Recreational Drugs

• recreational drugs are substances used in a non-therapeutic manner for its effects on motor, sensory, emotional or cognitive activities
• the brain contains a reward pathway which when activated causes us to experience a pleasant and rewarding feeling, this encourages us to repeat the behaviour, this means it has an adaptive function. drugs hijack this reward system and produces pleasurable feeling with no adaptive function
• cocaine is a recreational drug that blocks the binding site of receptors, preventing uptake of dopamine, creating an excess of it in the synapse giving the initial euphoria
• after taking cocaine the body then reacts and produces less dopamine so when the drug affects wear off the person now has less dopamine which causes the unpleasurable experience of dysphoria
• heroin increases the amount of dopamine in the reward pathways of the brain by boosting the activation of dopaminergic synapses causing euphoria, results in down regulation of dopamine after taking
• strength: research uses brain scans such as PET and fMRI, directly assesses neurotransmission, correlating a drug transit through the brain by monitoring fluctuations of neurotransmitters, objective and credible measure as it is free from interpretation bias
• weakness: correlational, only a link is inferred between drug use and aggressive behaviour, a cause and effect between recreational drugs and aggression cannot be established
• strength: positive applications, drugs have been developed to help heroin withdrawal; naloxone blocks opiate receptors and prevents heroin occupying them
• strength: compliments the learning approach as it shows that people take drugs to stop withdrawal, which is negative reinforcement
• alternate explanation: social learning theory, Bandura found that when children observed an aggressive role model, they were more likely to elicit aggressive behaviour
• weakness: reductionist as the functioning of the brain and neurotransmitters is very complex and saying that drugs inhibit or excite neurons is too simplistic and ignored other variables like social ones