The Brain, Drugs, and Cocaine Trade in Bolivia

    Picture this: you are sitting in an 8 AM calculus class that you have Monday through Friday, and for the third time this week, your head starts to hurt. What could be the cause of it? Maybe it is the three cups of coffee you had before class, the two hours of sleep that you got the night before, or maybe the frontal lobe of your brain is trying to keep up with the fourth new concept that has been introduced to you within the last twenty minutes—the world may never know… but a neurologist would probably tell you that it has to do with your brain. The brain is an amazing part of the body, a deeply intricate and complex organ full of nerves, wrinkles, and intelligence. It is the part of our body that commands the rest of the body with each lobe and portion of the brain in charge of a different task: the frontal lobe is responsible for intellectual activities, behavior, and muscle movement, and the parietal lobe controls sensations, the temporal lobe is in charge of visual and auditory memory, the occipital lobe recognizes colors, words, and movements, and the cerebellum controls essential bodily functions. Of course, each of these portions controls significantly more than can simply be listed, but you get the idea—the brain controls it all. That little nut-shaped lump hanging out in our skull is the reason we are alive and is easily the most important organ of our body because, without it, we would not be able to live. We may not know exactly how it works or why it works, but we do know that our body cannot function without it. As per usual, every organ comes with its own set of struggles and potential problems, as well as the fear that many have of accidentally damaging the organ; the brain is not exempt from those things just because it is important, in fact, it would be significantly more catastrophic if the brain were to be injured or damaged than most other organs. 

    There are multiple ways in which the brain can be injured or diseased; injuries may be more easily prevented than a disease, but that does not make them any less harmful to an individual. These injuries are typically known as Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) and can result from a multitude of activities and affect anyone, though they are typically seen in higher numbers in males, substance abusers, infants, the elderly, and prior sufferers of a TBI. Over 1.4 million people sustain TBIs in the United States alone and of those few million, 50,000 die, 235,000 are hospitalized, and 1.1 million are treated and released. TBIs can have serious consequences for the sufferers; behavioral changes associated with these injuries affect roughly 70% of the TBI population with changes in personality, aggression, affective liability, disinhibition, apathy, and paranoia. Patients can also suffer from memory loss, headaches, seizures, dizziness, visual changes, fatigue, balance problems, and paralysis. That football player that just got his bell rung for the third time this season is now dealing with severe memory loss, while that friend that got in a car accident hit their head hard enough on the dash that they are no longer the happy-go-lucky friend you used to hang out with, but an angry, bitter person now. Both scenarios are likely and have happened before with TBIs, but just because that is how an injury present’s itself in one person, doesn’t mean it will be the same for each person who suffers the same injury. Injuries and their symptoms differ from person to person and may never look the exact same as someone else’s which is just another example of the complexity of the brain.

Much like injury, brain disorders can also present themselves incredibly different depending on the person. There are over 600 brain diseases that plague the world, and those can be narrowed down into five types: neurological disorders, storage disorders, personality and mood disorders, developmental disorders, and prion diseases. Each disorder is incredibly different from the others in presentation, effect, and manageability, but they all plague the same organ: the brain. Though I could spend this whole blog post just going over each of the individual brain diseases (more like fill a whole book with them), the one that I am most interested in talking about is dementia and the different implications it can have for an individual. Dementia is a well-known deterioration disease that is commonly paired with personality changes and emotional instability, which affects about 13.9% of Americans following abnormal brain changes. Possibly one of the saddest implications of dementia is that it not only takes a rigorous toll on the individual but can also be just as difficult for the family members that care for someone suffering from dementia who can no longer function independently. Dementia is often one of the end stages of someone who has suffered from another deterioration disease, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s which are often a result of aging. Another potential (though less common) cause of dementia is substance abuse. 

    There always lies the question of what can drugs and alcohol do to your brain, and alcohol-related dementia is but one of many side effects drugs can have on the brain. Alcohol-related dementia is caused by the excess consumption of alcohol, which is also known as alcoholism or alcohol abuse. This type of dementia looks very similar to dementia not caused by drug use, but this type of dementia is much more likely to appear in younger individuals depending on how much alcohol they have consumed in their lifetime. Alcohol-related dementia affects roughly 1 in 10 people with dementia and can present itself as early as 30 years of age; individuals who drink more heavily over a prolonged period of time are more prone to developing this type of dementia as compared to non-drinkers. It is absolutely heartbreaking to know that the devastating disease of alcoholism will not just stop at making an individual dependent on the substance, but will also control their long-term health leading to chronic diseases like dementia. Unfortunately, dementia is just a drop in the ocean of problems that excessive drug and alcohol use can cause. 

