Week 4

This week we are learning about psychopharmacology. That means this weeks chapter is covering different types of drugs and their effects, drug administration techniques, sites of activation, different types of receptors and neurotransmitters. Much of what we have been learning up to this point has been a review for me and other students in the class who have taken other neuroscience and psychology classes but this chapter is a lot of new material and it is complicated.

The first order of business in class was to define the word “drug”. As we use the word “drug” in class it means an exogenous chemical compound that interacts with the cells of the body. This gives drugs a very broad categorization which can include things like pizza and chocolate as both foods can directly and indirectly release dopamine in our bodies. Other important terms defined in class were site of action, the locations at which a drug interacts with molecules on or in cells of the body, and drug effects which are the changes produced in an animals physiological processes and behavior.

We talked about different ways to administer drugs such as intravenous injection (IV) which most people are familiar with, intraperitoneal injection (IP) which involves an injection going into the space surrounding the stomach and other abdominal organs, and  intramuscular injections (IM) as well as drug administration forms that do not involve injections like topical administration and sublingual administration which is administering a drug under the tongue.

Some drugs have effects that are not intended to be consciously noticed by us when we use them, such as drugs that change our body chemistry to alleviate noxious internal stimuli, but that is never the case with recreational drug use. The point of recreational drug use is for us to be consciously aware of the effects of the drug and typically those effects are positive for the drug user “or at least interesting” as Eric put it in class.

We talked about many other things in class like margins of safety for drugs, tolerance and sensitization, withdrawal, placebo effects, and different ways drugs can affect synaptic transmission but I want to leave you with one random fun fact Eric dropped on us in lecture this week. When cocaine is injected intravenously 20% of it is in the brain in the first 30 seconds! That is why IV injection is so popular with recreational drug use but it is also very dangerous too.