Love as Cocaine. Love as addiction: For the brain they have almost the same bio-semantic meaning!

Love as Cocaine

“What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

- Romeo & Juliet, Act II, Scene II

What is love? This sensation that transports us to another parallel universe, where there are only two lovers. It empowers us, it transcends, but at the same time it can destroy us. Is it a demonic or divine greatness? What is its significance? Difficult to determine right?

     Love is a feeling embraced by various civilizations / cultures. Meanings are complex and widespread since ancient generations in humankind.

     In order to study scientifically it is necessary to isolate and understand its parts in order to have a holistic understanding of this phenomenon in the brain.

     The love that we will treat now is not the love between a mother and a child, between a person and her pet. The love that we will deal with is the couple with two lovers like men and women, because there are more scientific studies about this condition. This kind of love is called in science as "romantic love".

     In this type of love, there are phases that happen in the body, hormonal cycles and neural activities that influence the behavior of the couple in different stages of the relationship. The phases are: being in love, passional love, companionate love and adultery ^[1].

     Our focus is only on the first phase, it is falling in love that can extend a little in the beginning of passional love.

     But the story I want to tell you does not begin with love, but with cocaine.

     Cocaine is an alkaloid found in the leaves of the coca bush and is the same substance used to synthesize crack. The Incas used chewing the the coca leaves for mystical, religious, social, nutritional and medicinal purposes ^[2].

     It is possible to argue both positive and negative values, the tenuous line of its benevolence and malevolence.

“My only love sprung from my only hate!

Too early seen unknown, and is known too late!

Prodigious birth of love it is to me

That I must love a loathed enemy.”

- Juliet to herself. She fell in love with Romeo before she knew who he was.

Looking for the positive effects

     The effects of cocaine on the body depend on the amount or concentration consumed and the time that is used, casual or chronic. At the level of human perception cocaine is able to bring a sense of joy, improve mood, increase energy sensation, increase sexual interest, increase your self-confidence, conversational power, reduce fatigue, appetite, fear, anxiety, sleep and intensify / amplify states of consciousness ^[2-4].

     In the pre-Columbian period the Spanish "conquerors" discovered that cocaine was capable of producing in abstinence a pain experience and was considered by its religious as "an evil agent of the devil." But they went back on the position of prohibition because they realized that the natives (Incas) worked better in the fields and gold mines because cocaine encouraged them, they easily skirted fatigue, hunger, increased endurance and permanence of well-being.

     In the brain the drug works by blocking the uptake of dopamine in the midbrain, which in turn leads to an increase in dopaminergic concentration causing various effects depending on the region of the brain that this dopamine acts on. Another important point to highlight is that the drug leads to a hyper activation of D2 receptors in neurons.

     In 1855 it was scientifically described, but only its positive factors had been focused. In this context it was used for a number of purposes, they carried the fame of the elixir of life, "perfect against depression" and with the emergence of Coca-Cola business, they abuse marketing of "a valuable brain tonic and a cure for all nervous afflictions" , a moderate drink "offering the benefits of coca without the ill effects of alcohol" ^[2].

Yes! Coca-Cola had cocaine, a purification process was required to remove the alkaloid after prohibition, and there are still some suppositions / conspiracies theories of molecular traces of cocaine in the drink. What will be the famous secret recipe so well protected?

However not everything is a thousand wonders..

“These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,

Which, as they kiss, consume.”

- Romo & Juliet, Act II, Scene VI

     From the brief euphoria and glimpse of nirvana, the individual is shocked against the negative feedback mechanisms if recklessly consumed. Excessive activation of the D2 receptors leads to a negative regulation of their production which diminishes the brain's ability to experience pleasure. As a rebound effect of nature, the body becomes immersed in feelings of anxiety, anhedonia (loss of ability to feel pleasure), depression, irritability, extreme fatigue, paranoia and toxic psychoses. In this context, a wish for more cocaine is generated and this can lead to stereotyped, obsessive-compulsive and repetitive behaviors. It is also reported that tactile hallucinations can occur, such as insects crawling under the skin ^[2,4,5].

