Why can’t they create a drug like cocaine or heroin that retains only the positive effects (euphoria, relaxation, etc.) without causing harm and danger to health?
In: Chemistry
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.” 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.
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