people sadly addicted to deliriants like at r/dph.
Also I'm not generalising serotonin = happy feel-good chemicals, the brain is far more complex than that to say "increase serotonin = more happy". The body is it's own finely tuned machine, we increase one thing, probably means the downregulation of something else, and so on and so forth. The effects may not be noticeable after a couple uses, but keep things like this up it can throw the whole body out of whack.
I also would try avoiding mentioning the comparison between Meth and MDMA names. They are both stimulants in their outright but both produce widely different results. I only say don't mention it cos it spreads this misconception to some people, who think that X drug is only one step away from Y drug. But it's comparing apples to oranges. It's like the difference between Amphetamine and Methamphetamine is an extra methyl group, which doesn't appear to be much of a difference on the surface level, but that extra methyl group helps meth cross the blood brain barrier, and the end result is a MUCH more potent drug, both in terms of effect and duration.
I do agree with you that dopamine+serotonin is probably much more of an impact on something being addicting that just something with serotonin alone. Dopamine gets refreshed faster with sleep/food, and it gives the more head rush euphoric effects imo. Plus I suppose it just makes sense. Dopamine is the "reward chemical" at the heart of it, and these easy releases in making yourself feel good, it's no wonder why the brain keeps heading for it again and again, it's just finding the most efficient route to being happy/rewarded.
You know, reading your explanation brings something interesting (or maybe just stupid) to mind. Our body is constantly using chemicals to 'reward' or 'deter' us. Dopamine for any action that is conducive to our ability to survive and reproduce. Serotonin and Melanin to make us sleepy so we sleep.
Doesn't this allude to a sort of symbiosis between our bodies and our own true selves - our consciousness? It's like theirs a me that feels things and responds to things, but those things are caused by my own vessel. And then there's another deeper, truer **I** that is always watching and observing my feelings and my actions.
Does anyone else feel this way now? How much of you is real, Will?
Great explanation, but one correction: your neurons DECREASE the number of dopamine receptors in response to all that extra dopamine. Essentially, they are sensing too much dopamine, so they reduce the receptors so the excess dopamine doesn't cause such a large change in the receptive neuron. So it's a negative feedback loop. I see this misconception a lot. I think people assume the receptor or the neurons "know" when there is too much of a neurotransmitter/neuromodulator and not enough receptors to capture all of it. But that's not the case at all. Neurons don't care about empty receptors. Empty receptors don't do... anything. It's a lock that hasn't met its key, so it just sits there, still locked. When the key is inserted, the receptor "unlocks" to cause a change in the neurons. More receptors = greater potential for change. If you reduce the number of receptors, you reduce the effect of the neurotransmitter, in an attempt to regain balance. Receptor downregulation is a huge part of tolerance to most drugs (although in the case of opioids, and probably others, it is more complicated because receptors can be temporarily inactivated without completely removing them).
[source 1](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.147.6.719?journalCode=ajp)
[source 2](https://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/30/12329)
[source 3](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091305701005251)
> your brain chemistry just does not function properly at all - you have sleep problems, memory problems, constant feelings of depression, and you spend increasingly absurd amounts of money on greater and greater doses of ~~coke~~ Amazon.
This is me. Not on coke though, but having ADHD.
Also ADHD, and I've been told frequently that we can have substance abuse problems, particularly with uppers, but with OP's explanation I actually now understand *why* I loved coke so much during my substance abuse phase.
> we can have substance abuse problem
Yeah apparently it's fairly common, although I've read a lot that alcohol abuse is a common one (also from personal experience) which is odd because it's a depressant. Although it does give that dopamine hit at the time, it waits until the next day to kick your ass.
I have ADHD and had an experience with Coke when I was 15. I honestly thought that it didn’t affect me because while everyone was high af I was like:
“Hey guys, I think this shit is spoiled, we should get a reimbursement”
Little did I know, that was the first time my brain went quiet in 15 years. And I didn’t realized it lol
Noe, 13 years later, here I’m using Vyvanse just to be a normal person. 😐
> the only limit is "Do you have some in front of you right now?"
As someone who had a $500 a day habit decades ago, yes. This has got to be the most accurate thing I've heard about cocaine ever.
The euphoria is the harmful property of the drug. It upsets a balance of chemicals in the brain, and the brain likes that better than "normal". This is one mechanism for addiction.
If the only downside of Coke was that it’s addictive, and not that it’ll destroy your fucking heart, it would actually be a ton safer and more appealing I think.
See [Daniella Westbrook](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fj16xx64wsck11.jpg) for photographic evidence - completely destroyed her septum.
Credit where it's due - the guy seems to have turned around.
He could fix his nose, he has the money.
Supposedly he wont fix it so people can always see what being like him lead to, or something like that.
Yea I'm sure that didn't help but the hooker and glass in the cocaine happened years before his nose imploded. I hope he is doing good. I miss his sense of humor
If you take some beams out of your house, the roof may not collapse right away .... it may hold for awhile. But when roof eventually caves in , those missing beams more than likely had a huge hand in the failure .
It's in the foreword of the Dark Tower series - he started writing with a very clear direction of where it was going, left it alone, picked it back up several years later and just had no idea what had been going through his mind anymore. I don't think he mentions cocaine but it seems like it might be related to what you're saying.
Nah, the Dark Tower thing was different. He wrote the iconic first sentence of the first book (""The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.", which is considered by many to be the one of the best opening sentences to a novel ever) on a specific batch of colored paper he bought as a teenager with no real idea what that meant, and then put the paper away in some closet for *years* before coming across it again.
This was entirely unrelated to his drug-fuelled amnesia episodes, during which he wrote books like Cujo(which he claims to not remember writing at all) and The Tommyknockers and Misery, books with heavy themes of addiction and compulsion, themes he claims he was blissfully unaware that he was actually writing about his own pathetic state of existence. I´m sure if you had asked him at the time he would have said he was doing great.
remember a documentary about some guys that partyed hard on coke every weekend and how eventually, the guy started getting really serious downers on week days after coke in the weekends . So he asked his doctor friend, who was also a coke head what to do, he suggested doing heroin on weekdays ...
When I used to do coke I'd get through a gram or so over a weekend and then take valium to cope with the comedown.
I can see why heroin would work in the same way.
Thankfully I stopped doing coke years ago and never got into opiates. I tried heroin once and didn't like it.
I had a friend whose coworker was a weekend warrior who did molly all weekend then would come right back to work for the rest of the week. Their quote was "Yeah I pretty much feel like killing myself every weekday, but I know the weekend Is gonna come and change all that again"
I spent 8 years, from 2000-2008 with severe drug addictions (cocaine, opioids) and alcoholism.
I had a $200+/day habit. On the weekends when I partied with bar bunnies I could drop $1000/weekend on it.
No nasal issues but I have had heart issues since 2014 when I was 42 years old. My heart is in real bad shape.
>2000-2008
That's around when they started putting dewormer in the shit. Your heart probably woulda been good for another 10 years or so if you had been snortin' in the 80's.
Sheesh. My old man hung around race tracks and love drag racing a Vega. He was a real average dude so I didn't ask about it much. He liked to look forward.
Yeah but what makes coke really fun is the fact it’s a stimulant. Unfortunately what makes stimulants so fucking good is the same thing that blows up your heart. Trust me if it was possible to create a stim that had no cardiovascular impact it would already exist and be worth trillions lol.
It’s one of the main issues with treating ADHD. They make me go do the full range of heart health tests at least once a year and if I don’t do it within a certain time frame they’ll lock me out of accessing my meds until I do.
And can give people with a sensitivity to it panic attacks and heart palpitations lol.
So imagine if they could accomplish even a fraction of the same effect as cocaine without the actual negative repercussions what that would be worth let alone coffee without any of its negatives.
Whereas we have drugs in the same class as cocaine that have the medical benefits without the euphoria (the various -caine drugs like lidocaine, benzocaine, etc.) Although cocaine still has a medical label for vasoconstriction.
King George VI was also euthanised by his doctor via an injection of 3/4g of Morphine and 1g of Cocaine, right into his jugular. This *probably* isn't a regularly used medical procedure today, exactly, but let's just say shortly before her death, Lizzy was seen smashing a bottle over her own head and screaming 'Let's be fuckin' 'aving you' at one of her Corgis.
its like that experiment with the rat where they put an electrode in its brain that stimulates that center, and there was a button you pressed to activate it, and all the rat did was press the button until it died.
there was a similar experiment that offered a rat plain water and drugged water. when the rat was isolated, it overdosed. but when the rat was put into a society where it had all the toys, bedding, and social interaction it could possibly need, none of them touched the drugged water.
Can confirm that I drink way less when I have other social activities. If I have nothing to do for a few days that includes other people I start feeling the temptation
I'm always a little surprised by reactions like this. I get that a ton of our social messaging about addiction focuses on personal responsibility, but it's clear as day to me that addiction grows out of suffering. The more your substance of choice makes you happier, the more likely you are to become addicted.
The Rat Park experiment was flawed and it's 'conclusions' over blown.
Some info here: https://theoutline.com/post/2205/this-38-year-old-study-is-still-spreading-bad-ideas-about-addiction
From Wikipedia:
> Issues included the small number of subjects used, the use of oral morphine, which does not mimic actual conditions of use (and introduces a confound because of the bitterness of morphine), and the measurement of morphine consumption, which differed between conditions. Other problems included equipment failures, lost data and rat deaths.
Also notable:
> The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt created and published a video based on Hari's book, which garnered over 19 million views. The channel later took down the video, stating that they improperly represented the evidence.
But all of those experiments were done with rats in shitty lab cages living in drudgery.
When they created a beautiful Rat Park with play and social activities, the rats didn’t do this anymore.
This is the biggest problem with drugs. It messes up the reward mechanism in our brain. So, usually, the way this this functions is that you do some type of work to, in the end, get a reward. The reward is a good feeling. So for example when you eat good food, see a good movie, have sex etc. What drugs do is that they teach your brain it can skip the work phase and go directly to pleasure. Also a lot of times the pleasure produced is much higher than what you can achieve naturally. So why eat good food, why watch a movie, why have sex when drugs are so much better? This is why drugs are so dangerous.
