IO9

There are a limited amount of places where one can do drugs. Of those places, drug users select a certain few places where they prefer to do drugs and then do drugs most often at a select number of places that are convenient. Essentially, a regular drug user will often have a regular place to take their drugs. After they’ve done drugs regularly in the same place, the connection is made. A bathroom, a bedroom, a certain club, will always be associated with drug use. People trying to quit drugs often talk about how they have to avoid their old haunts because they feel a rush of anticipation. That rush is not just mental.

Scientists learned that putting a dog in a certain injection booth every day and injecting it with adrenaline produced a dog with bradycardia – a dangerously slow heartbeat – when they put the dog in the same booth but only injected it with a placebo. The dog’s body was compensating for the adrenaline it anticipated. It was trying to reduce the dangerous effects of the adrenaline by slowing down the dog’s heartbeat.

A drug user’s body does the same. Over time people build up a tolerance for the drug, not just because the body manages to deal with the drug when it’s in their system, but because the body knows to prepare for the drug before it has been administered. When a person who has built up a tolerance for a drug in a certain place goes somewhere new, the body may not know what’s coming to it, and that tolerance is greatly reduced.

In one experiment, scientists studied rats who had been given regular doses of heroin. Some of the rats were taken to a new area and given a larger dose of heroin. The others were injected with the larger dose but kept in their regular environment. The mortality rate of the rats injected in a new environment was twice that of the rats injected in the familiar environment. No similar experiment of human drug users would be conscionable, but a survey of the survivors of heroin overdoses found that seven out of ten were in a new place when they overdosed.

The full article simply stands on its own — in all, it’s disturbing glory…