Alcohol, MDMA and cannabis use: Impact on the adolescent brain

good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us on the positive choices webinar series my name is Medina Paul and I will be chairing this session today we have a wonderful speaker for you today she will be talking to us about the impact that alcohol MDMA and cannabis have on the adolescent brain before I introduce our speaker I would like to give you some details about this webinar session you are currently on listen-only mode which means that we will not be able to hear or see you we are open to questions so as the session progresses please feel free to add your questions to the question and answer panel we will address the questions at the end of the session we will be recording this session and it will be made available through the positive choices website along with the handout from the presentation if you are new to positive choices let me give you a quick introduction positive choices is an online portal that aims to provide alcohol and alcohol and drug information that is up-to-date and accurate and this can be used by parents and teachers and students I would encourage you to visit our website to access a range of evidence evidence-based resources our webinar series is a part of this you will be able to access previous webinars on the website we welcome any feedback that you might have on the website and additionally if there's anything you would like to see on positive choices or if you have any suggestions for future webinars then please feel free to send us an email on info at positive choices or tour au moving on let me introduce you to our speaker miss Jennifer Durbin Hamm she's a PhD candidate here at the Matilda Center for research in mental health and substance use based at the University of Sydney her research project involves translating evidence around the impact of illicit substances on the adolescent brain into effective harm minimization programs for young people I will hand over to you now Jen we're looking or to your presentation thank you sweetie so in the short time that we have today we're going to look beneath the surface of social drug news and focus on adolescent brain development namely first up we'll look at alcohol then we look at cannabis and then finally MDMA and then we'll explore some overall harm reduction strategies so to kick off let's have a look at how the brain functions and develops around adolescence and then we'll introduce drugs into the system all right so we used to think that the brain was nothing more than this mushy clump ourselves inside our head that didn't change much throughout all of life then CT scans came in and we started to link brain regions with different brain functions then MRI taught us about brain structure and this is a functional MRI which actually shows up it shows us the brain in action and that's symbolized by these warm and cool colors then PET scans came along and we started using dyes to observe different neurotransmitters and their targets in the brain then 3d imaging came along and we can see that we can see the density of different cells and how the brain changes over time and now we're using machine learning to mount neural networks and discover new insights about the brain so it's safe to say the brain is freaking extraordinary it's the absolute best tool that we'll ever have but we've only scratched the surface and we have a lot to learn about it so I have a question for you guys I'd kick off what do you think the brain finishes developing around the age of 18 and remains the same for rest for the rest of life true or false and I'll hand over to Smitty to launch the poll ok I've launched the poll now we'll give you a few seconds to answer this question I will let you know when we are about to close the poll okay last chance to provide your answers closing the poll now I will share the answer with you so according to our audience members so only 1% answered true to the question and 99 on answered false so back to you Jen let's tell us what's the right answer awesome so we've got quite a knowledgeable audience the correct answer is false so to answer the first part of this question the brain continues to develop past 18 and actually doesn't finish major structural integration until around the age of 25 so take a look at this graphic so what you can see here is that the brain changes occurring from age 6 to 20 with the warmer colors symbolizing less developed areas and the cooler colors symbolize a more developed so what's really going on here is that well born with a massive number of jumbled brain cells and connections that aren't necessarily working together so over time our brain tosses away what it no longer needs and it's strengthens the connections that we use the most and this kind of allows for a leaner meaner more efficient brain activity so we can kind of call this the user or loser principle and it underlies neuroplasticity so here is another example of this kind of neural remodeling that occurs in response to the outside world so to answer the second part of this question whether the brain remains the same after the age of 25 not completely in fact it retains its plastic malleable quality for the rest of your life but just so much smaller extent so this means that although adults can't learn as quick they're actually more protected against some of the damaging effects of drugs compared to young people so this brings me to the next point so our central nervous system is extremely complicated but all we really need to understand are these two basic principles first up our neurons are responding to the environment second up our neurons are adapting to the environment so when it comes to drugs and