The study of addiction is ultimately a quest to help those who suffer from it.
This was the message from Dr. Peter Kalivas, chair of the department of neurosciences at the medical University of South Carolina, as he gave a presentation Thursday night entitled “Why We Love Drugs So Much,” held in the classroom building at UW. He said his research has seen encouraging developments in treating addiction with antioxidants.
Francis “Bill” Flynn, director of UW’s graduate neuroscience program, hosted the packed event.
“Why We Love Drugs So Much” outlined what drug addiction actually is, as well as a look into the research Kalivas and his department has been conducting. The educator has been doing research in the neurosciences for the last 30 years.
“I basically tried to get across the idea that addiction is a biological disorder, and to describe the properties of addictive substances that make them addictive,” said Kalivas.
Kalivas said drug addiction most often occurs in the adolescent stages of a person’s life. He presented figures of the number of drug dependent people in the United States: 35 million people are dependent on nicotine, 25 million on illicit drugs and 45 million are dependent on alcohol.
Flynn asked the audience whether or not they considered marijuana an addictive drug; few hands rose in response. He then asked if the audience thought one could become dependent on the substance – this time more audience members raised their hands. He explained he had no stance on marijuana, but hoped by the end of the presentation the audience would have a better understanding of the substance.
The first portion of the presentation focused on drug addiction, its qualities and what drug addiction is in biological terms. Kalivas raised examples of animal behaviors that pointed to the learned nature of substance abuse. He explained a study about crawdads that were exposed to two dishes of water, one with cocaine and the other without, and how the crawdads would all naturally gravitate toward the dish with cocaine.
“Even a something like a crawdad can recognize that something like cocaine has rewarding values,” explained Kalivas.
He connected this with humans and the pleasure one experiences when using different substances. He furthered his explanation by illustrating the circuitry of the brain and how it naturally ends up looking for good things, such as the positives of different substances.
The latter section of the talk was about the research that his department has done as well as the clinical trials conducted with N-acetylcysteine, a common antioxidant. His finding report that the consumption of this antioxidant may be able to help people quit and avoid relapsing into using substances further. They have conducted two clinical trials, one with a group of cocaine-users and the second with a group of adolescent marijuana-users.
“The next step is to move into the really big clinical trials,” said Kalivas. “The biggest one was the marijuana trial which was about 120 subjects; what you really need, to prove that a drug is useful, is you need to do trials at multiple sites, with a 1,000 or more people involved.”
