Alcohol Addiction: Response to Adrienne Brown

After reading this weeks resources, I have to say that you should not use caffeine to treat alcohol addiction. In order to explain why it would be a bad idea, allow me to start with alcohol and how it affects you, how caffeine affects you, and how they would react together if you were to drink alcohol and consume caffeine at the same time, the affects to your brain and body are serious.

Alcohol, it affects your thought process, your vision, your speech, and your balance. This means that after drinking, and becoming drunk, it is much harder to do the things your body does on a daily basis, walking ten feet across the room just got hard, you haven’t felt that way since learning how to walk. Talking, slurred speech, people can not tell what you are saying or talking about, and if you are in need of help this could be a serious problem. Thinking, this might be the worst effect yet, you go from knowing right from wrong and how to do things without really thinking how to do them, like it is second nature, to thinking you can do anything.. like driving a car when you can not see straight or walk straight. We all know what kind of things can happen when someone gets behind the wheel after drinking, tragic things. Alcohol disrupts the synaptic activity of neurotransmitters. An example, as stated in our text book, “Julien’s Primer Drug Action: A Comprehensive Guide to Actions, Uses, and Side Effects of Psychoactive Drugs, it blocks the glutaminergic neurotransmission by pushing the responsiveness of N-Methyl-D-Aspartate, NMDA, receptors to released glutamate, affecting the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the striatum, ultimately impairing your motor performance and memory.

Caffeine, affects the body in different ways as well, it gives you energy, but can cause agitation, anxiety, tremors, rapid breathing, and insomnia. It can help improve your concentration. However, if you already have anxiety it will intensify it, as well as your agitation and tremors if you have a disorder that causes you to have tremors as it is. It also decreases the amount of blood going to the brain by constricting the cerebral blood vessels.

As you can see by the affects of caffeine, that it will not help alcohol addiction. It may reduces the motor impairment, sedation, and intoxication, but it increases, sexually risky behaviors, marijuana use, fighting, prescription and drug abuse, and leads to smoking cigarettes. So it could make things worse. Honestly, caffeine seems like a gateway to drugs, this coming from our text. This could build your tolerance of alcohol, so it would lead to drinking more, which defeats the purpose of trying to kick the alcohol addiction. This is why it is advised that you do not drink, or rather, mix your alcohol and caffeine.. energy drinks.

Adrienne

Resources-

Advokat, C. D., Comaty, J. E., & Julien, R. M. (2014). Julien’s primer of drug action: A comprehensive guide to the actions, uses, and side effects of psychoactive drugs (13th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.