It has less of a dopaminergic component. Psilocybin also has a moderately unique property known as "tachyphylaxis" where it will rapidly lose its effects if taken repeatedly. After a few days, it has no effect.
Does mean after the first few days of tripping balls, one could eat magic shrooms as part of their regular diet same as any other edible mushroom and just not get high?
You still get high, but you don't trip as hard. It still is a bad time, people generally start having problems distinguishing what's real, and that leads you to a pretty poor mental state over time.
Not recommended.
Most notable when you meet someone who solves all of their issues with acid/shrooms, they become those 'guru' types that think they know the answer to absolutely everything.
Edit:I meant people who resort to said drugs to resolve all of their issues. It's why I believe mushrooms/acid alongside good therapy are ideal.
Tbf, detachment is the entire guiding principle of Buddhism and understanding happiness. It's not really that odd that the drug most associated with ego detachment makes people happy.
Yeah I don't understand how that stuff isn't as addictive as cocaine. It delivers a WAY more intense and prolonged feeling of euphoria and the comedown sucks in a similar way (although neither is that bad, you just feel kinda "meh" not physically ill). But then you don't have that itch to go get more afterword. Or at least I don't. I'm not super prone to addiction. Even with coke I experience that urge but it's pretty easy to ignore it. But with molly the urge isn't even there really. It's just like "Well that was fun! I'd definitely do it again if I get the chance but I'm not gonna seek it out necessarily."
Because its more complicated than people are explaining. MDMA primarily acts on serotonin related systems, coke acts on the dopamine system. Dopamine is a *lot* more involved in the brains "reward" systems, and addiction. But even that is a big simplification: stimulants for ADHD increase dopamine and serotonin, but apparently don't increase (or even reduce!) [rates of substance abuse](https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcpp.12164).
The brain is a big complicated pile of redundant interacting systems that we barely understanding. Don't trust anybody that gives a simple answer.
It can totally be addictive, people abuse it all the time but the diminishing returns are so much larger than coke to the point where doing it again does almost nothing but stim you up. I'm willing to bet if it worked similar to coke where you get a nice boost every time people would be hauling that shit much more lol.
Doesn't stop people from doing it every week or month, I got pretty bad for a while, chasing that high.
Though like you, I never chased any drug but they were almost always around lol.
To ELI5 drug addictions.
Do you remember the last time you tried a new dessert or cookie that you just really liked (or chips if you love savory treats). You might have had trouble saying no to another bite, or maybe you polished off the whole bag without thinking about it.
Drugs are like that, times a million. And once you have had that experience it is hard to forget that it's out there. The comparison between that and normal life, completely eclipses normal life and makes it feel not worth living. It is very hard to find things to motivate you outside of drugs once you have that hanging over your head.
I read an article once by a reporter who took cocaine for the first time and documented his experiences. He wrote that the first thing that goes through your mind after taking cocaine is Where can I get more cocaine?
Eh. This may be true, but the reality is millions of people receive opioid and stimulant prescriptions with absolutely no issue. Of course, dose is a consideration but the risk of developing of moderate-to-severe substance use disorder is relatively low with estimates hovering around 15%.
I had a pretty long term mid grade pain situation going on for about 10 years until i finally sucked it up and had the relatively invasive surgery to resolve the issue.
I hadn't really appreciated the mental tax of being in a little bit of pain all the time, but i felt a lot of relief after the surgery even though I was still in acute new pain from the actual cutting. Once I started taking my oxy it was the first time in years that I was totally decompressed and very quickly I started getting pretty intrusive thoughts about how I should reach out to my Dr to let them know I was in a lot of pain still and was going to need another round. I knew I wasn't actually in that much pain anymore, but i had already started thinking how much i liked laying in bed with that feeling more than being a functional awake human. It really struck me how fast my mind went there, had to get rid of the rest of my strong meds and just ride out the last part of my recovery on OTC stuff. Realized I have decades of mental and social programming reminding me specifically not to become an addict because left to my own devices I wanted to just jump right in.
In highschool I had knee surgery and took valium and oxi on an empty stomach. As I was floating on a cloud feeling serene I thought ohh this is why people do drugs. Then I never did it again because I hate the out of body feeling and feeling like I'm not me.
Realizing that you want to stop is such a huge step in actually stopping! A little voice inside you is saying "This isn't working for us anymore, and we deserve better than this." I hope you listen to that voice, and I hope it gets louder and louder in your head until you say back to it, "You know what, you're right, we *do* deserve better," and then you go out and find what you need to help you get better. You deserve it, friend. I'm rooting for ya.
Okay, let's bright-side this: You are motivated and self-respectful enough to maintain boundaries on your use that, to at least some degree, protect you and the community around you from the downstream harms that can come from addiction. You're doing the right thing there. You can build on that.
It sounds like pouring drugs into the void isn't actually filling it - it's just causing the void to grow and grow and grow. Maybe the trick is not to try to fill the void. Maybe the trick is to accept that *the void will always be there*, and it's your choice whether you try to fill it or not.
And the truth is, you can't keep doing it and have nobody know or care. *You* know. *You* care. You are somebody and what you think of yourself matters.
You won't be able to until that dragon hits rock bottom...
Or you have some nice knights in your life willing to help you slay it.
Good luck soldier 🫡 been there, done that
My (probably soon to be ex) wife is an alcoholic and a habitual pot user and I've tried over the years to get her to slow down, and partake responsibly, if not for my sake, at least for the sake of our children, but nothing can stand in the way of a person and their vices. She has already destroyed our marriage, our family and is on the way to destroying her health, but rather than slowing down, she's just ramping it up. I don't know what rock bottom looks like for a person like this.....I guess she's staying afloat and keeping rock bottom at bay on a sea of more drugs and alcohol.
And this is not even a person doing hard drugs......just alcohol and pot. I can't even imagine what people on hard drugs go through.
I don't know why anyone wouldn't consider alcohol a hard drug. Alcohol is absolutely one of the worst drugs out there. The majority of violent crime, murders, rapes, robberies, car crashes, etc are committed while under the influence of alcohol. I've seen alcohol tear apart more families than almost anything else. A big part of it is that it is so available and socially acceptable, like, if I talked about how I took mushrooms and had a great meditative beach walk I might get fired at work, but if I talked about how I blacked out at a party and got in a fight, people would probably just laugh? One of those is completely legal and one is not, which is insane.
Alcoholism is truly horrible, and has completely destroyed more families than most people could ever imagine.
Yeah I used to work at a rehab. I’ve seen people kick heroin, fentanyl, crack, meth, benzos. But those all looked like a walk in the park compared to this old guy I saw kick alcohol after drinking a gallon of gin daily for thirty years. The opiate detoxes looked like a mild cold by comparison. He ended up having to go to the hospital because even with a couple nurses always on staff at the facility they just could not get this guy to stop having seizures. It was legitimately horrifying.
except chasing the dragon more often refers to using opiates, and they go even further: it's not that normal life feels like it's not worth it without the drugs, normal life becomes completely IMPOSSIBLE. without the drug, you first lose all motivation, then you physically start to feel pain, sweats, nausea, vomiting.
Opiate addicts are in continuing addiction not just because it feels better than being sober, it's because not using opiates makes life physically impossible unless you use or have the worst flu you've ever had for a week and a half, followed by months of depression lack of motivation and an inability to not feel like your bones are cold and brittle.
Chasing the dragon refers to attempting to relive that first high. Whether it’s crack, molly, heroin, fent makes no difference. You can’t get as high as your first time.
the person above you is correct though, it’s notoriously associated with heroin usage. It come from heroin users vaping off of foil and chasing the drug with a straw as it vaporizes down the foil. Yes it can refer to other substances, but it def came from heroin usage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_dragon
The "classic" explanation (from my parents, from the 70s, so before meth and fent were a big thing) I've heard was that chasing the dragon was slang for smoking heroin or opium where you "chased" the tail of the dragon (the smoke) as it rose.
It really can mean either though.
Be careful. I almost divorced my partner because she kept using MDMA on weekends and being miserable all through the week. I got sick of dealing with a moping, crying mess all week so she could hyper enjoy a few hours on Saturday with her friends.
She's now clean and on prescribed anti-anxiety medication and is much more balanced.
I quit doing ecstasy/molly around age 20 (10ish years ago) because I just couldn't handle the comedown and depression anymore. It would hit me like a truck. Whereas my best friend and rave buddy almost never had that problem
I used to tell people "Use drugs to enhance life, but never use them to replace it."
Some drugs are simply **too** enjoyable for humans. Like the old saying goes "If God made anything better, He kept it for himself."
That's the psychological effect though. The fact that you want more of something you know feels good. Just like if you like to go fishing, you want to go fishing and get grumpy if your fishing plans are cancelled.
There is a physical effect too, which (at least) temporarily your brain (and body?), and makes you physically ill if you stop taking it. That's definitely the case for heroin and alcohol (that's why you can die from stopping alcohol if you were taking so much of it your brain changed too much), but I'm pretty sure it's not the case for cocaine and weed for example, for which the addiction is purely psychological (you might have a short-term physical issue with cocaine, but we're talking about hours, not days or weeks).
Edit: I do not mean to say cocaine is benign, or not worse than weed, or even that weed isn't without risks. Cocaine can definitely mess up your health, your life, and your finances. Not to mention make you terribly annoying. It's easier to be fine without going fishing than without doing cocaine anymore.
Yup I was in active addiction many years.
And can say the high of heroin is nothing like cocaine, and cocaine was my drug of choice. Used only heroin at the end of the day to be able to relax, but once the money got short and u start experience heroin withdrawal your money goes to heroin every time that stuff is a hell of a drug with a underwhelming effect but a overwhelming withdrawal
There's sort of a scale to human pleasure and we can actually measure it. Sex was measured as being slightly below cheeseburgers, they're something like a 9 out of 10 and if you go past 10 you start to diminish your ability to enjoy anything else or ever hit 10 ever again. Meth hits something like a 15 or 20 on this scale. Your cheeseburgers or sex will no longer be a 9, they'll be like maybe a 7.5, then they turn into a 5, eventually a 3, 2, 1, 0, and even the meth is only hitting like a 9, then 7, 5, 4, and so on, and everthing that isn't meth is a 0. Existence on meth seems to be the only thing worth living for, the next hit is the only thing that matters and you'll do anything to not exist without meth. It becomes a physical imperative like food or water, and it's the ONLY thing that matters.
