DRUG ADDICTION
Updated: Sep 21, 2022
Considering that our organization is creating a department against drugs, our attention will be directed to this problem, as well as different ways for education on this topic.
In this article, we will introduce you shortly with basic thematics.
Drugs are substances that change a person's mental or physical state.
They can affect the way your brain works, how you feel and behave, your understanding, and your senses. This makes them unpredictable and dangerous, especially for young people. The effects of drugs are different for each person and drug.
We have a few main types of drugs:
- Alcohol
- Tobacco
-Cannabis
-New psychoactive substances – synthetic drugs
-Opioids, including heroin
Alcohol is among the most used drugs. It is classified as a central nervous system depressant, which means that drinking alcohol slows down brain functioning, and neural activity, and further reduces the functioning of various vital functions in the body. Some consequences of using alcohol are:
-Alcohol is not digested as food
-It is absorbed in the blood partly by the stomach and partly by the thin intestine
-The intoxicating effect occurs when alcohol reaches the brain and can not be oxidized by the liver
-The liver takes about 3 hours to dissolve a glass of alcohol
-Alcohol consumption causes liver cysts
-Alcohol slows the brain's action worsening memory and extracting information from memory
From alcohol can worsen: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, controlling muscle activity.
Tobacco contains nicotine. Nicotine is a stimulant drug that speeds up the messages traveling between the brain and body. The effect of tobacco is generally described as relaxing, although smoking actually releases a hormone called epinephrine, which can also cause stress to the user.
One of the substances other present at smoking smoke is and carbon monoxide.
It damages the ability of red blood cells (erythrocytes) which lead oxygen to the body tissues, including the tissue heart and brain. We all know that smoking can cause lung cancer, mouth, throat, larynx, as well as cardiovascular diseases and pulmonary disease.
Cannabis, also known as marijuana is a psychoactive drug ,a chemical substance that
changes nervous system function and results in alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, or behavior.
Cannabis has various mental and physical effects, which include euphoria, altered states of mind and sense of time, difficulty concentrating, people who use marijuana show little interest to everyone shows anxiety, fear and suspicion humor changes, sad at all times, abducted in every respect caught in a panic attack.
Synthetic drugs are chemical drugs with psychoactive effects made in labs.
They can be produced commercially by drug manufacturers for valid medical purposes and are diverted from legal channels or produced illegally in clandestine laboratories for illicit markets worldwide.
Synthetic drugs are divided into two categories:
Cannabinoids - synthetic Cannabinoids are chemicals that mimic the effect of THC, the primary psychoactive active ingredient in marijuana.
Stimulants - synthetic stimulants contain chemical compounds that mimic the effects of
cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine.
Not only that they are damaging health on different ways, like other types of drugs, but
numbers of synthetic drug abusers is increasing.
Opioids are a class of drugs naturally found in the opium poppy plant and that work in the
brain to produce a variety of effects, including the relief of pain with many of these drugs.
Opioids can be prescription medications often referred to as painkillers, or they can be so-called street drugs, such as heroin.
Opioids can cause side effects such as drowsiness, mental fog, nausea, and constipation.
They may also cause slowed breathing, which can lead to overdose deaths.
These are only a few basic types of drugs, even we have them in much different shapes, every day more and more, they are appearing on the market in new forms .
Our goal is to educate everybody, specialy young people about effect and consequences of drugs , and also about abusing drugs in different forms and danger that it brings.
By Sanela Nikolic, Police Officer, Crime Analyst
IPO Headquarters - Coordination Director
