Like you’re a skeleton and your mouth looks weird
In: Biology
A lot of it is just not taking care of yourself. Not eating enough food leads to the skeletal appearance and sunken cheeks; dry mouth and not drinking water means the digestive enzymes in your saliva have plenty of time to eat away at the enamel on your teeth, causing them to rot and fall out.
They make you eat less because they’re appetite suppressants so people lose weight and look gaunt. They also make your mouth dry and that makes your gums recede and your teeth are more prone to being damaged like that. Also the addiction comes with bad care for your teeth
A lot of it is indirect, such as spending your money on drugs instead of food. Like, “if I buy just enough food to not die, then I can afford more meth” type of thinking. Also not brushing your teeth or eating well because you’re high. Just hygiene in general suffers when your priorities are consumed by the drug habit.
Then some more direct effects of the drugs themselves like the dry mouth that has been mentioned leading to receding gums and tooth damage.
Both of them disrupt your normal bodily maintenance like eating, sleeping, bathing, etc. Meth in particular has some chemicals that when smoked are very nasty so you’ll see it stain and burn peoples teeth if they’re a heavy user. You also have stuff like “I got high and fell down and popped my mouth on the sidewalk, then I got high again and didn’t go to the dentist to get it fixed because I was high”.
It’s not the drugs themselves doing most of it, it’s replacing normal lifestyle stuff with addiction that causes those things.
The vast majority of the look has nothing directly to do with the drug. Instead, it’s about the behaviors that the drug-use creates in addicts.
Mostly, it’s from living hard and not taking basic care of your body. If you use drugs, at first you hide it well because you still pretend to have a normal life. You maybe hold down a job, so you have a safe home you pay rent for or whatever. You eat regularly, you drink water sometimes, you maybe brush your teeth, etc.
But as your addiction spirals out of control, you lose your job, and you don’t really bother to get another or you became unemployable. No more income does two things. The immediate major problem is that you likely cannot afford your housing, or food, or hygiene. But even more insidious… now those needs are competing for every dollar with your addiction. Addicts skip the stuff they *NEED* so they can get the drugs that they *WANT* instead. Skip a few meals and put that money into a high. Skip paying rent and get high and squat until eviction, then live out of your car or on the street and put all your funds to your drug.
This is why addicts look the way they do. They get so thin because instead of eating nutritional calories and being well hydrated, they do drugs and barely eat, and when they eat it’s usually just junk foods and not real nutrition. This causes your body to deteriorate QUICKLY. Add on hard living in the elements while homeless, and add in few showers and no dental care, no hair care, no skin care, etc…
There are a few things that the drugs accelerate too. Like many addicts have hallucinations and delusions of “bugs crawling on them” even though there are no bugs. So they scratch and pick at their skin, causing cuts and scrapes and scabs and that look. Smoking meth or other drugs is TERRIBLE for your teeth. Hell, smoking anything is bad for your teeth, it dries out your mouth which is bad for your dental health, and also the drug itself in aerosol form will coat and stick to the teeth, causing more deterioration. But all of that could be helped if the drug user drank plenty of clean water and brushed/flossed 2-3 times per day. But drug users aren’t doing that, obviously.
By the time you *SEE* the drug use on a person, they’ve likely been using for several years and their life has completely spiraled out of control. New users and users with wealth can hide it for much longer, because they can afford their drugs *AND* still have housing, have access to food and water, hygiene, doctors, etc.
Not meth but I remember watching a documentary about professional people addicted to heroin. We’re talking years. Lots of them looked totally normal and went to work etc. It’s the ones that can’t afford the lifestyle that spiral down into the chaos of not eating properly, street life, violence and other vices.
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