By knowing the mechanism by which drugs modify the nervous system
we can achieve adequate therapeutic strategies
either from a pharmacological or a psychological point of view.
Due to the fact that we cannot experiment with people,
we have to work with animals to try to understand this type of mechanism.
Animals have very similar addictive behaviors
to those observed in human beings.
Thanks to this type of studies we test in animals
we are observing that drugs, when consumed
modify the nervous system in a relatively permanent way,
producing irrevocable changes
and so people's nervous system, or "the brain",
will never be the same, once the use has ceased.
Animals help us to understand this type of process,
and once we can understand it
it is more feasible to get adequate therapeutic strategies,
either of a pharmacological or a psychological type.
What we do is to insert a catheter,
in the jugular vein,
protected by a metal spring
and connected to an automatic pump
This catheter allows the animal to ration the drug.
All the process controlled by a computer.
In these conditions, we realize that animals
ration easily the substances that we call “drugs of abuse”
such as heroine, morphine, cocaine, alcohol, amphetamine, etc.
And they don’t usually ration other kinds of substances
that having psychoactive effects, affecting the nervous system,
don’t have dependent properties.
These types of result indicate
that in the animals’ and human beings’ nervous system,
there are surely very similar substrates,
so that, by precisely studying the animals
we can understand quite well what occurs in the people's nervous system.
Once the animal has become dependent,
as it is said in colloquial terms,
we can extract its brain and do many experimental studies
that cannot be done with people.
We remove the brain, cut it in suitable slices
and observe the changes
that occur in some important elements of the neurons, as the receivers.
For this reason, the intravenous drug self-administration model
is contributing a great amount of knowledge to be able to understand those processes,
and to be able to help those people who want to quit that habit in the future.
Other types of experiments that we are able to do is to measure,
the changes produced in the brain when the animal is taking the drug;
by extracting part of the fluid that is between the neurons…
and with the appropriate equipment to measure the concentrations of those substances.
We can establish psychological therapies
that allow people, by knowing what happens to their nervous system,
to quit this kind of dependency by themselves.
We have both, pharmacological and psychological tools
to help these people to abandon that bad habit
and to live an absolutely normal life,
both integrated into their families and society.