alcohol the brain isn't this passive recipient of drug action in fact it changes a lot it responds to drugs most of the time is trying to compensate to maintain a constant state so that's to say that the relationship between drugs and the brain is bi-directional there's no such thing as a free lunch and I think a really basic example of this is caffeine so naturally when I wake up in the morning my nervous system has its own arousal mechanisms from waking me up but if I drink coffee every day which I do my brain adapts so that flow'd of a stimulant by suppressing the natural arousal system so that means when I take coffee out of the picture I actually feel more tired than before because my brain isn't producing that natural arousal so I kind of think that I don't drink coffee because I'm tired I'm tired because I drink coffee that cause an effect so the last point I want to make is brain development and that's that the brain actually develops from back to front so the facts for the sake of the next 20 minutes let's understand this through three basic parts first up you've got your hind brain so this is responsible for basic survival functions like breathing and heart rate it's going to keep you alive next up we have the midbrain so that's like that sub cortical region it's kind of being dug animal brain it's responsible for instincts and urges and desires emotion memory it's going to help us survive and then the final part to develop is the forebrain and basically it's responsible for the most sophisticated high level thinking thought to be the seat of personality and it's really going to help us to thrive so it's quite easy to remember because it goes from basic to the most complex and particular is this prefrontal cortex region it doesn't finish major structural integration until the age of 25 so basically the most important part of the brain develops lasts alrighty so let's get into it your alcohol and other drugs so this is a beautiful drug color wheel made by they're out of the Australian drug foundation so we're often told that drugs are a the stimulants or depressants right however if you look at this you can see that there are so many other categories so you can see cannabinoids opiates in pathogens and that's because drugs have much more varying effects on the body than simply up or down so the first thing that I want everyone to move away from is this idea that the drugs have fixed some predictable effects because this is so far from the truth and you can see in some of those symptoms in the middle part of the wheel take cannabis it makes some people feel relaxed but others quite anxious for alcohol it makes some people withdraw well as others might get withdraw and go to sleep whilst others might get violent there's so many unhelpful stereotypes out out there so let's let's take a closer look at what's going on so first up the drink of the nation alcohol so what happens when people binge drink so drink one alcohol inhibits the fall brain so that's the part of the brain that so basically we're going to feel more relaxed our prefrontal cortex isn't triple-checking everything we're saying bit freer with your words and the like a couple more drinks and alcohol is going to reach the mid part of the brain so the animal brain our emotions can go unchecked our urges enhanced our language not as memory ever wondered why people black out and don't remember parts of the night what's not because they don't remember it's actually because the brain isn't active enough in the hippocampus so memories aren't being laid down in the first place alcohol is also in so the in the midbrain also has a suppressed pleasure center so you tend to feel pretty good pretty confident less concerned about consequences and then finally if you keep going and going and going alkali was going to travel into the hindbrain so this is the danger zone this alcohol can reduce breathing rate and heart rate if you drink really quickly to get to this stage then you're probably going to pass out and if no one's looking after you then you can also OD now a lot of people run into problems when they're using alcohol when they mix alcohol with other depressants like benzodiazepines GHB or opiates the like because you can get that compounded neural inhibition and this can shut down the breathing center in the brain so to show you what this can look like in real life this is a study carried out by a nine iron pink body in the US so what you're looking at are brain scans of 20 healthy volunteers and we've got progressively deeper neural slices as as you move from left to right the warmer colors indicate higher activity and the cooler colors indicate lower activity we've got the controls at the top and the intoxicated down the bottom and basically the intoxicated individuals were given quite a moderate dose of alcohol about 0.5 grams per kilogram so for someone of my size it's about three standard drinks and what you can see here is that there is that basically alcohol decreases neural activity and then this is what's going on over the short-term so over the longer term so that is really conclusive research out there showing structural functional and cognitive changes associated with binge drinking curing brain development the structure and once a teenager starts drinking binge drinking their brains tend to grow more slow so there's reduced volume in the frontal lobes and the hippocampus um so that memory Center and that sophisticated brain area up front and this can really affect how we learn for the rest of life we also see functional changes so binge drinkers often need more brain power to do the same tasks as those who haven't been strong and then finally we also see associated cognitive changes