14 DAY TRIAL // A new study on marijuana has revealed that the drug toys with the brain chemistry of those who consume it. Thus, regular users risk losing their motivation and turning into slackers.
UK scientists explain that, whenever a person's body is regularly exposed to the chemical compounds found in marijuana, it starts producing less dopamine than it would under normal circumstances.
Dopamine is a compound otherwise known as the feel good chemical. Its presence in the brain reinforces motivation and helps establish reward-driven behaviors, Live Science reports.
Therefore, people whose brains stop being exposed to what is considered to be normal levels of dopamine are likely to lose their motivation and their interest in activities they would usually look forward to.
To prove that regular marijuana consumption impacts on people's motivation, the researchers used positron emission tomography to analyze the brains of 38 volunteers.
19 of them admitted to smoking marijuana fairly often, and the other 19 were nonusers.
When they compared the brains of the users to those of the nonusers, the scientists found that the first had lower dopamine levels in a part of the brain called the striatum.
“We compared dopamine synthesis capacity in 19 regular cannabis users who experienced psychotic-like symptoms when they consumed cannabis with 19 nonuser sex- and age-matched control subjects,” the researchers explain in their paper.
“Cannabis users had reduced dopamine synthesis capacity in the striatum and its associative and limbic subdivisions compared with control subjects. The group difference in dopamine synthesis capacity in cannabis users compared with control subjects was driven by those users meeting cannabis abuse or dependence criteria,” they detail.
The scientists argue that their findings could explain the peculiar behavioral patterns pot smokers often display.
However, they admit that no final conclusion can be drawn until more detailed investigations are carried out.
The paper documenting the potential link between marijuana consumption and lack of motivation was published in the June 29 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry.