why can’t people use pure serotonin and dopamine for recreational use, why do we need to take drugs like mdma or coke with all the bad side effects?
In: Chemistry
Dosing those feel good chemicals is complicated. Too few and you don’t feel much, too many and you can have seizures and die.
Serotonin and dopamine do stuff in other places throughout the body, and it would be unpleasant for all those processes to start going crazy. If you just want it in the brain, it makes more sense to block the reuptake or cause more release of it in the brain
Also, a form of dopamine is used as an oral drug for people with Parkinson’s disease. It’s usually given with a drug that prevents it from turning into dopamine before it gets to the brain so you don’t get those side effects
Brain chemistry is wildly complex, and it’s not as simple as just smacking the serotonin or dopamine button to feel happy. That’s why not all dopaminergic drugs feel the same, why dopamingergic drugs don’t feel like SSRIs, and why not all drugs people take recreationally are mainly about dopamine or serotonin.
Even if you somehow accounted for that and were able to somehow, despite it being impossible, only target the pleasure response caused by dopamine and effect nothing else: there would still 100% be side effects. The brain adjusts to its conditions, and part of developing a tolerance to drugs is that your brain will adjust to try and be closer to a baseline. If you’re doing loads of coke your brain starts tuning some thing down because it anticipates the coke will bring it back up.
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