Right - clearly Learning is the area of Psychology that really spins my head around 360 degrees, because as I sat in today's lecture about Classic Conditioning (again, I know - will it ever stop?) one year after I last posted on here I thought, "holy shit, that's freaking amazing! I want to have another crack at this blog thing". So here I am.
Drug tolerance occurs when your body get's use to your drug of choice - in this case heroin, but think also nicotine or even caffeine - and it takes more and more of that drug to produce the same results that it used to. This is why addicts start to use more and more heroin (or drink more and more cups of coffee). What's happening inside the body is that you are releasing more chemicals that counteract the drug that's entering your system; your liver is working harder and harder to get rid of the toxins in your system and so on.
Actually, now that I think about it, this has a lot to do with what I spoke about last year with Immune Responses (it's only the last post so you don't have to look too far). The deal with classically conditioned immune responses (specifically in immunosuppressant drugs) is that the cues in the environment are pre-empting the drugs you're about to take so your immune system starts to scale down before the drugs have taken effect.
Now we get to the the link with heroin...
Those same environmental cues, be it the rusty spoon you use to prep your hit (I know, I have no idea what I'm talking about) or the grubby bean bag you always sit in or the person you're usually with, signal to the body that some heroin is on the way. This ramps up the body's drug tolerance in preparation for the wash of heroin that's about to hit the body.
So how can this lead to overdose? If the body is prepared for the drug, it shouldn't make any difference right?
What if those environmental cues aren't there? What if you happen to be somewhere different? Or there's a different person with you? Or you had to replace your bean bag? That's when shit goes down. Your body hasn't ramped up the drug tolerance, there's not as many chemicals to counteract whatever you've just injected into your system and your liver's just chugging along as per normal... which may lead to an overdose.
Now, this is where I thought, "holy shit, that's freaking amazing!" but I do concede you may be thinking, "wtf, that's just speculation. I want some real science". And I agree, so here's some research...
In 1982 some researchers in Ontario Canada were interested in why it was that so many heroin overdoses occurred at levels that seemed to be lower than the drug users usual tolerance level (in some cases it was the same amount (or less) than was tolerated the previous day).
They suspected it may have something to do with a failure of the tolerance to initiate and were aware of other studies that linked environmental cues with increased drug tolerance by way of classical conditioning (sound familiar?).
So they reasoned that if the drug use occurs in an environment that is different from where it usually occurs the drug tolerance may fail to initiated and an overdose occur. Then they tested it on lab rats. They got lab rats basically hooked on heroin, always giving them a dose in the same environment. Then they took some rats and gave the same dose they had been tolerating in a different environment and watched what happened.
I'm going to quote them direct here, because they say it clearer than I could...
"The results of the study...indicate that heroin-induced mortality in heroin-experienced rats is higher when the drug is injected in an environment not previously associated with the drug than when it is injected in the usual drug-administration environment"
There you go. Significantly more rats died of overdoses in new environments that lacked the cues to initial a drug tolerance. It's not necessarily the heroin that kills you, it's deciding to hit up at another person crib (I can't tell you how incredibly uncool I sound in my head saying that).
Kids, don't do drugs.
Siegel,
S.,
Hinson,
R. E., Krank
M. D., &
McCully, J. (1982).
Heroin "overdose" death: contribution of drug-associated environmental cues. Science, 216(4544), pp. 436-437. doi: 10.1126/science.7200260
The fact that the title of this post has the word 'heroin' in it probably goes some of the way to explaining why I'm back here. And yes, I'm going to explain exactly what my lecturer told me the connection was between Classical Conditioning and overdosing on heroin.
But before I get to the classical conditioning I have to explain a bit about drug tolerance.
Drug tolerance occurs when your body get's use to your drug of choice - in this case heroin, but think also nicotine or even caffeine - and it takes more and more of that drug to produce the same results that it used to. This is why addicts start to use more and more heroin (or drink more and more cups of coffee). What's happening inside the body is that you are releasing more chemicals that counteract the drug that's entering your system; your liver is working harder and harder to get rid of the toxins in your system and so on.
Actually, now that I think about it, this has a lot to do with what I spoke about last year with Immune Responses (it's only the last post so you don't have to look too far). The deal with classically conditioned immune responses (specifically in immunosuppressant drugs) is that the cues in the environment are pre-empting the drugs you're about to take so your immune system starts to scale down before the drugs have taken effect.
Now we get to the the link with heroin...
So how can this lead to overdose? If the body is prepared for the drug, it shouldn't make any difference right?
What if those environmental cues aren't there? What if you happen to be somewhere different? Or there's a different person with you? Or you had to replace your bean bag? That's when shit goes down. Your body hasn't ramped up the drug tolerance, there's not as many chemicals to counteract whatever you've just injected into your system and your liver's just chugging along as per normal... which may lead to an overdose.
Now, this is where I thought, "holy shit, that's freaking amazing!" but I do concede you may be thinking, "wtf, that's just speculation. I want some real science". And I agree, so here's some research...
They suspected it may have something to do with a failure of the tolerance to initiate and were aware of other studies that linked environmental cues with increased drug tolerance by way of classical conditioning (sound familiar?).
So they reasoned that if the drug use occurs in an environment that is different from where it usually occurs the drug tolerance may fail to initiated and an overdose occur. Then they tested it on lab rats. They got lab rats basically hooked on heroin, always giving them a dose in the same environment. Then they took some rats and gave the same dose they had been tolerating in a different environment and watched what happened.
I'm going to quote them direct here, because they say it clearer than I could...
"The results of the study...indicate that heroin-induced mortality in heroin-experienced rats is higher when the drug is injected in an environment not previously associated with the drug than when it is injected in the usual drug-administration environment"
There you go. Significantly more rats died of overdoses in new environments that lacked the cues to initial a drug tolerance. It's not necessarily the heroin that kills you, it's deciding to hit up at another person crib (I can't tell you how incredibly uncool I sound in my head saying that).
Kids, don't do drugs.
References