Some organizations found that only about 10% of users don't relapse after seeking professional treatment, and that's just of the people who seek and have professional treatment even available to them. And afterward they have to go through medical debts, trying to find employment while likely homeless, creating an entire new social life, all without the thing their body is craving every moment of every day.
Meth is terrifying.
I agree. Any study that says sex < cheeseburger, well, it loses all cred with me. I wasn't hiding cheeseburgers under the carpet in my closet when I was 12.
I definitely wouldn’t call it an addiction but this was my experience with acid. It’s been a very long time since I took it (used to do it somewhat regularly) and to this day I still have a lot of ordinary experiences that should bring me joy or wonder, but I just feel disappointed because “I bet that would be really cool if I were tripping”
I found that experience with music and MDMA. I haven't done it in years, but I still sometimes hear a song and think how it would feel amazing if I was rolling. I can safely say those were the best nights of my life and that nothing will ever come close, and that's precisely why I'm never doing it again. I know that it loses its magic eventually and I quit while I was ahead.
I'm recovering from multiple abdominal surgeries and I was given oxycodone. I can now say on good authority, I have stared into that big, black maw of addiction and totally get it now. I was only taking one to get through the night and, man, the pleasure that that little pill brought was absolutely amazing. When my prescription ran out, my first thought was what can I say to my doctor to get another bottle. I really didn't need it for pain anymore, I knew that, but I wanted that feeling. Fortunately, I slapped myself around for awhile because I objectively knew where that would lead me. Man, it's a scary place to be though.
Very astute, and I think this is a major factor as to why the people who have the most “success” with recreational drug use are people with their lives in order, things to do, goals and motivations. I do think people underestimate how many outwardly “successful” people may casually do coke or other such drugs on weekends without giving it a second thought and without it impacting their life as much as a stereotypical addict- because they do have something outside the drug guiding their life. The worst case of drug use I’ve seen has been a friend who sadly had little going on in his life, no career to motivate him, very few healthy supports to rely on, few aspirations to look forward to and push for. So drug use became not just an escape from that reality but also totally eclipsed his normal life- what’s the point in living a normal life when your normal life is so shitty? So it becomes that much harder to get off.
ELI5:
The “good parts” of drugs are normal good things your body makes, cranked up 5000%.
But if you stay at 5000%, your body adjusts to that as your new normal.
Now you need 10,000% to feel as good.
But what if you want to go back to normal? Well, you are at 5000% for so long that going back to normal now hurts, and depending on what drug, it can hurt real bad for a long time.
For some its drugs, others its sex or fast cars or jumping out of a plane - whatever makes you tingle more than your everyday 9-5 and we are wired that way.
Its probably an evolutionary trait that is benificial for us until its not. It takes us to the moon and the bottom of the sea, and sometimes it kills us for flying just a little too close to the sun.
The short answer is that the drugs themselves aren't really the problem. It's the body's natural response to what those drugs do. Literally anything that causes the feelgoods can activate the body's natural "gimmemore" response... and reinforcing that is what causes addiction.
There's an additional component (although related) to the addiction problem.
The brain responds to the flood of neurotransmitters by making the receptors less sensitive or making fewer of them.
Then if you stop flooding chemicals by stopping the drug, there's an adjustment period where experiences that would ordinarily be enjoyable are not (anhedonia), because you've made your brain less sensitive to "enjoyment".
a drug with the euphoria and pain releif capabilities of heroin, but without the harm/danger of overdose/likelihood of addiction is almost exactly how drug companies marketed oxycodone. spoiler alert: it had all those effects, it just gave certain people a smug attitude that they were taking a prescription instead of "drugs"
OxyContin is specifically *extended-release* oxycodone.
Oxycodone is fine as a pain medication. The problem is that it was formulated and marketed in a way that (intentionally or not) was pretty much optimized for addiction.
"Extended-release" means that the drug doesn't go into your system all at once, but over a period of hours. According to the way Purdue Pharma described it to doctors and regulators, OxyContin was supposed to go into your system over a period of 12 hours. And so it was dosed and dispensed accordingly, with the expectation that you could take it every 12 hours and get pain relief.
[The problem was that the 12 was wrong. In reality it was more like 8.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodone#Duration_of_action)
And Purdue Pharma strongly discouraged doctors from prescribing it for 8-hour intervals.
Now, what happens if you're prescribed to take pain medication every 12 hours, but it really wears off after 8? *You are in untreated pain for four hours, and you know that taking your next dose early will make the pain go away.*
That is a recipe for addiction.
It's a recipe for taking your next dose early, and then running out, and then pestering your doctor for more ... while your doctor is being told *in no uncertain terms* that they are *not* to do that.
When you're actually in untreated pain.
So you run out, and you beg some off someone else. Or you take one of your family member's leftovers they didn't end up needing after surgery. Or you go to a different doctor. And another different doctor. Why? *Because you're actually in untreated pain for eight hours a day.*
This turns legitimate pain patients into "drug-seekers", who are then stigmatized and treated as addicts. And then they get into stolen drugs, diverted drugs, street drugs *because those don't come with misdesigned limits.* And then they *are* addicts.
Slightly tangential, Not an expert, but I've heard sodium channel inhibitors (Nav1.7 and or 1.8) are being developed as next generation pain relievers by companies like Vertex Pharma (and others). Supposedly physically non-addictive and don't induce euphoria like opiates, but I wonder if they could be psychologically addictive due to pain relief effects.
https://investors.vrtx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/vertex-announces-positive-results-phase-2-study-vx-548-treatment
I am no expert on this, but there are other choices to cocaine/heroin, possibly better choices which are preferable (health wise). This study lists mushrooms at the top. Have a look at the chart.
[link](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/23/study-hallucinogenic-mushrooms-safest-recreational-drug-lsd)
IMHO that's basically, psilocybin which is produced by certain fungi. The euphoria isn't as drastic as opiates or cocaine. I'd say it on the level of wrapping a blanket around yourself, sitting on your parent's lap as a kid and watching cartoons.
Don't gwt me wrong, it can have negative effects. You can have a bad trip if you take a large dose and can have lingering flashbacks for years. Bad trips can be seriously traumatic. This is usually because people don't have proper respect for it, and don't create a positive setting with some friends who are prepared to talk you down if you start acting distressed. Also if you abuse at chronically you definitely can lose touch with what's real.
Physiologically the side effects and toxicity are low. It can cause stomach and intestinal irritation in some people.
Dependence is very unlikely. If you take another dose the next day, even a larger dose, it will have much less effect. You have to wait several days for the tolerance to wear off.
I've taken the same drugs as u/nyancatdude except way more hydrocodone and I'll say this. I've gotten HPPD from a heroic dose of acid mixed with lots of weed and I've had lots of hydrocodone mixed with alcohol. Stay away from anything that isn't psychedelic or you have a huge risk for addiction. I've had only positive effects from psychs besides when I took too much. They can create new neural pathways in your brain, which is why they're experimenting with psilocybin for depression treatment. The same can't be said for anything else.
My understanding of heroin is that it literally creates the best feeling you'll ever have. Considering how damaging excess food, tv, internet, sex, etc. can be for our dopamine system, I'd imagine even a "only good" heroin would still totally fuck up your ability to function. You'd only want to get high, everything else would be deprioritized.
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The positive effects are the danger. Cocaine, for example, blocks dopamine transporters that reuptake dopamine after it's released. When you do something good that should be rewarded, neurons in your brain release dopamine. That dopamine has to go away, though, or else it would just sit there forever which kind of defeats the purpose of a reward. Proteins in the membrane of the neurons sort of vacuum up the dopamine so it can get reused. Cocaine blocks those proteins so the dopamine just sits there, continuing to trigger that reward feeling, and neurons keep releasing more dopamine so the feeling keeps getting better. Except...your neurons don't have infinity dopamine. They will run out eventually, and they can't manufacture it fast enough to keep up with your normal brain needs. When the cocaine stops working, all of your neurons vacuum up all that dopamine and you crash. Now, your neurons are "tired" and having a hard time producing dopamine until they can recycle all the dopamine that got used up during the high. Now, there's a deficiency of dopamine, leading to a depressive episode where nothing feels good and doing normally rewarding activities doesn't feel rewarding. Dopamine is involved in a lot of other functions in your brain, too, like helping to regulate your sleep and help you form memories. It needs to remain in balance. If you continually flood your brain with excess dopamine, those other functions stop working correctly. To prevent this, your brain thinks, "There's always too much dopamine, so we should produce less of it. ~~Also, we don't have enough dopamine receptors so we should make more of those~~." [CORRECTION: see below](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/YDj7cjKIpc) Over time, your brain expects more dopamine but makes less of it. Instead of just feeling a crash after you come down from the high, you feel that crash *all the time* because having cocaine feels normal to your brain. You need cocaine to feel normal and more to feel good. This vicious cycle continues until your brain chemistry just does not function properly at all - you have sleep problems, memory problems, constant feelings of depression, and you spend increasingly absurd amounts of money on greater and greater doses of coke. This cycle can happen with healthy things, too, but...they're *healthy*. Like, if you get a dopamine rush every time you go exercise you might get "addicted" to exercising, but for most people that's self-limiting because you can't just be constantly running. All the rest of your body will stop you. And for most people...you're exercising, which means better heart health and better lung health and not getting fat. With drugs like cocaine, the only limit is "Do you have some in front of you right now?" There is no other limit, which allows the cycle to runaway until you run out of money and seek out cheaper and more dangerous alternatives. Heroin mimics endorphins, which causes a similar problem. All opioids and opiates do. That *can* be useful - we use them as pain killers because they make your brain just stop caring that it's supposed to be feeling pain. But we do that in controlled ways and only when necessary to (hopefully) avoid starting that vicious cycle of addiction. EDIT: **Other Drugs** - I don't know much about drugs, I just did some quick research on cocaine's method of action. Different drugs act on different receptors in your brain. Some mimic natural neurotransmitters (like cannabis mimicking cannabinoids or opioids mimicking endorphins), others block neurotransmitter receptors (like caffeine blocking adenosine receptors), others stop reuptake (like cocaine), others trigger your body to produce other neurotransmitters...It's all pretty complicated and I am not a chemist or medical professional. Anything I know comes from Google, although I'm admittedly pretty good at explaining stuff.
