You Don’t Want To See Your Brain On Drugs

It is probably Oscar Wilde who said it.  “Youth is wasted on the young.”

He was clever and witty and literate and gay in the days when being gay could land you in prison. (In his case, it did.)

Youth comes along with a feeling of being invulnerable. This is a false feeling, for the average human life expectancy gives a person plenty enough years to feel in her or his body the consequences of the decisions made when he or she was young.

Sexually, I have always been (according to my alternative lifestyle friends) nauseatingly “plain vanilla.” The fact I wanted to be with one guy forever helped me pretty much in waiting until I found him, as well as helping me avoid myriad diseases.

When I was young, I never “experimented” with drugs. Of course, as a scientist (even when only in training for same) I was convinced it was not “experimenting” unless someone gathered data with a clipboard and hired a statistician to process the results for publication. But even more than that, I had a healthy fear of any substance that could have questionable of indeterminate effects on my brain chemistry.

In my case, at least, I was pretty sure that my brain was the best thing I had going for me, and that if I screwed up the function of my brain, I would pretty much screw up my life.

The people who were not so warned are frightening.

Although I saw many similar patients, covering for an inner city clinic over this past Christmas, I saw a young lady in her twenties who had become addicted to crystal meth.

Although I have seen many people who have lost brain faculties, most suffered from some kind of “dementia” from old age.

This one was 23 years old. I tried to test how much she could think.

She was with an attendant who had picked her up off the sidewalk on a regular sweep of downtown.

She could not remember anything I told her over about 15 seconds. She did not know where she was or why. She was thin, almost skeletal, and did not remember when she had last eaten. Or the city or state she was in.

She did seem to have some sort of sense of humor. She kept laughing when both her attendant and I tried to convince her that I was the doctor.

I told her well meaning attendant to see if she had any ID on her (She didn’t) and then leave her at the emergency room of the hospital.

All she could do was to ask me for some crystal meth. She stared into my eyes with her blank faced stare and said I looked rich enough I could probably get her some crystal meth.

No. She seemed to be safe enough to get to the hospital with the attendant driving.

As I closed the door behind her, I thought of Oscar Wilde, of her decision to try drugs that had gone wrong, and of my readers, friends, and their families.

Please tell everyone you know and love not to “experiment” with any street drugs. You never know what is in them or what they can do to your brain.

There are no medications, there is no computer, that can serve as a “prosthetic” brain. Nobody I know of is working on one just yet.

Avoiding street drugs will at least help you keep what you have got.

PS:

If you like what you are reading, you should keep up with my commentary on modern medicine and some tasteful pictures of my Fashionista side on my Facebook Medical Maverick Page! https://www.facebook.com/MedicalMaverick/