Affect of drugs on the adolescent brain and brain development

The study of adolescent psychology teaches the development of an adolescent and more specifically how they think and act. In fact, the adolescent stage is one of the most important stages when it comes to the maturation and development of the brain. According to findings in Article 9 of the Annual Editions text book titled Adolescent Brain Development and Drugs, there is evidence of a science called neuro-development. The article states “The emerging science of neuro-development is providing a new framework for viewing adolescent risk taking, including decisions by young people to use alcohol and other drugs”. This new found science is aided by sophisticated brain imaging technology. The purpose of this article and the rest of the research that will be presented in this paper is to “explore how adolescent brain development is a useful framework to understand adolescent drug use and abuse by looking at how brain development leads to risky behavior, how drugs affect brain development, and how we can use this knowledge in the prevention and intervention efforts”. According to Dean College’s psychology professor Dr. Reno’s Developmental Psychology class, the idea of personal fable is being “personally unique; invincible”. “Sixty percent of teenage deaths resulting from car accidents can be traced back to alcohol abuse” (WordPress, 2012). With statistics like this warning teens and advertising against drinking and driving, why do incidents like this happen annually? Personal fable can be the cause of this dangerous epidemic. A professor at Oglethorpe University, Jeffery Arnett, says that “Drunk driving was significantly related to the total score on the Sensation Seeking Scale, and to the Thrill and Adventure Seeking, Disinhibition, and Boredom Susceptibility subscales” (Arnett, 1990). In other words, the fact that the drunk driving relates significantly to the thrill and adventure seeking part of the brain shows that adolescents are willing to take unnecessary risks just for a thrill. Personal fable leaves adolescents to believe that they cannot be harmed, of that they are extraordinary and nothing will happen to them. That is why risk taking is so apparent during this stage, specifically the risk of drinking and doing drugs without being fully aware of the consequences.
According to the Drug Prevention and Alcohol Fact’s (DPAF) website, cannabis can be defined as “a drug that comes from Indian hemp plant such as Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica. The main active chemical in cannabis is THC (delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol)” . The DPAF also states that this drug can take a toile on mental health. Regular of over use of cannabis can cause a condition called “drug-induced psychosis” or “cannabis psychosis”. The problem with this drug is the lack of knowledge about it. Many teens are under the impression that cannabis, or its smoking form known as marijuana, cannot harm them. They are very mistaken. The DPAF’s website warns that “There is no safe level of drug use. Use of any drug always carries some risks-” There is research by A. M. Auther that proves in almost “50 studies of cannabis misuse in patients with psychosis found combined prevalence rates of 42.2% for lifetime cannabis use and 22.5% for lifetime cannabis misuse” . Pennay’s assessment suggests where the idea is coming from, and the blind risks adolescents are taking.
After looking at why teenagers begin these alcohol and drug behaviors, it is important to see exactly how the brain and the brains development are affected. The article mentioned earlier, titled Adolescent Brain Development and Drugs, uses neuroscience to get a view of the brain during maturation. Jay Giedd and fellow colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health have pioneered the research affiliated with brain maturation and neuroscience. Giedd’s research revealed that “The brain grows and excessive number of connections between brain cells prior to adolescents, but at about age 11 or 12, the brain begins the processing of ‘sculpting’ or pruning-back a significant proportion of these connections” (Geidd, 2004).
During this stage of brain, the brain is at its most vulnerable. In fact, there has been development in research that suggests repeated drug use can be held responsible for the disturbance of learning. A man named L.P. Spear, author of an article titled The Adolescent Brain and Age-related Behavioral Manifestations has been doing research on animals in hopes to get a better understanding of the effects of the substances on the brain, mainly because animals, rats in this experiment, show similar reactions to the substances. The text states that the “Animal studies from Linda Spear’s lab have demonstrated that adolescent rats ingested with alcohol, compared to adult rats, reveal significantly more brain damage in their prefrontal cortex region (important for decision making) and their working memory brain region” . Due to the fact that the rat brains can be compared to human brains, the study concludes that ingesting substances, such as alcohol in this case, can be very damaging to the brain long term. After exposure for a greater amount of time, brain damage was detected in other areas of the brain. The affected regions are learning (basal forebrain), and language (neocortex). The rats also revealed some ground breaking information about why drinking becomes a problem for adolescents. Spear’s study shows “a lowered sensitivity to the acute effects of alcohol by adolescents may contribute to high quantity drinking during the teenage years”.<ref name="spear"/> In other words, when the effects of alcohol are no longer something new, they become reduces, less noticeable. In teens, this happening at such a young age is dangerous because with a higher tolerance level, they might keep drinking until the feel the buzz they are looking for and exceed way past their limit.
Although not commonly done, human research similar to the rat research has proven the same information. It is reported that the adolescents who are recovering from an alcohol dependency score lower on verbal and memory tests, and also had problems with memory, or the hippocampus region of the brain. This study helped to reveal that adolescent brains are more susceptible to nearly “all drugs of abuse, including nicotine, cannabis, and stimulants” (Schepis, Adinoff, & Rao, 2008). The research is actual proof that “psychoactive substances” can alter the maturation process of the brain during the adolescent stage. This also heightens the chance of their being a disorder or addiction later on in the teenager’s life.
As with the research on the use and misuse of cannabis, misuse of alcohol has detrimental side effects on the brain; one of the most prominent being memory. Both substances have the long-term effect of memory loss on its users, and both are responsible the deteriorating function of the hippocampus region of the brain. In perspective to psychosis, when dealing with cannabis, “In a large prospective study of a clinical risk cohort for psychosis by the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study (NAPLS) group, substance abuse in general was associated with conversion to psychosis (Cannon et al., 2008) but cannabis abuse was not mentioned. By contrast, in another large, European sample, alcohol or any substance abuse was not predictive of conversion to psychosis (Ruhrmann et al., 2010) but, again, cannabis abuse does not seem to have been investigated separately” <ref name="auth"/>. Though a lot of the research seems to correspond with others, this statement makes once really wonder about all the connections being made. It still proves that substance abuse does attribute to the development of rising issues with psychosis, but it states that cannabis is not on this list. However, the quote also reveals that substance abuse cannot always be the predicting factor for future psychosis problems. Often times, there are already traces of psychosis present in the individual, and the use and misuse of substances is a source in bringing them out.
The research that was done for this paper compares as well as contrasts, but in the end there is one main point. The use and misuse of drugs and substance, especially during the developing stage of adolescents, is very harmful to the brain. Continued use of such harmful substance can cause long term and even permanent damage of brain regions, such as the basal forebrain (responsible for learning), the neocortex (responsible for language), the prefrontal cortex region (responsible for decision making), and memory. This stage in the brain development process is crucial because this is the part of brain development where the most changes to the prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain being affected can be detrimental to an adolescent’s future. With damage to the prefrontal cortex, the adolescent will continue to make questionable and sometimes even dangerous and risky decisions because the prefrontal cortex is responsible for decision making. Going into adulthood with the decision making region of the brain damaged is not wise. With damage to the basal forebrain, retaining learned information in school and in life will be hard because that section is responsible for learning. A lot of the maturation process contains learning, and having a delay in that ability could later entail some serious problems. Damage to the neocortex is crucial because that region is responsible for language, a major source of communication. Memory, though it may not seem as important, can also be bad if damaged because memories are actually learned experiences, which links back to the idea of the basal forebrain damage. Adolescent brain development and the presents of drugs can be very harmful to the future of an adolescent, solely based on the condition in which the substance leave important regions of the vulnerable, maturing, and developing adolescent brain.

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