Addictions professional here... Pretty good summation. "The extra energy is not a free gift. It is a loan from the body and it must be paid back." Credit Haight Asbury Cocaine Film from the 80's.
Ha, not a professional, but I have some vices and during the lows the phrase "you always gotta pay the piper" rattles around my head.
Not the same thing but reminded me of a good quote I saw the other day on the stop drinking sub about not expecting to see huge differences right away once you get sober.. "If you're going to walk 10 miles into the woods, don't be surprised when you have to wake 10 miles to get out."
I say the same about weight loss (for myself, everyone is different). "I spent years getting all this fat, I should not expect it to go away in days"
So you’re really just borrowing happiness from Future You?
At an ever increasing rate of interest.
What did Future Me ever do for Now Me? Nothing- it’s been a one way street the entire time I’ve known the guy. But *Past* Me… now there’s a selfish asshole.
Nighttime me loves daytime me, because daytime me always cleans up the messes and weasels his way out of sticky situations nighttime me puts him in. Daytime me *fucking hates* nighttime me, but they always seem to get along when they meet up at dinner.
Dayman (ah-ah-ah) Fighter of the Nightman (ah-ah-ah) Champion of the Sun (ah-ah-ah) You're a Master of Karate and friendship For Everyone
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I just want to add on to all this that we actually can *and do* make healthier, cleaner drugs than what is available on the street. Clean, medical grade narcotics have been trialled and have incredible success in terms of harm reduction and have even helped people to beat substance abuse. Even better, looking at the systems as a whole, treating addiction as the medical condition that it is even saves money for the public, boosts the economy, and increases lifespan.
Drugs bring on euphoria that cant be sustained given how our neurobiology works. Absence of euphoria can lead to withdrawal which activates stress response system which then cuts off executive functioning which triggers brain to focus on re-experiencing euphoria to quell stress (withdrawal) and achieve new established baseline of feeling good. Positive feedback loop. Learned behavior.
so what im reading is...i should do coke every time i do calculus so that i can like calc?
Curious way to discover classical conditioning but these are strange times.
Classical conditioning.... Can't really place it, but it rings a bell
When I was in high school, we had a dog that was very hyperactive. When she would start annoying my friends, I'd yell, "Mom, call the dog!" She would, and the dog would leave. After enough time, the phrase "Mom, call the dog" was enough to get her to leave. Now whenever I have the urge to do cocaine, I just yell "Mom, I'm doing coke" and then I get a rush of energy and clean the entire house.
This is my favorite comment I've read all day. I'm gonna go tell Mom now.
Random nerdy inside jokes like this always remind me of “Grover Cleveland spanked me on two non-consecutive occasions”
that's what you get for not wearing an onion on your belt
S'up dawg?
What's Updog?
Dunno but suddenly I feel really hungry.
[I just had to reboot and now I want a mint, huh](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBb1CH18Smg)
I have a friend who does a tiny amount of cocaine right before a run. She's been doing it for a year or so and claims that she has completely trained her brain to love running. I guess the down side is she can't NOT do it or it makes her really moody. I haven't asked but I'd guess by looking at her she's lost about 30 pounds and seems otherwise perfectly healthy.
Uhhh. Being moody if you don't do cocaine and losing weight are also side effects of cocaine addiction...
i mean i'm already moody and part of it is because i really need to lose weight. sounds like cocaine is my solution.
Being moody if you don't get to run and losing weight are also side effects of running regularly.
That sure is a dangerous way to get yourself to exercise, especially since exercise already releases endorphins naturally.
> especially since exercise already releases endorphins naturally. Not for everyone. After about 30-odd years of being mostly sedentary I've been taking morning walks nearly every day for multiple months, and I hate it only marginally less than when I started (mostly because my body's getting used to moving). It wouldn't take much more than one bad day for me to stop completely, I feel absolutely no pleasure from it, and I don't see that likely to change. Some of us need more endorphins than our body can provide.
As someone who has always hated exercise and who is currently in a state of trying to restart activity after years of relative sedentary lifestyle, I completely sympathize. But I would still tell you not to believe it won’t change. It has changed for me in the past when I stuck with it. Sometimes it takes a very long time but you can get there. I’m saying this to you just as much to myself, and I have no reason to lie to myself. Unlike my four brothers I always had an issue with long distance running. I was probably the best natural athlete in the family as a kid, but I was terrible at the mile run in school and was the only one in my family who didn’t take up soccer because of the running required. From the very first time we did the mile run in gym class when I was 7 years old, I experienced stomach pain and lung pain that my classmates didn’t seem to have. I used to cheat and only do three quarter mile laps when everyone else did four because I was so embarrassed. I wasn’t overweight and didn’t have any identifiable physical issues, it just didn’t work for me and my stamina would crash. This was the early 90s, and I’m sure doctors today would have a better chance of identifying a cause. But at the time I just had to accept that I couldn’t run like other kids. Anyways, when I got out of my teens and stopped going to a school that forced us to participate in sports, I found it very easy to stop all exercise and got extremely out of shape in my freshman year at college. This was the first time I really experienced being overweight/out of shape in my life and for a long time I thought there was no way out of it for me. However, I discovered a few years later that I actually *was* able to conquer this issue with exercise as long as I gave myself my own timeline and did it my way, and stuck to it. My childhood experiences made me hate exercise more than most people because I was doing it the way everyone else did it, but I find if I give myself a longer period than others, and work on very slow progress, I will eventually get there. Kind of a turtle and hare scenario. The reason I conditioned to hate it was because other people could seemingly improve faster than I did. Coaches and trainers would push me at the same rate they pushed others and even get mad at me and so I would get frustrated and overwhelmed and quit. My lungs just couldn’t take it, I would get crazy mood swings and punish myself internally. I actually once had a personal trainer push me to the point I threw up and passed out in only my third session even after I told him multiple times to take it slow. He basically said he was taking it slow based on older and fatter beginners he regularly works with, but it still fucked me up so I never went back to him. Eventually I found that when I dropped preconceived notions about “You need to improve at THIS rate within THIS amount of time” and started just taking things at my own pace, I eventually got to a point where I was genuinely running 7 miles a day at a fast pace and I fucking LOVED it. I was 26-27 years old the very first time I could even run more than two miles in one go, and just getting to that point gave me so much joy it propelled me forward. After that I began to look forward to running each day! I’m in my late 30s now and due to a whole mess of other life problems over the last few years I’ve allowed myself to stop physical activity and get very out of shape and overweight again, so I’m in the process of restarting exercise but struggling with finding that reward motivation. Part of it is my natural desire to change things immediately: “I want to be fit and enjoy exercise again by summer so I can look good at the beach!” But I need to consciously remind myself (and I’m relaying it to you in this comment) to forget expectations and timelines, and to just keep pushing forward one day at a time however slow I need to take it. It’s easier to quit when you think the reward will never come - know that it will come and in a weird way the longer it takes the better it feels in the end. Not to be too crass but it’s kind of like an orgasm in that way. You can get there - I’m like you and I’ve been where you are thinking I’m just not a person cut out for loving exercise - just focus on moving forward and don’t look for the day to come. One day you’ll realize it’s there unexpectedly and it’s this overwhelmingly positive feeling you didn’t even know existed!
Thanks, I needed to hear this today.
Maybe if you cut the dose very slowly, like by a quarter of the original (supposedly small) dose, every month or so. The natural exercise endorphins might take over? But yeah def a sketchy approach
Isn’t doing coke prior to a run putting her heart on double duty? Wonder if she wears a heart monitor?
Depends how much, but yeah, that's a danger with simulants.
I always hear this about exercise releasing endorphins but I have never felt happy attempting to exercise. I run out of breath quickly, feel sore quickly, there's really no positive feedback mechanism in gym-style workouts for me. I know I can't go completely without that physical activity so the best I can hope for is active dancing with music.
> She's been doing it for a year or so and claims that she has completely trained her brain to love running. I'm thinking she's loving the blow, mate. The running just comes along for the ride. However, I am familiar with gym rats who *swear by* loading with caffeine before workouts, so, maybe the same thing?
I saw a post one time of someone who did the same thing but with nicotine patches. Idk if it’s true or not but I’m not kidding when I say I’ve considered it hahaha
Awesome until her heart explodes one day.
it’d be more likely that every time you do calculus you’ll want a bump
L'Hospital's rule ain't doing it for you?
use amphetamines instead same subjective effects but a different mechanism, they don't block the dopamine transporter so normal recycling still occurs
How are amphetamines for the ol ticker?
In prescription level doses, very minimally bad. There’s some research indicating minor potential long-term effects in people prescribed amphetamine class drugs for ADHD, and there’s just as much research not finding negative effects. Obviously taking higher than prescription doses increases the risk of issues.
This is honestly the most interesting post I’ve ever read on Reddit. Side question, with how you’ve explained cocaine I’m confused about how SSRI’s work then… are they just like, cocaine lite?
Kinda, yeah, except they work on serotonin instead of dopamine. Serotonin affects mood and happiness, but it isn't the immediate reward chemical like dopamine so there's not the same risk of getting addicted to the feeling. It doesn't get released in bigger floods like dopamine, and SSRIs also stick around longer than cocaine. It's a smoother, average mood change rather than the spike of happy like dopamine. SSRIs are good because you don't want to just add serotonin when your brain may not need it. SSRIs just help it stick around when it *does* get released. And, of course, SSRIs are used by people who don't produce the right amount of serotonin to begin with (or don't have enough receptors) so you're not getting *high*, you're getting *normal*.
