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What Do Drugs Do to Your Brain

By Rebecca J. Stigall

In the mid-1980s, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America televised a campaign that was intended to teach kids about the effects of drugs on the brain. In the commercial, the announcer holds an egg and indicates that "this is your brain." The viewer then sees a frying pan while the announcer says, "this is drugs." The announcer then cracks the egg into the frying pan and, as the egg sizzles, the announcer says, "This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?"

This famous anti-drug campaign was a response to the 1970s-inspired attitude that drugs were harmless, maybe even enlightening. The goal of the campaign was to erase that attitude as well as inform people that drugs were a growing and serious problem. Snippets of the campaign are still recognizable today, so it obviously made an impression.

The statement "this is your brain on drugs" is a slogan that most people, young and old, easily recognize. Obviously, drug users risk becoming "fried." But what exactly do drugs do to your brain?

To put it simply, drugs are like a bunch of keys looking for locks. Once these keys find a lock that they fit into, they make a connection with “receptors” and unlock the doors to the brain's feel-good chemicals, which are then released into the bloodstream to travel through the body. The problem is that drugs unlock doors that are supposed to be unlocked by a different kind of key – a non-drug key. Because drugs essentially take the place of your body's own natural "keys," they can cause negative reactions. So, drugs are the "keys" and the "doors" are the brain receptors.

Doing drugs feels good – that's why people do them. But sometimes it takes a while for drugs to make a person feel good and sometimes, even though the person doing drugs feels good eventually, they might get sick when they first do the drug. When you get sick from drugs, it's because you have essentially poisoned your body. For instance, some people like the feeling of being drunk. But when the buzz wears off, many people get a hangover, which isn't fun at all. 

Once your body gets a taste of the drugs, especially the good feelings that come along with doing drugs, your body wants more – it wants to feel that way again. So your body gets cravings for more of the drug keys to open those feel-good doors. But once you starting using drug keys to open those doors, your body figures you don't need it to make any more of its own natural keys to the feel-good doors, so it doesn't waste any more time making them.

What ends up happening is that your body won't know how to make itself feel good anymore; it will always need the drugs to unlock the doors. When this happens, you're addicted, and you need to do more and more drugs, or even stronger drugs, just to feel normal.

Some parts of your brain can even die if you do drugs. Since you won't be using the right keys to open the feel-good doors, the doors get damaged. Once damaged, these doors can't be replaced. The part of your brain that is represented by these doors dies.

Drugs start changing your brain the very first time you use them. Some experts say that your brain can change back to the way it was before eventually, but others disagree. Ultimately, why take the risk?

There are so many factors that affect how you will react to drugs that there's no way for you to know ahead of time whether or not you'll feel good, get sick, or even die. The way that anybody reacts to drugs is based on their genetic makeup, how many receptors (or doors) they have in their brain, and how much of, and how fast, the drug gets to their brain. But these are characteristics that you can't see. You don't know how your body will react before you take drugs and, by then, it could be too late.