One of the many things that the drug cocaine is really good at is wasting time. For the low, low price of about $75 — according to the internet — you could have enough coke for you and some assorted jerkoffs you met at a terrible party to spend the next several hours talking about bullshit that seems brilliant and important but is actually neither and, to the sober world, sounds like an internet date played fast-forward. And there you are at some future dawn with an awful taste in your mouth missing a siginificant period of time that you can never have back. Well, here’s another interesting way that cocaine steals time: it makes your brain get old really fast.This is according to research out today in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. It basically says that grey-matter loss due to aging is greater in people dependent on cocaine. The study looked at 120 participants — 60 dependent on cocaine and the others with no substance abuse issues. According to brain scans, users lost about 3.08 ml brain volume per year, twice the rate of non-users. Most of the loss happened in the prefrontal and temporal cortex areas of the brain, which is bad. These zones handle things like attention, decision-making, self-regulation, and memory.Read the rest over at Motherboard.
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