so that's the way we think often people have been strong during adolescence have reduced inhibitions and reduced decision-making so checking out this seemingly complex picture on the ride basically you're looking at two angles of a brain with the yellow scale showing regions where binge drinkers have smaller brain volumes done on instinct it's not non although binge known although drinkers so the brighter orange is representing a faster rate of volume decline that in the yellow and basically we can say that it's his whole cortex area so this whole part of the brain responsible for being aware and cognition is infected and we can particular see a lot of orange in his prefrontal cortex and this isn't really this is a decent study it's longer journal so it's looking at about 483 adolescents over time between the ages of 12 and 21 and we're looking at when they started drinking and we're following them up afterwards so basically that that goes to say that alcohol is a powerful sterilizer and in in a bitter inhibit on and it really can disorder normal growth trajectories in the brain so what do we do about that well so that's some of it about harm reduction in alcohol so one way if I'm framing harm reduction is through this set setting and drug framework so if you haven't heard about it basically the set refers to everything about the individual so their gender their genetics physical state that mental state and the like the setting so that refers to the way the drug has been taken so what environmental actors are contributing to harm and then finally a drug so that's the action of the drug the potency the dose the purity what other drugs have been taken etc so I've put a couple of options up here and there will be much more so feel free to comment and if you have your own home reduction strategies um but first up if yeah it's first up learn the stages of drunkenness remind young people that that there are of many stages of drunkenness and we can track our behavioral symptoms in relation to the dose of alcohol and we know that nothing Sobers you up more than time so you know putting someone in the shower force feeding bread or whatever is not gonna sober them up and yeah so important to go through this with young people make sure that they know the signs of overdose here's a couple of points here like slow or irregular breathing you know pay or skiing lower body temperature someone can't be awakened all these points are really important um remind young people that they can always pause call an ambulance um the police do not calm um and that is a that is a standard in Australia which is awesome um you know don't mix alcohol with other drugs particularly other depressants and for a lot of people planning um you know planning salt and water when it comes to alcohol remind someone to have it a pre-plan of how many drinks they're gonna have what time in the night are they gonna stop they're gonna have a cut off um yeah that can that can really help um I really like this point reminding someone with the rules of consent so a lot of young people drink you know for a bit of a social lubricant or confidence but you can't get consent when you're intoxicated though that's a good one and yeah I guess I won it's a point that's often ignored or maybe forgotten is exploring these underlying reasons behind binge drinking so you know we know that alcohol reduces brain activity but for many people that's that might be the attraction for many people you know they're drinking to cope with some kind of negative and emotion so that that's all so that's really important when it comes to drinking because we know that healthy relationships with alcohol really can exist but we've got to nurture those in young people so next question what are some of the motives behind young people binge drinking to feel good to improve confidence peer influence feeling better all of the above and over to sweetie to launch the bulb launching the pool will give you a few seconds to answer this question as before and we'll share the answers at the end you you okay last call feel free to put in your answers to this question because we're going to close the poll now share this result so according to our audience the answer is all of the above what do you think Jen I mean yeah we all know that is a mixture of the above there's many reasons why we do what we do a big one is actually peer influence particularly for young people a lot of national data sets say that peer influence is the number one reason but yeah I really just think if you know when we're trying to minimize harm particularly with young people you've got to explore this and we've got to address you know if someone is drinking to feel better to cope with negative emotions then solving the problem want to address that to solve the problem with the inche drinking awesome so I'm moving on next we're going to look at the most widely used illicit drug around the world and that's cannabis and it's actually the drug that most Australians seek helpful so the cannabis part is typically cut up and it's smoked or sometimes it's used in cooking as well and the active ingredient that makes you high is called THC and basically THC mimics our bodies naturally occurring our neurotransmitters such as Ananda mind Ananda by so if we're gonna get a THC molecule like the one we have here and label it with a yellow dye and give it to someone we would see that once they've inhaled it we would see the the THC cross from the lungs into the bloodstream and then quickly carried to the brain and here in the brain the THC molecule molecule would target all the places with the yellow dots in the brain that you can see so it came as a shock to researchers to see that these little