Posted on 07/19/2004 8:22:02 PM PDT by neverdem
People who do not want to wait for old age to shrink their brains and bring on memory loss now have a quicker alternative - abuse methamphetamine for a decade or so and watch the brain cells vanish into the night.
The first high-resolution M.R.I. study of methamphetamine addicts shows "a forest fire of brain damage," said Dr. Paul Thompson, an expert on brain mapping at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We expected some brain changes but didn't expect so much tissue to be destroyed."
The image, published in the June 30 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, shows the brain's surface and deeper limbic system. Red areas show the greatest tissue loss.
The limbic region, involved in drug craving, reward, mood and emotion, lost 11 percent of its tissue. "The cells are dead and gone," Dr. Thompson said. Addicts were depressed, anxious and unable to concentrate.
The brain's center for making new memories, the hippocampus, lost 8 percent of its tissue, comparable to the brain deficits in early Alzheimer's. The methamphetamine addicts fared significantly worse on memory tests than healthy people the same age.
The study examined 22 people in their 30's who had used methamphetamine for 10 years, mostly by smoking it, and 21 controls matched for age. On average, the addicts used an average of four grams a week and said they had been high on 19 of the 30 days before the study began.
Methamphetamine is an addictive stimulant made in clandestine laboratories nationwide. When taken by mouth, snorted, injected or smoked, it produces intense pleasure by releasing the brain's reward chemical, dopamine. With chronic use, the brains that overstimulate dopamine and another brain chemical, serotonin, are permanently compromised.
The study held one other surprise, Dr. Thompson said: white matter, composed of nerve fibers that connect different areas, was severely inflamed, making the addicts' brains 10 percent larger than normal. "This was shocking," he said. But there was one piece of good news: the white matter was not dead. With abstinence, it might recover.
How can you tell? Junkies overwhelmingly started out Liberals. Maybe their brains always looked like that.
So9
Who needs a reason. Drug use is against the Law, should that not be the sufficient and the only reason for any behavioural decision?
Then if you had lived in the 1920s you would have refused to drink any alcoholic beverage, but would have smoked marijuahana, because that is what was the law at the time?
So9
Meth makers and dealers need to be executed after a fair trial.
Because you are at risk due to the people you deal with every day, whereas I am a retired veteran of the 60s and have evolved past sex, drugs and rock & roll.
And because the contact high just from living where he does, has given Nully a brain MRI that looks like the schematic for a loofa.
So9
*ouch*
Nah, I'm fine, give me the keys.
Oh. It was early.
"Swervie, OTOH doesn't remember anything about it. See title..."
ROTFL. Good point.
Nice to know my friends are concerned about me. *Smooch*
"And because the contact high just from living where he does, has given Nully a brain MRI that looks like the schematic for a loofa."
He does have a point, Nully.
Yes. Speed affects the entire body. When a person's body has used up most of the drug, their muscles begin to spasm, or twitch.
In Austin they call them tweekers or crack whores.
Now this is a fascinating statistic. Meth posession is a crime, punishable by imprisonmemt. Selling meth is also a crime punishable by imprisonment. Yet, close to 1/3 of families at the early childbearing stages are involved with drugs in some form.
It is easy to spot a tweaker. They are easily identified as they exhibit physiological and behavioral characteristics. They are nearly ubiquitous in the seedier parts of town. Hardly a day goes by that I don't see at least one tweaker at the local supermarket or shopping mall. And I have known people who used meth, had their kids raised by grandparents, and who ultimately died from meth use, in spite of the fact that meth use is illegal. If it is so easy to spot a tweaker, and amphetamine use is illegal, why don't tweakers get arrested more often?
Laws are tools of liberals to make themselves feel like they are doing something about problems. They are more concerned with making laws than enforcing them. Conservatives are supposed to enforce the laws that liberals make. The main problem, as I see it, in the war on drugs, is that liberals make laws to change people's behavior, and then make exceptions to those laws to prevent them from being effectively enforced. That's why lawyers are liberals. Conservatives then want what the laws have promised, and so try to enforce them, and apply the penalties that the laws proscribe.
In my opinion, we have to do one of two things: Either make the penalties talibanian, as in death for meth sellers on the first offense, and enforce them without exception, or we do away with the drug laws and the piecemeal enforcement that we get now, and treat drug abuse for what it is, a medical condition.
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