Irma Perez tragic story of hard core drugs
It takes only a single bad decision to result in catastrophic consequences, as it did for Irma Perez, a fourteen-year-old California girl, on April 23, 2004. According to her sister Imelda, Irma was at a party where she was offered a single pill of MDMA (3,4-methylene – dioxymethamphetamine), a synthetic stimulant and mild hallucinogen also known as Ecstasy. Immediately after swallowing the hard core drug, she became sick, “vomiting and writhing in pain, “but her friends, afraid of getting into trouble, delayed calling 911 or taking her to an emergency room for hours.
Instead, as Imelda wrote on www.nationalparentvigil.com, the website she helped found, they made the situation worse. They tried to give her marijuana another hard core drug, thinking it would relax her and possibly help her because they had heard it had medicinal qualities. Irma suffered for hours and when she was finally taken to the hospital the next morning, she was in terrible shape. Five days later she was taken off life support and died….
How did Irma actually die? Dr. Leslie Avery and Dr. Peter Benson, forensic medical experts, say that Irma’s brain swelled from a lack of oxygen. “Her cerebellum dissolved as her brain tried to escape its confined space,” Benson said (in a San Mateo Daily Journal article).
Annual gathering in remembrance
Every year since 2006, hundreds of ordinary Americans have gathered for a somber, candlelit ceremony in front of the headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Agency in Arlington, Virginia. The name of the event, begun by eight couples, is the Vigil for Lost Promise: Remembering Those Who Have Died from hard core Drugs. Those in at tendance on this one night every year are mostly parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, but many are just friends who gather in remembrance of someone they loved.
A medical use, and a possible fifteen-year jail term for illegal possession-it gets used a lot at raves where electronic dance music (EDM) in Europe. An MDMA high is called “rolling” by splayed, especially music ravers and is essentially a prolonged state of euphoria in motion, which goes hand in hand with electronic music and its nonstop, almost hypnotic, pulsing beat. A too-powerful form of the hard core drug can be lethal, and because people don’t know what they are getting when they buy it, they sometimes bring testing kits to raves.
Side effects of MDMA
The negative side effects of Ecstasy are considerable confusion agitation, irregular heartbeat, seizures, sleep disorders, liver and brain damage, and of course death. In fact, in September 2013 two young people died at New York City was found to be significantly impaired and prefrontaltion disrupted. These effects were not seen in rats exposed to amphetamines in adulthood only.
Confounding the problem for adolescents is that while they seem to have greater neuronal responsiveness to cocaine and methamphetamines than adults, they have less sensitivity to some of the physical side effects, especially motor coordination. It’s no wonder that studies also show that a key predictor of addiction is reduced sensitivity to these undesirable physical side effects. An adolescent who doesn’t have a negative reaction the first time he or she takes hard core drugs is much more likely to take those hard core drugs again and again .
The issue with MDMA is not only the immediate effects. It turns out experimental laboratory research shows that adolescent brains exposed to MDMA undergo changes in their synapses in almost every system you could imagine. These include systems for serotonin and a lowering of serotonin can increase the risk for depression and stress response. Stress can in turn affect glutamate receptors that modulate learning and memory.
Teenagers and Cocaine
The research into how and why drugs like Ecstasy and cocaine are so dangerous for adolescents is turning up new findings every day. The basis of many of these findings is that with a still-maturing brain, teens are especially vulnerable to hard core drugs that work directly on the brain’s chemistry.
In new rat studies, adolescent brains have been found to be more susceptible to lower doses of cocaine and to suffer more severe symptoms. Their brains are also more motivated to work for the cocaine reward; this means they find it difficult to abstain, and so become addicted faster and harder than adult rats. They also relapse more easily. These results are all too pertinent for human nine out of ten addicts say they first used drugs before they were eighteen years old.
Adolescents process cocaine differently from adults. First and foremost, cocaine is a stimulant, but it stimulates a greater release of dopamine in the adolescent brain than in the adult brain. Two areas in the teen brain appear to be especially sensitive to the effects of cocaine: the nucleus accumbens, which, remember, is the reward center and the dorsolateral striatum, where habits are formed.
Dopamine concentrations in these two regions of the brain are greater in adoles cents on cocaine than in adults. A researcher involved with rat studies at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, likened these areas to a “biochemical express lane.” A similar study from Canada showed adolescent rats ran around faster than adult rats when ex-posed to the same amount of cocaine.
Craving and relapse are hallmarks of drug addiction, and teens get hooked on drugs harder and faster than adults precisely because so many of the drugs target the very active reward system in their brains. Because the nucleus accumbens is still maturing during adolescence, its functioning is characterized by a search for the highest excitement with the least amount of effort expended. In fact, it takes less than three months for adolescents to transition from experimentation to weekly use.
Another concerning issue is that rat studies show the enhanced dopamine in the adolescent brain can actually change the way it processes information permanently, leaving the brain more susceptible to addiction in adulthood.
Those researchers in Canada who showed that adolescent rats have a greater response than adults to the same amount of cocaine also found permanent changes in a host of structures, including the nucleus accumbens, striatum, insular cortex, or bitofrontal cortex, and medial forebrain bundle-all of which are implicated in addiction. What was equally concerning was that these changes were still present even after one month of abstinence, hinting at the permanence of cocaine’s effect.
Hard core Drugs like cocaine are the perfect brain temptation. Other popular stimulants include amphetamines and methamphetamines. A quarter of all high school seniors in America admit to having used a stimulant like speed, and in the Southwest and rural Midwest, amphetamine use by teenagers is double the national average.
Like cocaine, amphetamines and methamphetamines both in- crease the concentration of dopamine in the brain, and like cocaine both produce a euphoric high. Medications used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, abbreviated ADHD, are also increasingly being abused by teenagers. Typically, teens use the pills for non-prescription purposes, most often to stay awake late at night studying or for a boost of energy or concentration when doing homework or writing a paper. But because Ritalin and Adderall and Concerta drugs used to treat ADHD-are stimulants, they are also capable of trapping adolescents in a cycle of habitual use and addiction.
In high schools across the country, the fastest-growing drug of abuse is heroin. It didn’t take long for Ian Eaccarino to become hooked on marijuana and other drugs, and he spent the better part of two years trying to get clean. On the Courage to Speak website, his mother, Ginger Katz, wrote about how quickly her twenty-year-old son became hooked on heroin.
6 months before he died, Ian and two friends snorted heroin for the first time. He was a college sophomore at the time. One boy became scared, one became sick-and Ian liked it. When he finally went to drug rehabilitation, he told: “Mom, there is a smorgasbord of drugs at college. If you don’t have the money, they would give it to you for free and then you’re hooked.”
It was Katz who found her son’s lifeless body in his bed the morning after he accidentally overdosed on heroin.