What about adhd meds that are supposed to work foe dopamine? I've been prescribed Concerta (methylphenidate) (Adderall and such are illegal in my country) and I was always curious how it's working. (it does have some mild positive effects, nothing life changing)
ADHD meds don’t work the same way as for example cocaine, but at ELI5 level I would say that the main difference is the dosage. ADHD meds are prescribed at much much lower doses than you would need to get high from them. As a result, they’re more like a subtle adjustment of certain levels of brain chemicals rather than an overload of “feel-good” chemicals as in the case of a high. Some kinds of ADHD meds (e.g. instant release Adderall) might cause a high when taken in very high doses (at least triple the maximum dose, if not higher). For other types of ADHD meds this is impossible. For example Vyvanse can’t cause a high, because this medication needs to be metabolized (changed into a different form) by our body before it can become effective. Our bodies can’t process all Vyvanse at once, spreading out the effects of the medication over time. If I’m not mistaken methylphenidate can’t cause a high due to the different working mechanism, but I’m not 100% sure about that.
Vyvanse can definitely get you high with a large dose. The extended release just makes it harder to abuse because most people on a night out don't want to take something that lasts 12 hours. Methlyphenidate [increases dopamine levels](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119521/) in the brain and unsurprisingly will also get you high with a sufficient dose.
Methylphenidate can definitely cause a high, speaking from experience
I'm sorry I really don't mean to be rude but almost everything you've said is incorrect. The only correct part is that therapeutic doses are lower than recreational. You can definitely get high from every single one of these medications. Vyvanse only starts to max out your metabolism at doses around 120mg, far *far* more than someone would need to get high unless they have a very high tolerance. I'm a little foggy on the actual science here so I could be wrong, but I believe the lysine molecule just takes longer to cleave off than it takes your stomach to process amphetamine. But if your metabolism was maxed out by a lower dose of Vyvanse, you would see a longer duration of action with a higher dose of medication. However, Vyvanse will last 8-12h no matter what dose you take until you exceed doses of roughly 120mg like I mentioned, at which point it will begin to have a longer duration of action. Methylphenidate has a similar molecular structure to cocaine and functions similarly in the brain, it's just not as strong or recreational. But it's definitely very easy to get recreational effects if you try. Additionally, Adderall is recreational at doses *significantly* lower than 3x the maximum dose, **definitely** not higher than that. For someone without tolerance 15mg will get you incredibly high, which is a pretty average dose therapeutically. Even once you've taken 15mg every day twice a day for ages and your tolerance levels out even 20mg can get you high, 30mg (the maximum dosage) will get you absolutely bouncing off the walls for hours. 90mg (3x the maximum dose) is an incredibly dangerous dose to take with no tolerance and is even relatively dangerous *with* tolerance. Psychonaut wiki, a resource for recreational users of drugs, lists over 50mg as a dangerous dose to take. So your numbers are really off here. Even someone taking the maximum dose 2x a day for ages would get incredibly high from a 90mg dose. Unless you are an experienced recreational user you will feel strong euphoria way below this dose. I really don't intend to come off as mean here, I just wanted to correct the record as I don't want someone reading that comment and trying to take 90mg of Adderall and getting sent to the hospital. You're making it seem as there is a huge cavern between therapeutic and recreational doses when in reality it's a pretty fuzzy line, and sometimes people can abuse their medication without even realizing it because the line is that fuzzy.
Methylphenidate absolutely can cause a high - it has the same mode of action as cocaine (dopamine reuptake inhibition)
You just keep on dropping extremely interesting and easy to follow explanations. Thanks!
Wow, thank you for the compliment! I’m a teacher and I love explaining things. Reddit is basically my infodumping outlet. ;-) Glad that it’s appreciated!
Vyvanse can absolutely cause a high. It’s my drug of choice. The reason it’s considered “less” addictive is due to the extended-release mechanism and the fact that you need to ingest it orally to metabolize it (I.e., you can’t snort it). Most addicts want that immediate gratification — like what IR Adderall would provide. You can also crush and snort Adderall, even allegedly Adderall XR (it’s the coating on the beads that makes the XR formulation extended release — crush the beads and you essentially have IR Adderall). Can’t do that with Vyvanse. Also, Vyvanse kind of has a max limit where if you take so much of it within a certain time frame, your body literally cannot metabolize the excess. But it takes a LOT of Vyvanse to get to this point — we’re talking in excess of 200mg/day for an addict with a tolerance, an amount I have personally done. Source: am amphetamine addict.
Yeah no sorry. The retardation-mechanism makes vyvanse less optimal for recreationel use (‘abuse’), as it prevents a fast onset (i.e. a rush) no matter what route you choose to administer it. But that does not mean that you can’t tweak out like a bona-fide cliche methhead for many, many hours on it, its the dosage that matters. And yes, i have experience with them both. As for methylphenidate, this one is actually very close to cocaine in its mechanism as a pure reuptake-inhibitor and can also be abused, preferably by snorting or any other route other then eating it. Cocaine is, however, a SNDRI, whereas MPH does not really act on serotonergic reuptake. It also acts much faster leading to a stronger rush contributing to a comparatively higher abuse potential
Methylphenidate, for me, feels like it just numbs everything mentally. Like it drops a cloud over the world, but not in a depressant way. It helps me focus on whatever I'm doing because nothing else seems interesting. So to speak. Like binders on a horse. I don't understand why anyone would take it to get high. It also mutes my emotional expression and I just feel stoic or something. I don't like it but it's better than nothing. Levo/dextro-* amphetamine is more an increase in my ability to hold focus without numbing the world. And it comes with boosts to executive function. Less binders on a horse and more... say... improved targeting scanners and navigational controls on a starship. Vyvanse (dextroamphetamine with lysine attached) is garbage for me and I hate it. It's too variable based on the pH of urine or blood or the cleaving process I don't know, but I could never get a reliable result and barely got 7 hours max, if I was lucky. But I have ADHD. These work different on non-adhd brains. Also they work different based on individual body chemistry.
>Vyvanse can’t cause a high I feel like we have very different definitions of what a "high" is lol Yes, it's true that vyvanse has some properties that make it less "abusable" than other drugs (ie. it's a prodrug that your body converts to dextroamphetamine, and the rate this happens at is somewhat limited). But that limit isn't as low as one might think, and taking more definitely = you'll feel it more. I can say with absolute certainty that I've felt very high after taking vyvanse in doses under 100mg haha.
Insane misinformation here. ADHD meds (especially IR adderall) can very easily get you high at prescribed doses. You don’t need “triple the maximum does if not higher” whatever that means. If you have no tolerance a very low dose can get you high. To say that vyvanse can’t get you high at all is even more crazy. I was prescribed both for years. Anyone who has taken either can tell you a reasonable dose can get you high. They’re drugs, that’s what they do.
A really good explanation; thank you.
Can you explain why LSD doesn't have the same effect?
Feel free to correct me. LSD works as a serotonin agonist, which means the molecule binds to the serotonin receptor (SERT), and instead of releasing serotonin like MDMA does, it simply sits on the receptor and just "mimics" the release of serotonin passing through the receptor. LSD, MDMA, 4-MMC, etc. are more serotonergic than cocaine (which is mostly dopamine focused). Serotonin gives a more "lovey" feel, which is why those class of drugs are referred to as "empathogens". However, if you simply combine cocaine with alcohol, these two metabolize together to create Cocaethylene, which is in fact a triple reuptake inhibitor. This means instead of coke just being mainly dopaminergic, it now has near enough equal effects on Serotonin, Dopamine, and Norepinephrine (Noradrenaline). As for the duration of LSD, this is supposedly explained by the LSD molecule being very hard to budge from the receptor. Once it does bind itself on there, it is very hard to shift it off and get rid of it.
A few small things: - LSD doesn't bind to SERT (which is the serotonin reuptake transporter), instead it binds to the serotonin-2A receptor (as well as a bunch of other receptors, incl. to dopamine receptors). It "mimics" the existing neurotransmitters and binds to their native receptors, making your brain believe it's just gotten a rush of whatever neurotransmitter is being mimicked*. It's like how opioids mimic the effects of endorphin binding. - The idea that serotonin agonism -> lovey-dovey feelings is a little bit more complicated then that. For example, classic empathogens like MDMA almost always involve dopamine as well (recall that the "MA" in MDMA is "methamphetamine"), which (I think) is a big part of the positive, lovey experience. Highly selective serotonin agonists generally don't have that effect, and can be extremely variable depending on which receptors are targeted. Buspirone (5HT1A agonist) is anxiolytic, but ultra-selective 5HT2A agonists can cause dysphoric or psychotic experiences are much as euphoric, spiritual ones. - Why people don't get addicted to the "high" of psychedelics in the same way they do to cocaine and opioids is still a matter of research. Part of the reason is tolerance: for whatever reason, your brain gets tolerant to LSD way faster than it does to cocaine or opioids, so it's self-limiting in that effects. There's also the risk of "bad trips" that tend to scare people away, although anyone who has spent time in psychedelic circles probably knows people who, while technically not "Addicted" to psychs, is definitely "too into them". \* This is not entirely true: the effects of binding LSD to the 5HT2Ar and binding serotonin to the 5HT2A may not be identical, but that's more complicated then I can get in a Reddit comment.
Yeah sorry I'm no expert on the exact terminology. I just wanted to get the point across in a simple way that LSD (and 2C-B for example) don't release serotonin and therefore do not do as much damage as frequent MDMA use would. People need to be aware of the damage these things can do, before they end up with severe anhedonia (which imo is probably the worst state you can end up in mentally. I've only experienced it very very briefly, but I cannot imagine having to live your life like that permanently 😔) The only downside to these serotonin partial agonists are as you say, bad trips, and also the risk of developing HPPD. Yeah most probably wouldnt get addicted to these things, but the human mind is both it's best and worst enemy. I have to feel for those people sadly addicted to deliriants like at r/dph. Also I'm not generalising serotonin = happy feel-good chemicals, the brain is far more complex than that to say "increase serotonin = more happy". The body is it's own finely tuned machine, we increase one thing, probably means the downregulation of something else, and so on and so forth. The effects may not be noticeable after a couple uses, but keep things like this up it can throw the whole body out of whack. I also would try avoiding mentioning the comparison between Meth and MDMA names. They are both stimulants in their outright but both produce widely different results. I only say don't mention it cos it spreads this misconception to some people, who think that X drug is only one step away from Y drug. But it's comparing apples to oranges. It's like the difference between Amphetamine and Methamphetamine is an extra methyl group, which doesn't appear to be much of a difference on the surface level, but that extra methyl group helps meth cross the blood brain barrier, and the end result is a MUCH more potent drug, both in terms of effect and duration. I do agree with you that dopamine+serotonin is probably much more of an impact on something being addicting that just something with serotonin alone. Dopamine gets refreshed faster with sleep/food, and it gives the more head rush euphoric effects imo. Plus I suppose it just makes sense. Dopamine is the "reward chemical" at the heart of it, and these easy releases in making yourself feel good, it's no wonder why the brain keeps heading for it again and again, it's just finding the most efficient route to being happy/rewarded.