yellow dots are basically in every brain structure so we can see it's all throughout the cortex responsible for thinking and awareness in the midbrain so memory motion and also in the hindbrain so coordination so basically instead of having specialized effects the effects of kind of as a far-reaching I think it's particularly interesting to note here the the pink part of the brain at the back our responsible for vision you can't really see any yellow dots there and that's because contrary to popular belief most people don't experience hallucinations or any trippy effects from cannabis and that's because they don't have receptors in that part of the brain however an extremely rare small amount of people do and then they might experience it so so it turns out that this the cannabinoid system that we naturally have in our brain is particularly important to young people's brain development and that's because it's basically coordinating the integration of different parts of the brain so think of it kind of like the occupational health and safety team with heaps of little workers facilitating structural integration and these little workers are basically choosing which neurons to prune away so which and which neurons to keep basically so you can imagine if your young person smokes regularly and they're continuously flashing the system with heaps and heaps of workers in that OHS scene there's going to be an excess of workers and basically what we see ur eyes is that with too many workers more work gets done so we actually end up pruning away more than we might need or might want but then to continue this little analogy at some stage the boss is going to be like okay we've got an excess of workers let's fire all these people and then and then we're going to get a basically not enough work being done and that's just risk that's just um that bi-directional relationship between drugs in the brain the drive the brain is going to compensate and down regulate certain things to cope with excess of a drug so basically we think that th they use during brain development can disrupt this process this process of pruning and and it can lead to abnormal in connectivity and theoretically the parts of the brain that are less developed so that prefrontal cortex might be the most sensitive to cannabis exposure but that's to say after the age of 25 when the brain is finished developing maybe we won't see these effects and these these this impact on brain on brain structure and function so to show you what this might look like and I don't want to be part of this this area of this is your brain on drugs but this is on some simple brain scans of young people who have chronic exposure to cannabis use so this is the MRI scans of 48 regular cannabis users in 62 control brains and basically what you can see is that the other regions in the frontal part of the brain is where regular users of cannabis had lower brain volumes and non-users and and in the bar graph you just seen that same that same data um and what we what we saw in this study is at the age of onset abuse correlated with the Const so yeah so that's that's quite interesting but we also do see that the longer the period of abstinence and the reduced size of these effects so that indicates that either degree of recovery after abstinence so so that's brain structure moving on to brain function this is a PET scan showing brain activity and that's measured through blood flow basically and this is a study carried out by NIDA in the US and what was what we're seeing here is the brain scans of eight healthy men aged about 35 years old who started smoking cannabis during adolescence again the warmer colors represent higher activity and the cooler colors represent lower activity and you can basically see the front of the brain in these uppermost scans Oh basically you're seeing progressively like deeper slices again and you can see that there's reduced activity in the cerebellum and that's part of the brain responsible for coordination so so often heavier cannabis users become slightly uncoordinated yes so just to summarize cannabis and brain structure we know that that cannabis is neurotoxic for growing brains we know that earlier you start the more damage you can do and we think that really reduces the plasticity of neurons and usually a normal brain development we see a reduced cortical thickness so that's at the surface of the brain it gets a bit you know as things are pruned away we see gray dark gray and white matter contrasts so that's types of difference different parts of the cells in the brain and we see increased rainfalls however in multiple studies we see that when people when adolescents engage in heavy so not not low or medium heavy cannabis use during adolescence we pretty much get the opposite effect in all these brain regions however a really really important point that needs to be made is so the current state of the evidence with cannabis is really mixed so we see a lot of studies showing showing just this then we also see studies showing no change and that's because and that means that these findings are really inconclusive and I want to explore why this might be the case so why here such different things when it comes to cannabis so basically first up we've got a big issue with potency so th see that psychoactive component the potency of cannabis has changed like immensely over the past thirty years we started off with that one to two percent THC and now up 10 20 30 40 50 percent THC that has a massive change on the impact on the brain i'm ii are a lot of studies use different methods to assess brain activity and a lot of them assess different regions of the brain and so it's quite hard to compare the results across