The first time third-year psychobiology student John tried smoking marijuana, he experienced a high that made him see the world and his life with an alternative perspective he had never experienced when sober.
John described his experiences with drugs as mind-altering and full of intellectual revelation.
“I noticed sounds in well-known songs that I had never heard before, it even made me reach a whole new appreciation for music,” he said. “Drugs just take you places in your mind that you could probably never experience otherwise.”
However, drugs affect all people differently, and some may reach the tipping point and lose sight of the consequences and risks of abusing drugs or becoming addicted, said Elizabeth Gong-Guy, director of Student Psychological Services.
“For certain individuals, the right physiological factors, some unfortunate history of heavy use, negative life events and bad coping strategies can be a recipe for addiction,” Gong-Guy said. Even though most students do not become addicted to a substance, an unfortunate amount do.
John said he never became dependent on any of the drugs he tried, and he smokes marijuana socially, but some of his friends became addicted to drugs like cocaine because they just did not understand their limits and became dependent on the stimulating effects.
College-aged people, in general, are susceptible to drug abuse due to multiple factors, said Dr. Thomas Newton, researcher at the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Program.
Experimenting with drugs is not only about being away from home and in a new social environment where your peers are pressuring you to take risks, Newton said. It is also a biological vulnerability and sensitivity to the pleasure-inducing effects of drugs in the brains of young adults ages 15 to 25.
These rewarding effects begin to wear off by the age of 25, when the frontal region of the brain responsible for higher-order thinking and decision making finally reaches maturity, he added. In theory, Newton said, if people were kept away from drugs until the age of 25, they would be less likely to engage in use.
Since that is not a realistic possibility, people must accept drug use as socially the way things are, Newton said.
“People are going to try drinking, dope and other drugs ““ that’s a given,” he added. “But, they must know that it can progress rapidly, and people do not sense the shift into danger and do not notice when things go bad and they are dependent on a certain drug.”
In order to establish the difference between safe drug use and unsafe abuse, the UCLA chapter of a nationwide organization, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, tries to get information about drugs out to students that gives them the facts without trying to scare them, said Matt Nazareth, cofounder of the chapter and a fourth-year political science student.
Fear is not the answer when it comes to keeping people safe from drugs, he added, which is why the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (DARE), which seeks to prevent use of illegal drugs, has been shown to be ineffective.
A pamphlet, Nazareth said, will be put out this year that will address how drug use becomes abuse and what students need to know about certain popular drugs in terms of risks, effects and safe dosage.
According to research and Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the biggest worry about marijuana use is loss of motivation and focus, Nazareth said.
Also, a growing trend on campus has become the abuse of prescription drugs, such as Adderall and Ritalin, meant to treat psychiatric disorders like attention deficit disorder and narcolepsy, he added. These drugs are legal, but not when they are misused by healthy individuals who are taking them in order to stay up all night and study, Nazareth added.
Students should be given the information they need in order to stay safe from all forms of drugs, not just the illegal ones, he added.
“What worries me is that many students who use drugs do not have an understanding of issues like dosage and dangerous combinations,” Nazareth said. “When they have the necessary information, it is up to the individual to decide whether or not they are going to do drugs.”
From seeking out an intellectual and spiritual awakening to doing drugs just for fun and for social interaction, the reasoning and rationale are different for everyone, just as the effects of drugs vary from person to person.
“For me, doing drugs was more than just thrill-seeking; they fed my intellectual curiosity,” said third-year linguistics and Spanish student Kris.
Kris began experimenting with a number of different drugs ranging from marijuana to hallucinogens like mushrooms and LSD to stimulants like ecstasy, as well as a legal psychedelic drug called salvia divinorum, to see how they affected his mind and behavior.
“Salvia caused me to have extremely strong hallucinations because it created a mental dissociation from my visual perceptions and the real meanings of the things around me, making everything seem to no longer fit into the relational structures set up in the mind previously,” Kris said. “As I did it more often, I was able to think about the changes more attentively and stay aware of the intellectual revelations I was experiencing.”
But Kris said he always maintained a sense of awareness about his actions and conducted his own research on the risks and effects of any particular drug he planned on sampling.
“Drugs are not for everyone because many people use them irresponsibly without understanding the full effects,” Kris added. “There is a huge difference between drug use and drug abuse.”
It is that difference students need to be aware of, Gong-Guy said, because once you have entered the realm of abuse, where your social, emotional and academic life suffers, you are at risk of becoming addicted and putting yourself and others in danger.