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Health and medicine
Course: Health and medicine > Unit 9
Lesson 6: Drug abuse and drug addictions- Drug abuse and drug addiction
- Overview of psychoactive drugs
- Psychoactive drugs: Depressants and opiates
- Psychoactive drugs: Stimulants
- Psychoactive drugs: Hallucinogens
- Routes of drug entry
- Drug dependence and homeostasis
- Reward pathway in the brain
- Tolerance and withdrawal
- Risk factors for drug use and drug abuse
- Substance use disorders
- The development of substance use - Why do people use legal and illegal substances?
- Why do some people but not others develop substance use problems?
- Treatments and triggers for drug dependence
- How does substance use develop into substance abuse
- Drug use prevention - school programming and protective factors
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Overview of psychoactive drugs
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Want to join the conversation?
- I have heard of opiates used to mean pain relievers not produced by the brain that have a similar chemical structure to opium and opiods used to mean pain relievers produced by the brain that have a similar chemical structure to opium.
So why are the terms opiates and opiods used for both what I have heard them used for(from the brain or not from the brain) and for what she said they are used for(natural vs synthetic)?(21 votes)- Essentially, if it doesn't come from the opium poppy it is an opioid. Thus, for the most part only morphine, and codeine are opiates. However, within the context of opioids there are a number of classes including semi synthetic ones such as heroine, and hydromorphone to fully synthetic opioids such as fentanyl which are not even partly derived from opium. They all however (whether they be opiate, or opioid act on many of the same receptors, but to different degrees). Thus, as a class they share many (but not all) of the same side effects, but again to different degrees.(23 votes)
- How come Nicotine can relax you and make you more alert?(4 votes)
- I found this excerpt from www.quit.org:
Nicotine causes a spike in your heart rate and blood pressure making your heart work harder. The cigarette appears to relax you because the nicotine removes the uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms caused by smoking, and gives you a brief hit from the brain-reward chemical called dopamine.
But because of this spike in heart rate and blood pressure it’s difficult to achieve the level of relaxation and stress relief of a nonsmoker.
Hopefully this helps!(22 votes)
- Why do some individuals say that cannabis is a good drug, like makes your mood better, alert in a good way, ect..(3 votes)
- Transcript of this video needs corrections.Palestinians, 2:57Pakistans, and many other strange words. 3:12
How are the transcripts produced and checked?(3 votes)- It is most likely a computerized speech recognition system. It will sometimes replace rare terms with more commonly used words.(3 votes)
- What is the conversation about caffeine? Is it actually bad for your health or does it do you good health wise?(3 votes)
- Caffeine, more often than not, is actually not good for us.
Too much of it, for too long of a time period of usage, can make a person dependent upon it, and when a person attempts to quit using caffeine, they may experience withdrawal symptoms. The Mayo Clinic has found that even moderate amounts can be harmful.
One important thing to know about products on the market, is that the manufacturers do not have to prove they are safe before making them available to the public. However, the FDA does have to prove that the product is not safe before banning it. Just because something is out on the market does not mean its good for us.(3 votes)
- for morphine is it just for people who have a disease that can't be cured and there like really awake and stressed or is it for everyone because my grandma before she passed a couple of weeks ago because of brain cancer , she used liquid morphine because she was stressed out and couldn't sleep and also how bad or good are the side affects of liquid morphine ?(2 votes)
- Morphine, just like any drug, needs to be used with care. In your example of a person who is "awake and stressed out" I would need to know what you mean. For example, my cousin died of a blood infection and a sepsis and was given diclegis in hospice. (It's much stronger than morphine.) Without the medication, when he was awake, he would cry and writhe around in pain, clearly in much distress. With it, he would be comatose, wake up for literally 5 seconds, then fall limp backwards, out cold. In that sense, morphine is useful as a palliative anti-pain drug. I'm very sorry about your grandmother. She probably used morphine as a painkiller. It is addictive and needs to be used with caution.(4 votes)
- Since when are opiates/opiods considered a separate type? Always seen them been classified as downers.
