Imagine not being able to remember what happened yesterday, or last week, month, 10 years ago, or your entire past life? How would your life be changed if you couldn’t perform simple tasks, like brushing your teeth, walking up and down stairs, balancing your checkbook? No, we’re not talking about the aftermath from an automobile accident. This scenario is all about what can happen if you mix drugs (prescription, street or over-the-counter) with alcohol. You can lose your mind.
How Alcohol Damages Your Brain
Alcohol in its many forms (beer, wine, whiskey, scotch, rum, etc.) is considered a central nervous system depressant. It acts to lower your inhibitions, make you feel relaxed, gives you a sense of belonging and a temporary lift in self-confidence. Intoxication, repeated use or continued abuse of alcohol, however, can result in alcohol dependence and alcohol addiction. These are serious conditions that jeopardize your physical and mental health.
What happens to your brain with too much alcohol? You suffer impaired judgment, unable to make appropriate decisions, such as overestimating your driving ability, driving too fast, getting in fights, taking life-threatening risks, and other mistakes. Your brain functioning is slowed. You can’t process things fast enough or you see or hear things that aren’t there. You may begin to experience panic attacks, feel a sense of persecution or paranoia, and feel threatened by individuals who mean you no harm, or deliberately pick fights with the wrong person who does pose a real threat to you.
Users may experience memory lapses, blackouts, distorted vision, and shortened coordination. In short, your capacity to function, your decision-making center – your brain – is compromised.
For the alcohol-dependent individual, vitamin deficiencies, memory loss or disturbance, and hallucinations can occur within 48 hours of abstaining from alcohol, such as during withdrawal.
How Drugs Affect Your Brain
Depending on the drug, your brain suffers numerous kinds of effects. It’s best to list some of them by drug category, but the sad fact is that users seldom choose only one drug to abuse. There are usually several, although one may serve as the “drug of choice.” Multiple drug use is referred to as “polysubstance abuse/dependence.”
• Cocaine and Crack Cocaine – In all its forms, cocaine can cause brain seizures, erratic, violent or paranoid behavior, anxiety and hallucinations.
• Cannabis or Marijuana – Long touted for its ability to mellow the user out, marijuana also splits you off from your consciousness, like you are outside your body watching yourself), makes you feel anxious, results in mood swings, amnesia and paranoia. Marijuana affects the portions of the brain that control emotions, memory and judgment. Smoking it can weaken not only short-term memory, but also block information from becoming long-term memory. Marijuana also negatively affects problem-solving ability.
• Ecstasy – An amphetamine, ecstasy causes users to have difficulty differentiating reality from fantasy. It also causes problems with concentration. Long-term use destroys certain connections in the brain. Even after the drug is discontinued, studies have shown that the sections don’t connect normally. Ecstasy impairs memory, and can cause anxiety, confusion, and paranoia.
• Hallucinogens (LSD, mescaline, mushrooms) – Often taken deliberately by the user for its ability to produce hallucinations, flashbacks of those hallucinations can occur long after the drugs are out of the user’s system. Flashes or trails in front of the eyes, and “bad trips,” frightening and very real hallucinations are also common. LSD blurs reality and fantasy, causes anxiety, confusion, panic attacks and paranoia.
• Heroin – A highly addictive opiate, like morphine, users’ brain cells can become so dependent on the drug that they can’t function without it. Following a brief rush, users are in a fog for hours afterward. They then seek only to obtain more of the drug to replicate the “high.”
• Inhalants (paints, glue, solvents) – Slurred speech, dizziness, brain damage, seizures and death can occur – from a single use in certain individuals.
• Methamphetamine (meth, speed, chalk, crystal, ice and glass) – This is an addictive stimulant that strongly activates certain systems in the brain. Anxiety, confusion, insomnia, mood disturbances and violent behavior occur. Chronic abuse may result in psychotic behavior such as paranoia, delusions, and visual and auditory hallucinations.
• Opiates or Painkillers (morphine, codeine, heroin, methadone) – Painkillers also produce slurred speech, altered mood, dizziness, and, like other drugs, impaired memory and attention span.
• PCP – Its official name is phencyclidine, and its effects on the brain include distortions in time, space, and body image, visual and auditory hallucinations and active fantasies (users may think they have the ability to fly, for example). Users often appear to be uncommunicative, even comatose.
• Ritalin – Prescribed to treat attention-deficit disorder (ADD), Ritalin is used on the street crushed into powder and snorted, like cocaine, or injected, like heroin. Abused this way, it causes severe headaches, anxiety, delusion and paranoia.
• Sedatives, Hypnotics, Anxiolytics (Valium, Librium, Quaaludes, barbital or amytal, Nembutal, and Seconal) – Effects include impaired speech and concentration, poor judgment, mood swings, paranoia, acting out of aggressive and sexual impulses. Overdose can lead to delirium, convulsions, and death. Benzodiazepines, such as Valium, can cause users to experience aggressive and hostile behavior, as well as convulsions.
• Steroids – These are hormones taken by users to stimulate growth and accelerate weight gain. Anabolic steroids are actually man-made replications of the male testosterone hormone. Along with negative physical effects, long-term use of steroids can damage the brain and result in agitation, aggression, mood changes, anger and an inability to control impulses.
Alcohol + Drugs = Serious Brain Consequences
Individually, abuse of alcohol and or any of the above-mentioned drugs can cause users to experience some form of damage to the brain. Combining them is a prescription for serious injury to brain functioning and health. These dangers also apply to over-the-counter (non-prescription) drugs such as cough syrups and allergy medications containing epinephrine.
Since the human brain doesn’t fully form until about age 20, teens who drink and/or do drugs too much experience permanent brain damage and memory loss.
Bottom line: Steer clear of any nonmedical use of prescription drugs, avoid alcohol and don’t be tempted to use illegal street drugs. It’s not worth losing your mind – or your life.
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