studies and we've also got the issue of poly drug use so a lot of people who use drugs don't just use one in isolation so it can be hard to account for that in in research and there's so much research coming out about nicotine about alcohol you know changing brain structure and structure and function so this could really compound our results and then finally the study design so often we see what we call cross sectional studies so that's looking at one point in time a snapshot of a whole cohort and what's going on and basically it's what how we draw correlations between behaviors and effects instead of longitudinal studies which is where we follow a cohort over time and can deduce causality there's a real lack of longitudinal study so a lot of work needs to be done but nonetheless when it comes to young people there's so much harm reduction strategies that we can all learn and implement first up avoid avoid avoid avoid all use during adolescence and early adulthood we know it's neurotoxic particularly for developing brains we know that the first the age of onset matters we know that the frequency matters we know that the potency matters so we need to educate young people about potency how it's changed how it's linked to higher rates of psychosis and mental illness um it's a cannabis is addictive potential I think a lot of people think that you know no it's not addictive you know no one's died from it it's fine actually seventeen percent of young people get addicted to it and now that we're seeing more potent strains coming out it's actually cranked up to twenty to thirty percent so in some ways cannabis can be more addictive than tobacco and I think it diction is quite an interesting yeah it's an interesting concept because often we have this physical addiction addiction but then we also have two psychological habit and that's what you really see in chronic cannabis users that you have this your behavioral addiction so that's important to track use if you know someone's is if you know someone's using ask them how much are using are they are they on top of that definitely don't drive we know that it impairs coordination and reflexes and once again coming back to that underlying reason why we need to address the underlying so next start ending a so I've got another question for you so what do you think MDMA increases the activity of the following neurotransmitters dopamine serotonin noradrenaline endorphins or a B and C what do you think over to you smooching okay thanks Jen launching the poll now we'll wait for a few seconds for your answer hopefully this is a little bit more challenging and their previous questions Thank You Billy you okay last chance to answer this question and I'm going to close it now sharing the results so Jen list of audience members think it's a B and C you tell us what the right answer is so in a way everyone who didn't pick endorphins is correct so the MDMA causes the rule not the release but increases the activity of dopamine serotonin and noradrenaline so dopamine is a pleasure chemical serotonin elevates mood and it's responsible for that increase empathy that we commonly see with MDMA users and then noradrenaline so that's what those simulating effects that fight-or-flight response um endorphins that's the opioid existence that's more of a depressive kind of effect but well done everyone a lot of people have clearly heard of these neurotransmitters which is really cool so when it comes to MDMA and for the sake of time I'm just going to make one point basically and that's and that's around Heat so basically MDMA stop seek effect have to do with temperature so brain tissue is exceptionally sensitive to heat and we often see structural changes associated with the 3 or 4 degree increase above our normal baseline so usually the brain sits at about 37 point 5 degrees so anything more than about 39 to 40 degrees you really see structural damage in brain cells so let's have a look at how the brain kind of maintains an enormous C basically has these two main mechanisms first up we've got the hypothalamus so that's that's um in subcortical part of the brain the animal brain and it maintains homeostasis by detecting heat changes and also controlling heat production secondly we've got the brain loses a lot of heat through blood flow so we know that when my hot our veins dilate they come to the surface of our skin and we lose heat to the external environment the MDMA compromises both of these mechanisms so being a stimulant it increases brain metabolism and MDMA also prevents the hypothalamus from being able to detect these changes in the brain also and also impairs circulation because it causes vasoconstriction so instead of our blood vessels dilating and losing heat they constrict and we don't lose heat to the external environment very well so just to kind of show you what this this can look like and you don't have to get this exactly but basically this is an animal study because we can't do this in a controlled way with humans of course but basically on the Left we have normal heat loss so when the brain temperature increases through metabolism or whatever reason we get a circular true change and we start to lose heat through the skin and you can see that that comes up and they intersect however on the right when we've introduced MDMA we can see that the brain increases in temperature so the skin barely changes and we don't actually end up losing heat so you see the blue line is the nucleus accumbens that's a pleasure center in the brain and then the red is the brain muscle and that's in the cortex compared to the green the green skin so we know that damage like to your brain cells particularly your serotonin neurons progresses a lot with