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Harmful Effects Of Drugs On Society – Substance use is different for everyone and can be seen on a spectrum with different stages of benefit and harm.
When a person who uses drugs or alcohol, they get used to a certain dose and need higher amounts to get the same effects. Tolerance develops over time and will change based on many factors, including:
Harmful Effects Of Drugs On Society
People who do not use drugs, or have taken a break from drug use, may experience a lower tolerance to drugs. This can put them at greater risk of overdose because they may use more medicine than their body can handle.
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Physical dependence is a body’s natural reaction when certain substances are used for an extended period of time. The body gets used to a regular supply of the substance, and if the dose is reduced or stopped, a person may experience withdrawal symptoms, which can make it difficult to give up the substance. For some substances, the amount needed to prevent withdrawal increases with time and use as the body develops tolerance.
Someone can become physically dependent on a substance (such as a prescription drug) but not use it in a way that has a negative impact on their health or others.
Withdrawal is a natural reaction that can occur when a person reduces or stops taking drugs or alcohol after using them regularly for a long time or after using high doses. In some cases and depending on the substance, withdrawal symptoms can be extremely debilitating and make it very difficult to stop or reduce the dose.
Prescription drugs can help treat illnesses and conditions and make you feel better. But taking these medications correctly is important.
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Improper use of prescription drugs, such as taking drugs that were not prescribed for you or taking more than prescribed to induce euphoria or change your mood, can have dangerous consequences.
Inappropriate use of these medications can cause serious health effects, including addiction (substance use disorder), overdose, and even death.
Over time, the harms associated with high-risk substance use may outweigh any perceived positive effects. Higher risk substance use can affect many areas of a person’s life:
Getting help can mean different things to different people and can take many different forms. The chronic nature of addiction (substance use disorder) makes reusing drugs or alcohol at some point, even after a period of abstinence, common.
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It is important for people to know that treatment success is not determined by immediate and long-term abstinence. Treatment is successful when the person understands their addiction and seeks help if they relapse. Returning to treatment and healthier behaviors should be considered a success.
Addiction recovery is possible, but it looks different for everyone. People can, and do, overcome substance use problems. A person in recovery is going through an individual process to improve their physical, psychological and social health, which can take time. Recovery could include complete abstinence (avoiding drugs or alcohol completely) or medication-assisted treatment, such as prescribing methadone or buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder.
There are also many health and social services available, including non-medical therapies such as counseling or support from people with lived and life experience. Illegal drug use remains a major problem in the United States. In 2010, 8.9 percent of Americans age 12 and older reported using an illicit drug in the past month, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, and prescription drugs which are used non-medically.
The negative effects of drug use are numerous and many are well documented in the medical literature. Illicit drug use should be considered in the differential diagnosis of many clinical presentations, especially in patients with positive drug tests or a history of substance abuse, because the list of known adverse effects is growing. . There is a growing number of case reports involving infrequent adverse effects of commonly used illicit drugs (Table 1).
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Common acute manifestations of marijuana abuse include euphoria, conjunctival injection, and xerostomia. Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome is a lesser known result of chronic marijuana use. Recently, clinical criteria have been proposed to aid in the diagnosis of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.
The condition occurs in susceptible individuals and leads to severe intermittent nausea, hyperemesis, and abdominal pain. A unique finding in this syndrome is temporary relief through compulsive hot bathing.
Known adverse effects of cocaine use include cardiovascular manifestations (eg, myocardial infarction, arrhythmias), psychiatric conditions (eg, psychosis, paranoia), and neurological findings (eg, headache, stroke, seizures). However, recently, many cocaine users have presented to healthcare facilities with an unusual clinical triad of leukopenia, positive autoimmune markers, and dermatologic manifestations.
This unusual presentation has been linked to the adulteration of cocaine with levamisole, an anthelmintic agent currently used in veterinary medicine. Although it is not clear why levamisole is added to cocaine, it is undetectable by most street tests for cocaine purity, making it useful when a person is trying to “cut” or dilute the drug. Levamisole has also been theorized to increase the euphoria associated with cocaine use. This problem is likely to become more recognized, because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 69 percent of all cocaine seized in 2009 contained this adulterant.
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Patients using levamisole-containing cocaine often have striking reticular and purpuric lesions on the ears and extremities due to an underlying vasculitis (Figure 1). Assuming there are no superimposed infections, the effects often resolve with cessation of adulterated cocaine use and supportive care.
Acute heroin intoxication is known to cause euphoria, miosis, xerostomia, bradycardia, hypotension, and respiratory depression. Less common effects include transverse myelitis and rhabdomyolysis with subsequent acute kidney injury.
The underlying mechanism of these effects is unknown and the patient’s description of symptoms may be vague, leading to a delay in clinical recognition. Denial of drug use can make recognition even more difficult. Prompt treatment of transverse myelitis and rhabdomyolysis is imperative to minimize long-term sequelae. Transverse myelitis should be treated with corticosteroids. Rhabdomyolysis is treated with aggressive rehydration to prevent kidney injury.
Because of the social implications associated with illicit drugs, patients may conceal their use of these substances, further complicating a difficult diagnosis. Promptly initiating the discussion about cessation is an important aspect in the overall treatment of the adverse effects of illicit drug use. Family doctors are often the first to recognize serious drug abuse. They can be especially helpful for these patients if they remain actively involved in their care, as patients receive comprehensive, multidisciplinary treatment for substance abuse and addiction.
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Share all sharing options: How scientists rank drugs from most to least dangerous and why the rankings are flawed
There is a very common talking point about drug policy that is meant to convey the absurdity of the war on drugs: alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, even though alcohol is legal and marijuana is not.
Perhaps the biggest evidence of this point is a 2010 study published in The Lancet which ranked alcohol as the most dangerous drug in the UK, beating heroin, crack and marijuana. This study has attracted widespread media attention, appearing in outlets such as the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New Republic and here at .
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Although drug policy experts generally do not dispute the claim that alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, the study, led by British researcher David Nutt, is quite controversial. Experts see the rankings as deeply flawed, largely because they present the harms that come from drugs in a rather crude and one-dimensional way. Even Nutt has acknowledged that the study is imperfect.
This may seem like a small academic quibble, but it is quite important as researchers and lawmakers try to advance more scientific approaches to drug policy. Finding the best method for assessing drug risks is much more complicated than assigning numerical ratings.
Nutt’s analysis measures two different issues related to drug use in the UK: the risk to an individual and the harm to society as a whole.
Individual scores take into account a number of variables, including mortality, dependency, drug-related family adversities, environmental damage and the effect on crime.
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Even if two drugs score similarly in Nutt’s analysis, the underlying variables behind the scores may be completely different. For example, heroin and crack are quite close in the ranking. But heroin has a much higher risk of death, while crack carries a much higher risk of mental impairment.
There is also some divergence within specific damage categories. Both alcohol and heroin rate high for crime. But the crime risk of alcohol is due to its tendency to make people more aggressive (and more likely to commit crimes), while the crime risk of heroin is based on the mass criminal.
