New studies are showing that those who may have an addiction to salt, can also be more apt to a cocaine or heroin addiction. Scientists in the United States and Australia have discovered that there is a correlation between salt and other drugs in the hypothalamus portion of the brain.
New research has found that a vaccine can block the effects of cocaine by combining elements of the common cold virus with a particle that mimics cocaine. This could be the first medication to treat cocaine addiction, and could help treat other addictions, such as nicotine and opiates.
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Researchers have identified a molecular switch that plays an important role in forming memory and addictive behaviors. The formation of these behaviors depend on the creation of new connections between neurons in the brain. Addiction behaviors manifest in long-term alterations in neuron connections and can be viewed as a type of learning.
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Researchers from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine have become the first to find a link between specific neurons and alterations in the “reward” people feel after taking cocaine. Mary Kay Lobo, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and first author of the study, said that they found that the two main neurons in the nucleus accumbens (an important part of the brain’s reward center) have opposite effects on cocaine reward.
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Forensic pathologists have shown that over three percent of all sudden deaths in southwest Spain are related to the use of cocaine. They believe their findings can be extrapolated to much of the rest of Europe, indicating that cocaine use is a growing public health problem in Europe and that there is no such thing as “safe” recreational use of small amounts of the drug.
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New research suggests that fruit flies, which are already used to study dozens of human diseases, could be used as a simpler and more convenient model for studying the effects of cocaine and other drugs on the brain. The study appears online in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, a new monthly journal.
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When a person uses a chemical substance like cocaine, the drug provokes a response in the immune system, creating special biomolecules that may serve as a permanent record of each exposure.
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When Mackenzie Phillips was 10 years old, her father, John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, taught her how to roll a joint. She first tried cocaine when she was 11. One week after her 18th birthday, she was arrested for the first time. Now, at 49, Phillips is revealing the most shocking part of her past for the first time: she was raped by her father and then began consensually sleeping with him.
In his new autobiography, rap star Bobby Brown says he was first introduced to cocaine by his ex-wife, Whitney Houston. The former drug addict, who was married to Houston from 1992 to 2006, has revealed shocking details of the couple’s relationship in Bobby Brown: The Truth, the Whole Truth and Noting But, due in September 2009.
“I never used cocaine until after I met Whitney. Before then, I had experimented with other drugs, but marijuana was my drug of choice. At one point in my life, I used drugs uncontrollably,” he writes. “I was using everything I could get my hands on, from cocaine to heroin, weed and cooked cocaine.”
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According to the singer’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Amy Winehouse stole cocaine from supermodel Kate Moss, temporarily died during an overdose in 2007, and wouldn’t perform without taking a hit from her crack pipe. Blake Fielder-Civil talked to the UK’s The Sun, describing how their life spiraled into a “drug-crazed nightmare.”
Fielder-Civil revealed that in August 2007, after they had spent three days using heroin and crack, he was begging her to get some sleep when she suddenly went into a fit. “It was nearly midnight and I’d finally got her upstairs. We were sitting on the bed talking. Her eyes suddenly went blank,” he said. She began foaming at the mouth and “started having a fit on the bed. She slid down on to the floor before I could stop her.”