US teens are using less of every substance – except for one
Teenagers in the US roughly doubled their use of nicotine pouches in 2024, despite turning away from alcohol and other drugs Source link
All posts tagged: drugs and alcohol
Drug residue can be detected in fingerprints left at crime scenes
A researcher uses a chemical to extract drug residue from fingerprints Loughborough University Forensic scientists have developed a new technique that can detect drug and explosive residue on fingerprint samples from crime scenes. “That information, the presence of drug particles, is an almost untapped resource,” says James Reynolds at Loughborough University in the UK. That is because investigators use thin gelatine layers, called gel lifters, to lift fingerprints. These introduce chemicals to samples, making it difficult to identify trace amounts of drugs or explosives on them. … Source link
Cocaine seems to hijack brain pathways that prioritise food and water
Illustration of the reward pathway in the human brain FERNANDO DA CUNHA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Persistent use of drugs such as cocaine and morphine is thought to affect the way the brain prioritises the body’s basic needs — and we are now getting to the bottom of how this comes about. When people repeatedly misuse drugs, they might see long-term changes in their behaviour that lead them to choose to take drugs instead of doing essential things like eating and drinking. A brain pathway called the mesolimbic reward system is suspected to be involved in this process, but few studies have directly compared the system’s response to taking drugs with the response of innate needs being met. Now, Bowen Tan at Rockefeller University in New York and his colleagues have shown that the same neurons are activated in these two circumstances. They uncovered this using a sophisticated microscopy set-up that allowed them to track the activity of individual neurons in the brains of mice going through withdrawal following repeated exposures to these drugs. “The field has …