a slight temperature increase and we know that sustained like hypothermia which does only happen to or a number a small number of users but we can get a neurochemical structural changes and we can yeah I'm gonna have to go into it too much but yeah it is it is if the brain is extremely sensitive to heat damage so you know if we compare if we like combine this knowledge of you know the way MDMA acts in the way it works in our brain with the context of social use so often our people use it festivals it's overcrowded elevated temperatures as dehydration so it's a physical and emotional activity all of these things increase heat and and I do a bit of volunteer work at festivals and what we see is that most hospitalizations happen because of heat exhaustion and dehydration and I really think that this is preventable and this happens also without without and you may a lot of the time so in terms of harm reduction with MDMA the safest thing by far and what we recommend to all developing brains that are vulnerable and under construction is don't take MDMA so don't do it whilst your brain is developing but next up if you're around people who might be using do you guys know if you you know speaking to young people do they know the signs of overdose of stimulant overdose you know higher temperatures headaches confusion agitation these are a couple of them you know if they're out of festivals or clubs or whatever do they know do they know that location of a medical unit because a lot of you know the treatment up to overheating that requires prompt medical attention like seconds matter low purity is a big issue with MDMA and the dose varies widely so I'm small amounts are really important avoid booster doses and I think a really important thing is that there are there are police there are police units and and every single festival a lot of the time we see that young people you know might be waiting in line to enter an event and they see police and they panic and they might take a few pills at one point um and that is so so dangerous and can often lead to quite tragic outcomes so it's a remind people that the police will be there expect them to be that don't try and take anything into a festival don't don't let that be you next don't mix MDMA with other drugs you can really dramatically increase the chances of having an adverse drug event finally you know stay hydrated have long breaks sleep well eat well and the way so to wrap up just like to conclude we know that the earlier the actor earliest you start you know that the greater than your cognitive deficits and we really do know that now and we know alcohol reduces brain activity over the shorter term and this can lead to reduce reductions in volume and function over the longer term cannabis and impairs our impairs brain connections so that pruning process so connectivity is most important and then with MDMA it really compromises heat loss and we do see that that damaged after sustained higher temperatures however a real disclaimer is the issue of causality is far it's far from resolved I mean there is a lot of study at research out there getting across it can be quite confusing but we do have a lot more work to be done in terms of longer longer journal studies and yeah just the end on some overall harm reduction strategies um for a lot of parents and teachers out there um have the conversation first off you know it shouldn't be a taboo topic ask plenty of questions ask people you know are they using any of their friends using do they have any concerns about that you know just really try and have a non-judgmental conversation um you know nurture protective factors young people you know it's broad circle of friends and exercise and hobbies and all these kind of thing really try and encourage that and discuss risk factors um what do what do their friends think about substance use I think every every parent has a real responsibility to discuss genetic predispositions towards a mental illness and and the like and really explore family heritage it's really important um yeah negative communication patterns actually having that close relationship and a lot of trust with young people yeah school commitment all that kind of thing and finally you know always explore that underlying reason why if you want behavior change we have to address that underlying reason why and I think that concludes all we had for today thank you so much for listening and if there are any questions I'll hand over to sweetie now awesome Thank You Jen for that really informative presentation I learned a lot of things and I'm sure our audience members did too so this is for our audience members if you have any questions please please feel free to add them to the queue up question and answer panel in the meantime while I wait for questions to come through I will ask you a question that I have Jen answer I was wondering when someone's been taking drugs consistently does do that drugs cause permanent damage to their brains or is there a point of return hmm great question basically the brain's capacity to learn adapt recover is basically infinite in terms of that you know how long does it take to you see some like bad effects of alcohol and cannabis and MDMA you know we do we do believe that there's no such thing as a free lunch particularly for young people and that's because you know the brain changes so much in response to drugs coming in and it's such a complex time of development but I mean we've been drinking actually with it we do see changes wait I think it's up to binge drinking once a month is enough to show these structural brain changes it's scary um but yeah we see some really promising results in animals to suggest that that is there's never a