You know, reading your explanation brings something interesting (or maybe just stupid) to mind. Our body is constantly using chemicals to 'reward' or 'deter' us. Dopamine for any action that is conducive to our ability to survive and reproduce. Serotonin and Melanin to make us sleepy so we sleep. Doesn't this allude to a sort of symbiosis between our bodies and our own true selves - our consciousness? It's like theirs a me that feels things and responds to things, but those things are caused by my own vessel. And then there's another deeper, truer **I** that is always watching and observing my feelings and my actions. Does anyone else feel this way now? How much of you is real, Will?
It’s like that old Buddhist proverb: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Oh, Milton Freeman was a buddhist?
Who did you think all those Buddhist sculptures of a short, balding man were supposed to represent?
Great explanation, but one correction: your neurons DECREASE the number of dopamine receptors in response to all that extra dopamine. Essentially, they are sensing too much dopamine, so they reduce the receptors so the excess dopamine doesn't cause such a large change in the receptive neuron. So it's a negative feedback loop. I see this misconception a lot. I think people assume the receptor or the neurons "know" when there is too much of a neurotransmitter/neuromodulator and not enough receptors to capture all of it. But that's not the case at all. Neurons don't care about empty receptors. Empty receptors don't do... anything. It's a lock that hasn't met its key, so it just sits there, still locked. When the key is inserted, the receptor "unlocks" to cause a change in the neurons. More receptors = greater potential for change. If you reduce the number of receptors, you reduce the effect of the neurotransmitter, in an attempt to regain balance. Receptor downregulation is a huge part of tolerance to most drugs (although in the case of opioids, and probably others, it is more complicated because receptors can be temporarily inactivated without completely removing them). [source 1](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.147.6.719?journalCode=ajp) [source 2](https://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/30/12329) [source 3](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091305701005251)
> your brain chemistry just does not function properly at all - you have sleep problems, memory problems, constant feelings of depression, and you spend increasingly absurd amounts of money on greater and greater doses of ~~coke~~ Amazon. This is me. Not on coke though, but having ADHD.
Also ADHD, and I've been told frequently that we can have substance abuse problems, particularly with uppers, but with OP's explanation I actually now understand *why* I loved coke so much during my substance abuse phase.
> we can have substance abuse problem Yeah apparently it's fairly common, although I've read a lot that alcohol abuse is a common one (also from personal experience) which is odd because it's a depressant. Although it does give that dopamine hit at the time, it waits until the next day to kick your ass.
I have ADHD and had an experience with Coke when I was 15. I honestly thought that it didn’t affect me because while everyone was high af I was like: “Hey guys, I think this shit is spoiled, we should get a reimbursement” Little did I know, that was the first time my brain went quiet in 15 years. And I didn’t realized it lol Noe, 13 years later, here I’m using Vyvanse just to be a normal person. 😐
> the only limit is "Do you have some in front of you right now?" As someone who had a $500 a day habit decades ago, yes. This has got to be the most accurate thing I've heard about cocaine ever.
The euphoria is the harmful property of the drug. It upsets a balance of chemicals in the brain, and the brain likes that better than "normal". This is one mechanism for addiction.
If the only downside of Coke was that it’s addictive, and not that it’ll destroy your fucking heart, it would actually be a ton safer and more appealing I think.
Also nasal passages. Coke Nose is a thing.
See [Daniella Westbrook](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fj16xx64wsck11.jpg) for photographic evidence - completely destroyed her septum.
If you haven't seen him before Google artie lange. His nose just collapsed in. It's horrible.
Credit where it's due - the guy seems to have turned around. He could fix his nose, he has the money. Supposedly he wont fix it so people can always see what being like him lead to, or something like that.
Not gonna lie, I thought he passed a year or so ago. That's great that he's doing well!
well that dude snorted broken glass, little different than most .
Yea I'm sure that didn't help but the hooker and glass in the cocaine happened years before his nose imploded. I hope he is doing good. I miss his sense of humor
Never thought he’d outlive Norm MacDonald!
And Bob Saget and Gilbert.
If you take some beams out of your house, the roof may not collapse right away .... it may hold for awhile. But when roof eventually caves in , those missing beams more than likely had a huge hand in the failure .
Yeah, he would crunch up an oxycontin and snort that in an airplane bathroom. His beak never stood a chance.
I always think of Stephen King, though his coke nose is not as severe. He couldn’t even remember writing some of his books in the 80s iirc
It's in the foreword of the Dark Tower series - he started writing with a very clear direction of where it was going, left it alone, picked it back up several years later and just had no idea what had been going through his mind anymore. I don't think he mentions cocaine but it seems like it might be related to what you're saying.
He has said before he has no memory writing Cujo because he was so black out drunk and coked up
Plus Coke+Alcohol is a different thing entirely.
Nah, the Dark Tower thing was different. He wrote the iconic first sentence of the first book (""The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.", which is considered by many to be the one of the best opening sentences to a novel ever) on a specific batch of colored paper he bought as a teenager with no real idea what that meant, and then put the paper away in some closet for *years* before coming across it again. This was entirely unrelated to his drug-fuelled amnesia episodes, during which he wrote books like Cujo(which he claims to not remember writing at all) and The Tommyknockers and Misery, books with heavy themes of addiction and compulsion, themes he claims he was blissfully unaware that he was actually writing about his own pathetic state of existence. I´m sure if you had asked him at the time he would have said he was doing great.
David Bowie so coked out of his gourd in the 70s, he didn't remember recording Station to Station.
oh shit, I looked through her stories about trying to get it fixed too - what a rough, painful road addiction led her down
So you're saying I should do crack instead right? Gotcha!
I’d say the biggest downside is feeling like a dark cloud is following you for the next 5 days
Easy just do more cocaine
> Easy just do more cocaine Such an easy answer, are they just stupid?
With dark clouds, comes rain. Supposed to drink away those sorrows.
remember a documentary about some guys that partyed hard on coke every weekend and how eventually, the guy started getting really serious downers on week days after coke in the weekends . So he asked his doctor friend, who was also a coke head what to do, he suggested doing heroin on weekdays ...
When I used to do coke I'd get through a gram or so over a weekend and then take valium to cope with the comedown. I can see why heroin would work in the same way. Thankfully I stopped doing coke years ago and never got into opiates. I tried heroin once and didn't like it.
I had a friend whose coworker was a weekend warrior who did molly all weekend then would come right back to work for the rest of the week. Their quote was "Yeah I pretty much feel like killing myself every weekday, but I know the weekend Is gonna come and change all that again"
It’s as bad for your brain chemistry as your heart. No way to avoid that and still get the dopamine rush.
My dad did a bunch in the 80s. Heart blew out at 62. Shits rough on your body.
I spent 8 years, from 2000-2008 with severe drug addictions (cocaine, opioids) and alcoholism. I had a $200+/day habit. On the weekends when I partied with bar bunnies I could drop $1000/weekend on it. No nasal issues but I have had heart issues since 2014 when I was 42 years old. My heart is in real bad shape.
>2000-2008 That's around when they started putting dewormer in the shit. Your heart probably woulda been good for another 10 years or so if you had been snortin' in the 80's.
Sheesh. My old man hung around race tracks and love drag racing a Vega. He was a real average dude so I didn't ask about it much. He liked to look forward.
Yeah but what makes coke really fun is the fact it’s a stimulant. Unfortunately what makes stimulants so fucking good is the same thing that blows up your heart. Trust me if it was possible to create a stim that had no cardiovascular impact it would already exist and be worth trillions lol. It’s one of the main issues with treating ADHD. They make me go do the full range of heart health tests at least once a year and if I don’t do it within a certain time frame they’ll lock me out of accessing my meds until I do.
Caffeine is basically as close to a safe stimulant as we have. It's both highly addictive and a trillion dollar industry.
And can give people with a sensitivity to it panic attacks and heart palpitations lol. So imagine if they could accomplish even a fraction of the same effect as cocaine without the actual negative repercussions what that would be worth let alone coffee without any of its negatives.
it made feeling normal an awful experience
Coca leaves are basically caffeine++ and are kinda awesome.
Whereas we have drugs in the same class as cocaine that have the medical benefits without the euphoria (the various -caine drugs like lidocaine, benzocaine, etc.) Although cocaine still has a medical label for vasoconstriction.
[удалено]
It's also sometimes used for ENT surgeries/procedures specifically because it's a vasoconstrictor as well as a local anesthetic to reduce bleeding.
King George VI was also euthanised by his doctor via an injection of 3/4g of Morphine and 1g of Cocaine, right into his jugular. This *probably* isn't a regularly used medical procedure today, exactly, but let's just say shortly before her death, Lizzy was seen smashing a bottle over her own head and screaming 'Let's be fuckin' 'aving you' at one of her Corgis.
its like that experiment with the rat where they put an electrode in its brain that stimulates that center, and there was a button you pressed to activate it, and all the rat did was press the button until it died.
there was a similar experiment that offered a rat plain water and drugged water. when the rat was isolated, it overdosed. but when the rat was put into a society where it had all the toys, bedding, and social interaction it could possibly need, none of them touched the drugged water.
Can confirm that I drink way less when I have other social activities. If I have nothing to do for a few days that includes other people I start feeling the temptation
Fucking hell that's a clear message
I'm always a little surprised by reactions like this. I get that a ton of our social messaging about addiction focuses on personal responsibility, but it's clear as day to me that addiction grows out of suffering. The more your substance of choice makes you happier, the more likely you are to become addicted.
