Word: brained
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...since the cup of joe - or so its enthusiasts said - the antinarcolepsy medication has helped recreational and casual users stay peppy without the benefit of sleep. As for addiction? Not to worry. The drugs that hook you most powerfully do their work by mucking about with the pleasure-inducing brain chemical dopamine, but modafinil doesn't go there. "Modafinil," as Slate magazine claimed in a 2003 posting on the drug, "tiptoes around dopamine...
...study published on March 17 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors say modafinil is not only the latest in a long line of chemical stimulants designed to keep users awake, alert and happy; it's also the latest to go straight to the brain's addiction centers in the process...
...Dopamine transporters perform cleanup work," says Volkow. "They remove dopamine after it's released and recycle it." The more dopamine that gets left in the spaces between cells, the longer its rewarding effect on the brain - and the likelier it is to lay down the roots of addiction. As Volkow and Fowler suspected, the PET scans of the men who had taken modafinil showed that dopamine transporters were indeed being blocked by the drug and overall levels were rising...
...same site on dopamine transporters as cocaine does, and one of the areas where dopamine levels then begin to climb is the nucleus accumbens - a spot researchers have come to recognize as a sort of addiction central for recreational meds. "The nucleus accumbens," Volkow and Fowler wrote, is a "brain region critical for the rewarding effects of drugs of abuse...
...Either way, you're going to make a mess, and surprisingly fast. Volkow points out that even without increasing dopamine output, modafinil blocks the re-uptake of more than half the amount the brain naturally releases. "This completely negates the argument that modafinil has no dopaminergenic effect," she says. "It does have the drug signature required to produce addiction." The safe party drug, once again, is not nearly as safe as it seems...