Why do our bodies build up a tolerance to some medications but not others?
In: Biology
First off it has to do with your body always trying to stay in a state of balance. Most drugs involve binding to different receptors and your body has counters to the effects of binding to these receptors. It’s able to learn how to regulate them differently and control how “sensitive” they are with different hormones and other chems lime adrenaline. This is why some drugs have hangovers, because once the drug itself has worn out, the body’s chemicals and mechanisms it released to try and balance you out into homeostasis still exist. For instance, an alcoholic after a binder will have the shakes because the body was releasing adrenaline to counter the depressant alcohol. And since they person was drinking for so long, not only is the body exhausted from tons of adrenaline but it’s still pumping out, causing shakes and in extreme cases, delusions.
But with other drugs like say DMT, the body doesn’t have a counter chemical for this. It can’t pump another drug into your body to level you out. But it does have a defense mechanism specifically for just this drug since the body already produces it in low doses. So while it can’t counter it with another drug it does have a hormone which catches and kills DMT in the brain, which is why it only lasts 15 minutes but also doesn’t have a hangover because there wasn’t any adrenal or neuron fatigue.
But then you gave drugs like datura which can last literally days because the body has absolutely no defense mechanism against this. Not a counter hormone nor a cleanup hormone. Nothing. So it just has to get cleared by the liver and kidneys and you will never build a tolerance.
That being said you will eventually still build a pseudo tolerance against anything that impacts you. Eventually your brain will adapt to the changed state of reality and start rewiring itself to adapt to the differences. So eventually a person will still be super high but they’ll just have had their brain learn how to handle the intensity because the brain has rewired itself to navigate it.
But that too comes with a problem. This is why if someone gets off something like long term chronic use of things like LSD it can take sometimes months to years to get back mentally normal again. Because once they stop using, their brain has to again rewire itself to being a normal brain again. In some extreme and rare cases of extreme chronic abuse of lsd of really really long periods of time, like years, they can’t possibly come back. The brain has been so heavily rewired that it can’t undo itself.
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