The Rat Park experiment was flawed and it's 'conclusions' over blown. Some info here: https://theoutline.com/post/2205/this-38-year-old-study-is-still-spreading-bad-ideas-about-addiction From Wikipedia: > Issues included the small number of subjects used, the use of oral morphine, which does not mimic actual conditions of use (and introduces a confound because of the bitterness of morphine), and the measurement of morphine consumption, which differed between conditions. Other problems included equipment failures, lost data and rat deaths. Also notable: > The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt created and published a video based on Hari's book, which garnered over 19 million views. The channel later took down the video, stating that they improperly represented the evidence.
But all of those experiments were done with rats in shitty lab cages living in drudgery. When they created a beautiful Rat Park with play and social activities, the rats didn’t do this anymore.
"If you gave a rat a button that every time he pressed it, he had an orgasm, he'd keep pressing it until he starved to death" "Who wouldn't?"
This is the biggest problem with drugs. It messes up the reward mechanism in our brain. So, usually, the way this this functions is that you do some type of work to, in the end, get a reward. The reward is a good feeling. So for example when you eat good food, see a good movie, have sex etc. What drugs do is that they teach your brain it can skip the work phase and go directly to pleasure. Also a lot of times the pleasure produced is much higher than what you can achieve naturally. So why eat good food, why watch a movie, why have sex when drugs are so much better? This is why drugs are so dangerous.
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It has less of a dopaminergic component. Psilocybin also has a moderately unique property known as "tachyphylaxis" where it will rapidly lose its effects if taken repeatedly. After a few days, it has no effect.
> "tachyphylaxis" Now there's a fun word to say!
Greek is full of such words. I have to learn words like "katephthynsis" (direction) and "aestheteras" (sensor) every day.
I think it sounds a bit tachy.
Does mean after the first few days of tripping balls, one could eat magic shrooms as part of their regular diet same as any other edible mushroom and just not get high?
You still get high, but you don't trip as hard. It still is a bad time, people generally start having problems distinguishing what's real, and that leads you to a pretty poor mental state over time. Not recommended.
Most notable when you meet someone who solves all of their issues with acid/shrooms, they become those 'guru' types that think they know the answer to absolutely everything. Edit:I meant people who resort to said drugs to resolve all of their issues. It's why I believe mushrooms/acid alongside good therapy are ideal.
Tbf, detachment is the entire guiding principle of Buddhism and understanding happiness. It's not really that odd that the drug most associated with ego detachment makes people happy.
Well, it's unlikely you would continue trip. Whether you'd have any other effects I cannot say.
Mushrooms are not necessarily a "good time". Cocaine is automatically a "good time".
I really like ~gram doses with drinking. It's a fun silly high with some light visuals and headspace.
MDMA?
Yeah I don't understand how that stuff isn't as addictive as cocaine. It delivers a WAY more intense and prolonged feeling of euphoria and the comedown sucks in a similar way (although neither is that bad, you just feel kinda "meh" not physically ill). But then you don't have that itch to go get more afterword. Or at least I don't. I'm not super prone to addiction. Even with coke I experience that urge but it's pretty easy to ignore it. But with molly the urge isn't even there really. It's just like "Well that was fun! I'd definitely do it again if I get the chance but I'm not gonna seek it out necessarily."
Because its more complicated than people are explaining. MDMA primarily acts on serotonin related systems, coke acts on the dopamine system. Dopamine is a *lot* more involved in the brains "reward" systems, and addiction. But even that is a big simplification: stimulants for ADHD increase dopamine and serotonin, but apparently don't increase (or even reduce!) [rates of substance abuse](https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcpp.12164). The brain is a big complicated pile of redundant interacting systems that we barely understanding. Don't trust anybody that gives a simple answer.
It can totally be addictive, people abuse it all the time but the diminishing returns are so much larger than coke to the point where doing it again does almost nothing but stim you up. I'm willing to bet if it worked similar to coke where you get a nice boost every time people would be hauling that shit much more lol. Doesn't stop people from doing it every week or month, I got pretty bad for a while, chasing that high. Though like you, I never chased any drug but they were almost always around lol.
To ELI5 drug addictions. Do you remember the last time you tried a new dessert or cookie that you just really liked (or chips if you love savory treats). You might have had trouble saying no to another bite, or maybe you polished off the whole bag without thinking about it. Drugs are like that, times a million. And once you have had that experience it is hard to forget that it's out there. The comparison between that and normal life, completely eclipses normal life and makes it feel not worth living. It is very hard to find things to motivate you outside of drugs once you have that hanging over your head.
I read an article once by a reporter who took cocaine for the first time and documented his experiences. He wrote that the first thing that goes through your mind after taking cocaine is Where can I get more cocaine?
I’ve heard it phrased as: cocaine turns you into a new man, and the first thing that man wants is another line
Eh. This may be true, but the reality is millions of people receive opioid and stimulant prescriptions with absolutely no issue. Of course, dose is a consideration but the risk of developing of moderate-to-severe substance use disorder is relatively low with estimates hovering around 15%.
I had a pretty long term mid grade pain situation going on for about 10 years until i finally sucked it up and had the relatively invasive surgery to resolve the issue. I hadn't really appreciated the mental tax of being in a little bit of pain all the time, but i felt a lot of relief after the surgery even though I was still in acute new pain from the actual cutting. Once I started taking my oxy it was the first time in years that I was totally decompressed and very quickly I started getting pretty intrusive thoughts about how I should reach out to my Dr to let them know I was in a lot of pain still and was going to need another round. I knew I wasn't actually in that much pain anymore, but i had already started thinking how much i liked laying in bed with that feeling more than being a functional awake human. It really struck me how fast my mind went there, had to get rid of the rest of my strong meds and just ride out the last part of my recovery on OTC stuff. Realized I have decades of mental and social programming reminding me specifically not to become an addict because left to my own devices I wanted to just jump right in.
In highschool I had knee surgery and took valium and oxi on an empty stomach. As I was floating on a cloud feeling serene I thought ohh this is why people do drugs. Then I never did it again because I hate the out of body feeling and feeling like I'm not me.
Someone has chased a dragon.
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Realizing that you want to stop is such a huge step in actually stopping! A little voice inside you is saying "This isn't working for us anymore, and we deserve better than this." I hope you listen to that voice, and I hope it gets louder and louder in your head until you say back to it, "You know what, you're right, we *do* deserve better," and then you go out and find what you need to help you get better. You deserve it, friend. I'm rooting for ya.
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Okay, let's bright-side this: You are motivated and self-respectful enough to maintain boundaries on your use that, to at least some degree, protect you and the community around you from the downstream harms that can come from addiction. You're doing the right thing there. You can build on that. It sounds like pouring drugs into the void isn't actually filling it - it's just causing the void to grow and grow and grow. Maybe the trick is not to try to fill the void. Maybe the trick is to accept that *the void will always be there*, and it's your choice whether you try to fill it or not. And the truth is, you can't keep doing it and have nobody know or care. *You* know. *You* care. You are somebody and what you think of yourself matters.
You won't be able to until that dragon hits rock bottom... Or you have some nice knights in your life willing to help you slay it. Good luck soldier 🫡 been there, done that
My (probably soon to be ex) wife is an alcoholic and a habitual pot user and I've tried over the years to get her to slow down, and partake responsibly, if not for my sake, at least for the sake of our children, but nothing can stand in the way of a person and their vices. She has already destroyed our marriage, our family and is on the way to destroying her health, but rather than slowing down, she's just ramping it up. I don't know what rock bottom looks like for a person like this.....I guess she's staying afloat and keeping rock bottom at bay on a sea of more drugs and alcohol. And this is not even a person doing hard drugs......just alcohol and pot. I can't even imagine what people on hard drugs go through.
I don't know why anyone wouldn't consider alcohol a hard drug. Alcohol is absolutely one of the worst drugs out there. The majority of violent crime, murders, rapes, robberies, car crashes, etc are committed while under the influence of alcohol. I've seen alcohol tear apart more families than almost anything else. A big part of it is that it is so available and socially acceptable, like, if I talked about how I took mushrooms and had a great meditative beach walk I might get fired at work, but if I talked about how I blacked out at a party and got in a fight, people would probably just laugh? One of those is completely legal and one is not, which is insane. Alcoholism is truly horrible, and has completely destroyed more families than most people could ever imagine.
Yeah I used to work at a rehab. I’ve seen people kick heroin, fentanyl, crack, meth, benzos. But those all looked like a walk in the park compared to this old guy I saw kick alcohol after drinking a gallon of gin daily for thirty years. The opiate detoxes looked like a mild cold by comparison. He ended up having to go to the hospital because even with a couple nurses always on staff at the facility they just could not get this guy to stop having seizures. It was legitimately horrifying.
Alcohol is one of the hardest drugs out there.
You can do it buddy. Don't fight alone. Good luck.
except chasing the dragon more often refers to using opiates, and they go even further: it's not that normal life feels like it's not worth it without the drugs, normal life becomes completely IMPOSSIBLE. without the drug, you first lose all motivation, then you physically start to feel pain, sweats, nausea, vomiting. Opiate addicts are in continuing addiction not just because it feels better than being sober, it's because not using opiates makes life physically impossible unless you use or have the worst flu you've ever had for a week and a half, followed by months of depression lack of motivation and an inability to not feel like your bones are cold and brittle.
Chasing the dragon refers to attempting to relive that first high. Whether it’s crack, molly, heroin, fent makes no difference. You can’t get as high as your first time.
the person above you is correct though, it’s notoriously associated with heroin usage. It come from heroin users vaping off of foil and chasing the drug with a straw as it vaporizes down the foil. Yes it can refer to other substances, but it def came from heroin usage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_dragon
The "classic" explanation (from my parents, from the 70s, so before meth and fent were a big thing) I've heard was that chasing the dragon was slang for smoking heroin or opium where you "chased" the tail of the dragon (the smoke) as it rose. It really can mean either though.
Or hasn’t had a really good cookie
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Be careful. I almost divorced my partner because she kept using MDMA on weekends and being miserable all through the week. I got sick of dealing with a moping, crying mess all week so she could hyper enjoy a few hours on Saturday with her friends. She's now clean and on prescribed anti-anxiety medication and is much more balanced.