point of no return and basically you can you can always increase in your own plasticity you can increase you can grow your brain and reverse damage and we don't know exactly to what extent but some really cool research actually coming out around exercise increasing neuroplasticity so it really increases sign up to Genesis so the connections between brain brain cells and also yoga meditation so those those activities that basically just like silence the brain a little bit there really harness the power of neuroplasticity so yeah so to answer your question there's a lot of optimism and I think it's really important we tell people young people this it's never too late you can always you know introduce more healthy positive ya activities in your life that's awesome news Jim so I'll get to a couple of audience questions that we have ooh the first question from the audience is what is considered heavy cannabis use among young people yeah so again it varies a little bit but once a week is considered heavy once a month is moderate and Daly's obviously very heavy but I mean you you want to look at the frequency but you also want to look at the volume and that's a one thing that we haven't got much consistency of throughout across studies yeah okay and another interesting question is it's so common we absorb into the system after MDMA use and does MDMA use causing extrapyramidal side effects so so yeah basically like the way MDMA works is it in the come-up it basically prevents the reuptake of dopamine so you basically you've got like two neurons and you get the dopamine release from one you're on and it will come on to the other neuron but in normal brain function we recycled dopamine so it doesn't stay in that signups for longer very long and we recycle it so it can be used again but MDMA stops that recycling so you get a buildup of dopamine in the signups and you get that real you know big cascade of cascaded effect and lasting effect so that's why it's the drugs in your system but then when you're coming down basically they're this you've got depleted dopamine reserves so now that there's none in the signups there's actually none also in that presynaptic neuron meaning when you know the next day or the next week it's actually quite hard to release any dopamine because you don't have that much you don't really have any reserve yeah in storage so to say so mm-hmm so you say yeah and in terms of extra side effects yeah like every drug has side effects particularly with ecstasy you know you get disruptions in sleep and diet and concentration and we see cognitive changes after about two years of of MDMA you you see cognitive brain changes so yeah it's as you saw before that the drug doesn't just go to one spot in the brain often it goes throughout the brain and the whole body so depending on where its target is it will have quite broad effects so we have time for one last question and the last question is so you know there's been a lot of debate recently around legalizing cannabis and there are people often say that cannabis is not as powerful as alcohol what what would do you say to people like that like what how do you think people should talk to young people about these things mm-hmm yeah I think this is something that here a lot of young people say in particular that like yeah it's legal in the US you know that we killed anyone maybe alcohol causes more harm and that sight you know that the that generation really doesn't think cannabis is that dangerous so what I would say to that is that yes whilst cannabis is used medicinally here and and in some states in the u.s. it is legal recreationally the big point to make about medicinal use is that cannabis has a hundred like thousands of chemicals right and so you have the psychoactive ingredient THC but in the medicinal drug there's no THC in there so patients aren't having a high basically they're just given other cannabinoids so that that's really important medicinal cannabis is very different to what people smoked recreationally and yeah over over in the states it is legal for people over 21 years and and yeah there's an increase in use and that we don't have really long-term data to know the real impact on that so I think you know when your brain is fully developed after the age of 25 maybe there isn't that negative impact on brain development but we just it's a bit of an experiment at this stage um and I think you said yeah cow nose doesn't hasn't killed anyone that's quite a funny kind of way of thinking in a way it's like you know as long as you're not dead it's fine but you know although you can't overdose on cannabis with people don't tend to overdose that's not to say it's not new your toxic and it's not to say that it's not implicated in mental illness it's not very active you know it's linked to psychosis anxiety all these things particularly for young people yeah does that answer the question yes yes thank you Jim and yeah that's the end of the question answer session and before we go I would like to remind everyone to logon to positive choices in order to get more evidence-based information on alcohol and drugs and also please feel free to send us feedbacks that you might have and before you before I end I would also like to let you know that the webinar will be made available online within the next 48 hours along with their hand out from their presentation I would like to thank you again Jen and I would like to thank our audience for tuning in today thank you thanks bye

Channel: The Matilda Centre

Views: 1,560

Rating: 4.7777777 out of 5

Keywords: drugs and developing brain, adolescent brain, developing brain, harm reduction

Id: 24ICoZUKI3E

Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 27 2019