Snorting Just One Line Of Cocaine Changes Your Brain Permanently

This won’t come as welcome news to anyone who has dabbled in Charlie, toot, dust, flake, snow or blow – but snorting just one line of cocaine could change your brain permanently.

A single dose was found to change a molecular mechanism in the brain’s reward centre in a University of East Anglia study. The change could mean that people are more likely to relapse into drug addiction after stressful events.

I should point out here that the study involved mice dosed with cocaine, but mouse brains have the same receptors as human ones, apparently.

Dr Peter McCormick from the School of Pharmacy said: ‘Relapse among cocaine addicts is a major problem. We wanted to find out what causes it.

‘We showed that cocaine disrupts the interaction between receptors and these changes could increase the risk of relapse under stressful conditions. Importantly, we identify a potential mechanism for protection against such relapse. Although our study is in rodents, the same receptors have been shown to impact human stress and drug addiction.’

It seems unlikely that anyone who has dabbled in one line of coke, didn’t go in for seconds. As Cass Anderson says, “Cocaine’s like Pringles, once you pop the top you can’t stop, and nobody’s ever stopped at just one.”

However, getting addicted to cocaine isn’t even an option for most people due to the astronomical price of the party drug. So if you’re priced out of the market but are curious about what it does, check out this artist who drew pictures while on 44 different drugs. It’s a very interesting read.

Would this experiment put you off doing cocaine in the future? Let us know your thoughts with a comment.