I don't follow the reasoning behind it.(2 votes)- By downers I assume you mean depressants, the reasoning, as explained in the video, is that they act on different systems (inhibitory (GABA&Glycine) vs. nocirecepting peptides (enkephalin, endorphins). Also opioids have a pain-killing effect, leading them to be a separate group despite sharing many characteristics.(2 votes)
- Does caffeine really stop child growth by affected the hormones? Would this be the reason caffeine is a drug?(2 votes)
- No, caffeine doesn't stunt a child's growth. But caffeine stimulates the central nervous system. Caffeine is defined as a drug because it stimulates the central nervous system, causing increased alertness. Caffeine gives most people a temporary energy boost and elevates mood.(2 votes)
- just a bit of a question... for people with ADHD (as my self) does caffeine make you calmer or is that a myth? I know that people who don't have ADHD when they have caffeine it could make them feel more alert but does it do the opposite for people who have it?(2 votes)
- i wanna know this, i get adhd too and its interesting(1 vote)
- so is coffee in this category?(2 votes)
- Coffee is an alkaloid, a class of naturally occurring compounds with nitrogen as bases. Alkaloids have diverse and important physiological effects on humans and other animals. Other well-known alkaloids include morphine, cocaine, and nicotine.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Narrator] Psychoactive drugs are drugs that can
alter our consciousness. They can alter our perceptions,
influence our moods, calm us down, make us
feel more alert, etc. We classify psychoactive
drugs based on the actions and effects that they have on our bodies. When we do this we wind
up with four main groups : depressants, stimulants,
hallucinogens, and opiates. Drugs that are classified as depressants depress our central
nervous system function. They decrease the level of arousal or decrease the level of stimulation in certain areas of our brain. They decrease our heart
rate, lower blood pressure, slow our breathing. They can cause dizziness
and lack of coordination. Importantly they lower
our processing speed. This is important because it
can effect how we interpret and react to the things
that are going on around us. It will cause us to think more slowly and to act more slowly. There are a number of
different types of drugs that fall under this heading. One type is referred to as barbiturates. These are also sometimes
referred to as tranquilizers. These are drugs that are sometimes
prescribed to individuals to help them sleep or
to help them calm down. They are also sometimes
used in general anesthesia or as an anti-convulsant. The truth of the matter is that these drugs aren't
actually prescribed very often because of the side
effects that they can have and because they have a
high addiction potential. They've mostly been replaced
by another type of depressant which are called benzodiazepems. These are prescribed for the same thing. They are prescribed to
treat insomnia, anxiety, and they are also used to treat seizures since they can depress
out of control activity. The last depressant I want
to point out is alcohol. It might surprise you that alcohol is
characterized as a depressant since it's associated
with going out to bars and flirting and dancing with friends. Rather than producing a stimulating effect what is actually going on is that alcohol is lowering
their inhibitions. It's decreasing their cognitive control. People who generally might
not dance in front of others, alcohol is stopping the thing that would generally stop them. Of course all of the other
symptoms of depressives are also present for alcohol. Things like lack of coordination and slurring of speech, etc. The next class of drugs that I want to talk about are stimulants. If depressants depress our central nervous system functioning, stimulants excite it. They stimulate our central nervous system. They increase our heart
rate and blood pressure and they increase our alertness. When people take them
they feel more awake. They feel more alert and energetic. They can also make people
really nervous and jittery, make them unable to sit still. You are probably very familiar
with one legal stimulant in particular and that is caffeine. This is the part of Coke and Pepsi and also coffee that
helps to keep us awake. You may have heard of
other stimulants as well. Things like amphetamines like Adderall, also methamphetamines and
MDMA or ecstasy or Mollie. Cocaine is also a
stimulant, as is nicotine. Nicotine is in fact a
stimulant and not a depressant. Even though it can cause relaxation it can also make people more alert. One thing that I want to
point out before I move on to the next class of drugs
is that while depressants and stimulants are functionally opposites they don't necessarily
work on the same things on a neurochemical level. This is one of the reasons why
you can't actually take one to counter the effects of the other. Drinking coffee after
you've had a lot of alcohol won't actually sober you up. It will make you just a
more alert drunk person. The next class of drugs are hallucinogens. These are sometimes
referred to as psychedelics. These drugs cause individuals to experience distorted perceptions. This can include hallucinations, so seeing or hearing things that are different from
how things actually are. They can also cause heightened sensations. Sensations that feel real and might be based in reality but is actually different from what is really going on around them. To be clear these drugs aren't
stimulants or depressants even though they can give
people a lot of energy or sometimes calm them down a lot. Instead these drugs are really classified by the perceptual changes
that they bring about. That can include a ton of different things in addition to hallucinations. In can also include emotional responses, feelings of connectiveness
but also intense mood swings. Moods that change very rapidly. This brings up a really interesting point about hallucinogens which is
that the exact experiences felt by the individual can
be different depending on the individual personalities or where they are or who they are with. This class of drugs
includes things like LSD which is sometimes referred to as acid, psilosiban which is an active
ingredient in mushrooms, and also things like peyote and PCP. The last class of drugs I want
to talk about are opiates. Which are sometimes called opioids. These terms are actually
used interchangeably although there is one small distinction. The term opiates is
generally used to describe natural varieties while
opioids are used to discuss synthetic versions. Like depressants, opiates can depress central
nervous system functions. They can decrease heart
rate and blood pressure, they can cause relaxation
and induce sleep. Because of this they are sometimes lumped under
the heading of depressants. While there are actually
important distinctions between them. The main one is that they actually work on different mechanisms
on a neurochemical level. Opiates also have an added feature that also distinguishes
them from depressants. They are an analgesic. They reduce the perception of pain. Some opiates that you might have heard of include morphine and codeine and heroin. It includes other substances
like oxycodone and Vicodin. Here we are we have four classes of drugs depressants, stimulants,
hallucinogens, and opiates. It might seem nothing fits
neatly into one category or another but the fact of the matter is that this is not a perfect system. That is because we created
the system of categorization. Nature did not. Because of this not all drugs fit neatly
into one category or another. Before when we talked
about MDMA or ecstasy we placed it in the stimulant category. It also could just as easily belong in the hallucinogen category. Since it does cause distorted perception and heightened sensations. What about cannabis? Where does marijuana go? It can cause perceptual distortion so it could go under hallucinogens but it can also decrease
central nervous system function and cause relaxation
much like a depressant. Of course this is just one way to classify psychoactive drugs. We could also have sorted
them by legal status or how likely they are to be abused.