The East Coast Is Getting A Blizzard, But The Real Snowstorm Is This News About Cocaine
A new study conducted by John Hopkins University of Medicine says that high dosages of cocaine has now been proven to make your brain eat itself. That’s the more scary way to say it, but it’s also the simplest; the study, which has been a long process of findings over the past fifteen years, first discovered an ambiguous relationship between cell death and cocaine usage, but now, the doctors have explored another method of placing the research puzzle pieces together.
“We performed ‘autopsies’ to find out how cells die from high doses of cocaine,” Solomon Snyder, M.D., professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine told EurekAlert. In experiments conducted with mice, They discovered that cocaine accelerated the process of ‘autophagy’, in which cells clean and digest unwanted materials within themselves. While the process is organic, cocaine prompts the cells to get rid of materials that might otherwise be beneficial and necessary, then ultimately resulting in cell death.
The good news? Since 2013, the numbers of cocaine users aged 12 and up has gone down—in 2013, according o the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an estimated 1.5 million users were identified, substantially lower than the 2 to 2.4 million users identified between 2002 and 2007.
The other bad news? The east coast is definitely still getting winter weather this weekend. The New York Times says it’s still too early to tell just how bad it’ll be, but either way — make sure to stay snow-free this weekend (or maybe forever).