     Where does love come from throughout this story?

     Just like cocaine, fall in love is a chemical explosion that happens in your brain. Famous love molecules such as oxytocin and vasopressin interact with the dopaminergic system (the same dopamine cited in cocaine), in which they are dependent on the release of dopamine and its effects on the D2 receptors of neurons. Molecules that bind to these receptors induce partner preferences. If this receptor is blocked or D1 receptors are stimulated, the opposite is the case, if it provokes a violation of preferences by partners ^[1].

     It is not new to science that drugs that influence the dopaminergic system, in which case cocaine is associated with the same biochemical and behavioral response effect of romantic love in its first phase, as well as its negative rebound.

     Interesting characteristics raised in studies on the behavior of romantic love in phase 1 ^[3]:

• They produce the same cocaine effect as increasing exhilaration, excessive energy, improves emotions, reduces sleep, fear, anxiety and can cause loss of appetite.

• Increased sexual interest

• The behavioral development of obsessive thinking in the beloved is called "intrusive thinking", in the condition the person think of their partner until about 85% of the time in their day. It forms obsessive-compulsive behaviors, very similar processes in the abstinence of cocaine drug, generating:

- Sensations of possession as "object love"

- Emotional addiction

- Fear of rejection and separation which initiates anxiety cycles.

• Increase empathy with the lover, which influences a lower decision-making ability because it leads to self-sacrificing behaviors by the partner without discernment of the consequences and an extrapolation of their qualities by the inhibition of systems of reasoning in the human brain.

“Oh, she shows the torches how to burn bright! She stands out against the darkness like a jeweled earring hanging against the cheek of an African. Her beauty is too good for this world; she's too beautiful to die and be buried. She outshines the other women like a white dove in the middle of a flock of crows.”

- Romeo

     Of course that addiction and abstinence from love does not generate physical side effects as severe as cocaine to the body, but when it comes to psychological wounds, being in love has its harmful power.

     In either scenarios, drug or feeling, they are capable of addiction because they regulate processes in the brain tied to reward. If driven in reckless ways, it lead you to abandon reason and repetitive behaviors in search of reward emerge to the detrimental effects of consequences.

     For generations drugs have been demonized and by others canonized (to become divine). Some British doctors [2] had a habit of administering "Brompton cocktail" (cocaine, heroin and alcohol) to relieve the pain of patients with terminal cancers and provide them with a transcendent orgasm of joy, acceptance of death as a process of transformation of existence and not a confused, delayed and painful anticlimax sensation. The truth is that we are now breaking the stigmas in science with the knowledge of the good and evil of these substances or of the natural activities / cognitions of the body (like loving).

     This leads us to rethink the new forms of acting given their biochemical and psychoactive potentials of transforming our conditions of being and living.

     Returning to the dialect of the thought Love X Cocaine.

     Metaphorically the effect of love and cocaine, for example, had very close meanings, the same (bio-) chemical semantics of these brain phenomena. The natural act as love (fall in love) with the action of consuming cocaine, in its neural circuits, take you to very similar trips.

"And Juliet said to Romeo:
Be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet;”

- Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare

References:

 [1] Love is more than just a kiss: A neurobiological perspective on love and affection; A. De Boer et al; Neuroscience; 2012.

[2] In Search of the Big Bang: What is Crack Cocaine?” Accessed February 14, 2019.

[3] Lust, Attraction, Attachment: Biology and Evolution of the Three Primary Emotion Systems for Mating, Reproduction, and Parenting; Fisher, H; Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, 2000. 

[4] Neurobiology of addiction; Wise, R. A. ; Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 1996.

[5] Brain dopamine and reward; Wise, R. A.; Annual Review of Psychology, 1989.