    Drugs are a very interesting substance because they are meant to mimic certain neurotransmitters in the body to evoke or stimulate certain feelings or emotions. Though that is incredibly useful for controlled substances that are prescribed by doctors to help balance out neurotransmitters within the brain should someone be suffering from an imbalance, when drugs are used outside of the help of a doctor, it can have detrimental effects on one’s mental, physical, and neurological health. There are thousands of different drugs throughout the world that all affect individuals differently both short and long-term; drugs are often used illegally because they have alluring short-term effects that the individual enjoys, but over time, those effects change to ones that are detrimental and long term—people often feel like the immediate physiological effects of a drug outweighs the long term affect. Drugs can cause a wide range of issues depending on the type that is being used: stimulants increase anxiety and agitation, marijuana leads to paranoia and psychosis, designer drugs lead to amnesia and death, and so on and so forth. Though each drug type may have its own detrimental side effects that come with it, the long-term effects of all of them will have a devastating effect on the individual that uses them with the scariest effect being addiction. Addiction is when an individual has used a drug or alcohol for a prolonged period of time, to the point that it has rewired the brain to believe that the body is dependent on their substance of choice; addiction destroys millions of lives a year—relationships, jobs, income, social lives, etc. Addiction is no laughing matter and is devastating in and of itself, but it has more implications and problems than just “needing” a certain drug and not being able to live without it.

    I love the sociological and anthropological approach to drug use because it focuses more on the causes and effects of drug use outside of just the most noticeable issues; drug use doesn’t just affect the individual, but can affect a whole country. The most interesting example of this that I have read about is the cocaine trade in Bolivia—a country that has been demolished by this designer drug. Bolivia is one of the largest cocaine distributors in the world, so it makes sense that they would have one of the highest addiction rates to the drug in the world, but it goes further than just that. Small communities in Bolivia that use to grow coca leaves (the leaves that get reduced to make cocaine, but in the leaf form have similar effects as coffee and isn’t detrimental to one’s health but actually a healthy source of nutrients) for coca tea, foods, and overall nutrition can no longer afford to grow the crop because their fields were taken from them by the cocaine business and they can’t afford the seeds to grow coca. Due to their fields being taken from them by these companies, these communities no longer had a way to make themselves self-sufficient within the community, so they had to outsource their labor elsewhere to support their families. The men of the houses moved to large cities to work in the cocaine factories to send money back to their families to live, but this had detrimental effects on the men and in turn their families. The jobs these men were able to get in the factories were stomping down the mixture of coca, kerosene, and other chemicals to make the paste that would later become cocaine. The issue with this was the corrosiveness of the mixture, which would eat away at the skin on their feet, leaving them permanently disabled, unable to work, and therefore unable to return home or send money home. To cope with the pain of stomping the mixture down, these factory workers were given cigarettes laced with the byproduct of the mixture, which in turn led to cocaine addiction in the men. These men would stop sending money home long before they couldn’t work because most of their money went to buying more cocaine-laced cigarettes. Not only was a huge part of the country becoming permanently disabled and addicted to cocaine by cocaine production, but once self-sufficient communities were left to fall apart which meant the country lost a huge part of its culture. This is just the tip of the iceberg with the cocaine production in Bolivia as cocaine production also led to an increased amount of venereal disease, higher crime rates, poorer communities, displaced indigenous people, and significantly more. I could go on and on about the cocaine trade in Bolivia because this drug truly has destroyed a large part of this country, not just people who did cocaine and were addicted to it, but also people who have never even touched it, but were a victim of the circumstances. I love the sociological and anthropological approach to drugs because it looks beyond the disease of addiction and shows just how detrimental drug production can be to these poorer countries as it can truly destroy whole cultures—they show you beyond just the addiction level after production but show you post- and during production and just how damaging that can be to a country. While we may be studying the effects that diseases can have on the body, it is just as important for us to look at the effects these diseases can have on our body, mind, spirit, and the environment and world around us.