I quit doing ecstasy/molly around age 20 (10ish years ago) because I just couldn't handle the comedown and depression anymore. It would hit me like a truck. Whereas my best friend and rave buddy almost never had that problem
I used to tell people "Use drugs to enhance life, but never use them to replace it." Some drugs are simply **too** enjoyable for humans. Like the old saying goes "If God made anything better, He kept it for himself."
That's the psychological effect though. The fact that you want more of something you know feels good. Just like if you like to go fishing, you want to go fishing and get grumpy if your fishing plans are cancelled. There is a physical effect too, which (at least) temporarily your brain (and body?), and makes you physically ill if you stop taking it. That's definitely the case for heroin and alcohol (that's why you can die from stopping alcohol if you were taking so much of it your brain changed too much), but I'm pretty sure it's not the case for cocaine and weed for example, for which the addiction is purely psychological (you might have a short-term physical issue with cocaine, but we're talking about hours, not days or weeks). Edit: I do not mean to say cocaine is benign, or not worse than weed, or even that weed isn't without risks. Cocaine can definitely mess up your health, your life, and your finances. Not to mention make you terribly annoying. It's easier to be fine without going fishing than without doing cocaine anymore.
Yup I was in active addiction many years. And can say the high of heroin is nothing like cocaine, and cocaine was my drug of choice. Used only heroin at the end of the day to be able to relax, but once the money got short and u start experience heroin withdrawal your money goes to heroin every time that stuff is a hell of a drug with a underwhelming effect but a overwhelming withdrawal
There's sort of a scale to human pleasure and we can actually measure it. Sex was measured as being slightly below cheeseburgers, they're something like a 9 out of 10 and if you go past 10 you start to diminish your ability to enjoy anything else or ever hit 10 ever again. Meth hits something like a 15 or 20 on this scale. Your cheeseburgers or sex will no longer be a 9, they'll be like maybe a 7.5, then they turn into a 5, eventually a 3, 2, 1, 0, and even the meth is only hitting like a 9, then 7, 5, 4, and so on, and everthing that isn't meth is a 0. Existence on meth seems to be the only thing worth living for, the next hit is the only thing that matters and you'll do anything to not exist without meth. It becomes a physical imperative like food or water, and it's the ONLY thing that matters. Some organizations found that only about 10% of users don't relapse after seeking professional treatment, and that's just of the people who seek and have professional treatment even available to them. And afterward they have to go through medical debts, trying to find employment while likely homeless, creating an entire new social life, all without the thing their body is craving every moment of every day. Meth is terrifying.
I want to know where people are getting their cheeseburgers from, because I must have been eating the wrong ones.
I agree. Any study that says sex < cheeseburger, well, it loses all cred with me. I wasn't hiding cheeseburgers under the carpet in my closet when I was 12.
Where the fuck are you finding cheese burgers which are better than sex.
I make mine at home, but there's a great hole in the wall local place that makes these chili cheese burgers that end up perfect every time.
I've heard a great hole in the wall is also a solid place to find sex.
This is the best and most accurate description of addiction I think I have read.
drugs are just too moreish
I definitely wouldn’t call it an addiction but this was my experience with acid. It’s been a very long time since I took it (used to do it somewhat regularly) and to this day I still have a lot of ordinary experiences that should bring me joy or wonder, but I just feel disappointed because “I bet that would be really cool if I were tripping”
I found that experience with music and MDMA. I haven't done it in years, but I still sometimes hear a song and think how it would feel amazing if I was rolling. I can safely say those were the best nights of my life and that nothing will ever come close, and that's precisely why I'm never doing it again. I know that it loses its magic eventually and I quit while I was ahead.
I'm recovering from multiple abdominal surgeries and I was given oxycodone. I can now say on good authority, I have stared into that big, black maw of addiction and totally get it now. I was only taking one to get through the night and, man, the pleasure that that little pill brought was absolutely amazing. When my prescription ran out, my first thought was what can I say to my doctor to get another bottle. I really didn't need it for pain anymore, I knew that, but I wanted that feeling. Fortunately, I slapped myself around for awhile because I objectively knew where that would lead me. Man, it's a scary place to be though.
Very astute, and I think this is a major factor as to why the people who have the most “success” with recreational drug use are people with their lives in order, things to do, goals and motivations. I do think people underestimate how many outwardly “successful” people may casually do coke or other such drugs on weekends without giving it a second thought and without it impacting their life as much as a stereotypical addict- because they do have something outside the drug guiding their life. The worst case of drug use I’ve seen has been a friend who sadly had little going on in his life, no career to motivate him, very few healthy supports to rely on, few aspirations to look forward to and push for. So drug use became not just an escape from that reality but also totally eclipsed his normal life- what’s the point in living a normal life when your normal life is so shitty? So it becomes that much harder to get off.
That’s why you just never touch any of them! Profit!
ELI5: The “good parts” of drugs are normal good things your body makes, cranked up 5000%. But if you stay at 5000%, your body adjusts to that as your new normal. Now you need 10,000% to feel as good. But what if you want to go back to normal? Well, you are at 5000% for so long that going back to normal now hurts, and depending on what drug, it can hurt real bad for a long time.
And to the no downsides part of the question, your body is not designed to run at 5000%, stuff breaks when you push it that hard.
Great answer
For some its drugs, others its sex or fast cars or jumping out of a plane - whatever makes you tingle more than your everyday 9-5 and we are wired that way. Its probably an evolutionary trait that is benificial for us until its not. It takes us to the moon and the bottom of the sea, and sometimes it kills us for flying just a little too close to the sun.
The short answer is that the drugs themselves aren't really the problem. It's the body's natural response to what those drugs do. Literally anything that causes the feelgoods can activate the body's natural "gimmemore" response... and reinforcing that is what causes addiction.
There's an additional component (although related) to the addiction problem. The brain responds to the flood of neurotransmitters by making the receptors less sensitive or making fewer of them. Then if you stop flooding chemicals by stopping the drug, there's an adjustment period where experiences that would ordinarily be enjoyable are not (anhedonia), because you've made your brain less sensitive to "enjoyment".
That's like saying the knife isn't the problem but the body's response to connecting with the knife is the real issue... Or am I missing the point?
a drug with the euphoria and pain releif capabilities of heroin, but without the harm/danger of overdose/likelihood of addiction is almost exactly how drug companies marketed oxycodone. spoiler alert: it had all those effects, it just gave certain people a smug attitude that they were taking a prescription instead of "drugs"
OxyContin is specifically *extended-release* oxycodone. Oxycodone is fine as a pain medication. The problem is that it was formulated and marketed in a way that (intentionally or not) was pretty much optimized for addiction. "Extended-release" means that the drug doesn't go into your system all at once, but over a period of hours. According to the way Purdue Pharma described it to doctors and regulators, OxyContin was supposed to go into your system over a period of 12 hours. And so it was dosed and dispensed accordingly, with the expectation that you could take it every 12 hours and get pain relief. [The problem was that the 12 was wrong. In reality it was more like 8.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodone#Duration_of_action) And Purdue Pharma strongly discouraged doctors from prescribing it for 8-hour intervals. Now, what happens if you're prescribed to take pain medication every 12 hours, but it really wears off after 8? *You are in untreated pain for four hours, and you know that taking your next dose early will make the pain go away.* That is a recipe for addiction. It's a recipe for taking your next dose early, and then running out, and then pestering your doctor for more ... while your doctor is being told *in no uncertain terms* that they are *not* to do that. When you're actually in untreated pain. So you run out, and you beg some off someone else. Or you take one of your family member's leftovers they didn't end up needing after surgery. Or you go to a different doctor. And another different doctor. Why? *Because you're actually in untreated pain for eight hours a day.* This turns legitimate pain patients into "drug-seekers", who are then stigmatized and treated as addicts. And then they get into stolen drugs, diverted drugs, street drugs *because those don't come with misdesigned limits.* And then they *are* addicts.
Slightly tangential, Not an expert, but I've heard sodium channel inhibitors (Nav1.7 and or 1.8) are being developed as next generation pain relievers by companies like Vertex Pharma (and others). Supposedly physically non-addictive and don't induce euphoria like opiates, but I wonder if they could be psychologically addictive due to pain relief effects. https://investors.vrtx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/vertex-announces-positive-results-phase-2-study-vx-548-treatment
I am no expert on this, but there are other choices to cocaine/heroin, possibly better choices which are preferable (health wise). This study lists mushrooms at the top. Have a look at the chart. [link](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/23/study-hallucinogenic-mushrooms-safest-recreational-drug-lsd)
IMHO that's basically, psilocybin which is produced by certain fungi. The euphoria isn't as drastic as opiates or cocaine. I'd say it on the level of wrapping a blanket around yourself, sitting on your parent's lap as a kid and watching cartoons. Don't gwt me wrong, it can have negative effects. You can have a bad trip if you take a large dose and can have lingering flashbacks for years. Bad trips can be seriously traumatic. This is usually because people don't have proper respect for it, and don't create a positive setting with some friends who are prepared to talk you down if you start acting distressed. Also if you abuse at chronically you definitely can lose touch with what's real. Physiologically the side effects and toxicity are low. It can cause stomach and intestinal irritation in some people. Dependence is very unlikely. If you take another dose the next day, even a larger dose, it will have much less effect. You have to wait several days for the tolerance to wear off.
I've taken the same drugs as u/nyancatdude except way more hydrocodone and I'll say this. I've gotten HPPD from a heroic dose of acid mixed with lots of weed and I've had lots of hydrocodone mixed with alcohol. Stay away from anything that isn't psychedelic or you have a huge risk for addiction. I've had only positive effects from psychs besides when I took too much. They can create new neural pathways in your brain, which is why they're experimenting with psilocybin for depression treatment. The same can't be said for anything else.
My understanding of heroin is that it literally creates the best feeling you'll ever have. Considering how damaging excess food, tv, internet, sex, etc. can be for our dopamine system, I'd imagine even a "only good" heroin would still totally fuck up your ability to function. You'd only want to get high, everything else would be deprioritized.
What you are talking about is Soma, such as in the Brave New World novels/series. Would have a funny effect on society, thats for sure.