Study – The Brain and Cocaine
In the early days of drug abuse awareness campaigns, a series of commercials ran comparing a frying egg to your brain on drugs. Remember “Any questions?” While they painted a pretty frightening picture of the damage drugs do to their brain, the analogy is oversimplified and glosses over how the brain reacts before, during, and after each drug use. Many studies have looked into this, and recent results from one are very promising.
Not much can be done about deterioration of brain tissue that results from drug use, other than to wait for it to regenerate. Which it does with long-term sobriety, most of the time, over a couple of decades. To be proactive, researchers study how receptors in the brain act and change with drug use and between uses. What they’re finding is that they can manipulate certain receptors to increase and decrease cocaine usage and relapse behavior in animals.
The study that discovered the breakthrough was done at the University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions (RIA). You can find a summary of it here or purchase the full published study here.