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.“As we age, we all lose grey matter,” says Dr. Karen Ersche of the University of Cambridge, in a press release. “However, what we have seen is that chronic cocaine users lose grey matter at a significantly faster rate, which could be a sign of premature ageing. Our findings therefore provide new insight into why the cognitive deficits typically seen in old age have frequently been observed in middle aged chronic users of cocaine.”According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, there are around 21 million cocaine users worldwide, with about 1-percent of those becoming dependent on the drug. That is a whole lot of people with brains aging at twice the usual rate. Which could make for an interesting health situation in the future, what with a bunch of middle-aged folks crowding out nursing homes, somehow baffled that there’s no cure for parts of your brain just dying.Of course, you’ll also be the lamest people in the nursing home too. Long-term cocaine use blows out your dopamine system, desensistizing your brain’s dopamine receptors. In other words, your brain’s natural rewards system becomes fucked, and nothing feels good anymore. Of course, most cocaine users won’t wind up dependent and probably even won’t totally wreck their brain’s pleasure centers. The drug’s dipshit effects are, however, far more widespread. In conclusion, just stay away from me OK.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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