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According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 217 people died each day in 2023 in the United States alone due to opioid overdose.
Opioids are pain-relieving drugs, commonly prescribed by doctors when dealing with acute or chronic pain like that caused by surgery, injury, or conditions like advanced cancer or severe arthritis.
In most cases, doctors prescribe opioids since they are a fast-acting painkiller; they bind to the receptors in the brain and spinal cord that control pain and pleasure. When attached to these receptors, opioids don’t only block pain signals, but they also release an increased amount of dopamine. Dopamine is the brain’s “feel-good” chemical which gives people the “high”– and this is exactly what makes opioids so addictive. However, opioids have many detrimental long and short term effects on the brain.
Some of the short-term effects of opioids include pain relief and relaxation, but they also cause dizziness, nausea, and slowed breathing. Since opioids slow down breathing, it is also possible that breathing gets dangerously slow causing a condition called Hypoxia. Hypoxia is when the brain doesn’t receive enough oxygen, which can cause long-term brain damage, coma, or in some cases death, according to the National Institutes of Health. While opioids may seem like a harmless painkiller at first, their addictive tendency can quickly escalate into a dangerous addiction.
Misusing opioids for prolonged periods of time, known as Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), can have damaging effects.
OUD is a chronic brain disease influenced by both genetics and environmental factors. Over time, continued use of opioids results in large amounts of dopamine being released into the brain often. As the brain gets used to the extra dopamine introduced by the opioids, it begins building tolerance-which requires more and more of the same drug to feel the same effect or “high”.
The human brain and body are trained to maintain a state of balance or homeostasis; therefore, the brain detects the excess amount of artificial dopamine as a sign to stop producing its own. This leads to the body becoming dependent on the drug which causes the withdrawal symptoms.
The main flaw of opioids is that they not only change how the brain feels, but also how it works. Opioids target the parts of the midbrain which are responsible for control, decision-making, and memory and make them less active.
According to the Recovery Research Institute, researchers have recently discovered that opioids weaken working memory – the ability to hold small pieces of information in the brain — like remembering a number long enough to dial it. As a result, over time the brain becomes so dependent on the opioids that it rewires itself to prioritize the drug over everything else, resulting in changes in personality.
Opioids may start as a way to control pain, but the effects on the brain go much deeper. What begins as pain relief can escalate into a powerful dependence that takes over all aspects of daily life that’s hard to escape. Understanding how the drug hijacks the brain is the first step toward recovery.
This article was written as part of a program to educate youth and others about Alameda County’s opioid crisis, prevention and treatment options. The program is funded by the Alameda County Behavioral Health Department and the grant is administered by Three Valleys Community Foundation.
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