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Fair Doctor's talk at South Side High School hones in on addiction to drugs, alcohol, technology
Every addictive drug works by increasing dopamine in the brain, Dr. Stephen Dewey explained to a packed auditorium at South Side High School on March 20. Dopamine, a chemical that travels from one nerve cell to another, plays a role in reward-motivated behavior.
“Dopamine goes up, you’re happy. It goes down, you’re sad,” said Dewey, a research professor in the New York University School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry.
A kid who gets a 98 on a math test may have a four percent increase in dopamine, he added. If that same child uses two milligrams of methamphetamine, his or her brain dopamine could go up between 930,000 and 1.3 million percent.
Several gasps fractured the room’s stunned silence.
The talk, attended by a few hundred students, parents and staff members, was the Rockville Centre School District’s Drug, Alcohol and Violence Prevention Task Force’s spring presentation. Its goal, said Assistant Superintendent Dr. Noreen Leahy, who leads the task force, was to educate students and parents about the dangers and consequences of alcohol and drug use.
In 2017, more than 70,000 people died from drug overdoses — 192 a day — making it the leading cause of injury-related death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Leahy told the crowd that her 41-year-old nephew is a heroin addict. “I’m sure he didn’t think the beer he guzzled or the pot he smoked was going to land him in the place he is today, and that is addicted, poor, alone and very sad,” she said. “Even if one person sitting here tonight stays out of harm’s way because of something you heard, then we will have done our job.”
The patients Dewey studies range in age and type of addiction. He sees alcoholics in fourth grade who drink more than a quart of liquor a day, seventh-graders who inject heroin daily and patients in their 80s. But even in the case of older adults, he said, addiction is a neuro-chemical change in the brain that is unmasked during adolescence.
“The disease is caused by the introduction to the drug, which becomes the medication for the drug, which perpetuates the disease,” he said.
Throughout the 90-minute presentation, Dewey displayed positron emission tomography, or PET, scan images on the auditorium’s big screen to show how addiction develops and progresses in the brain. Pre-existing conditions in the brain can lead to addiction, he explained, noting that thrill seekers — people who like trying something new — are more at risk. He added that adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for example, who have low dopamine and go untreated, may drink or use drugs to raise dopamine levels.
“We know that kids that unmask addiction more often than not do it because they’re self-medicating another condition,” he said.
Other findings that Dewey shared with attendees included that smoking marijuana stops the growth of the frontal lobe in an adolescent brain; nano-particles of nickel, chromium and cadmium found in vaping devices go into users’ body and get trapped in the kidneys; and that addictive drugs alter one’s brain longer than how they change the way you feel.
Dewey went beyond drug and alcohol addiction, discussing addiction to one’s cell phone, as well as to some of today’s most popular video games, such as Fortnite. Placing a teenager’s cell phone into their hand while they were blindfolded raised dopamine levels by 78,000 percent, he said. Flashing an image of a Fortnite game during a PET scan showed dopamine increases of 85,000 percent, he added, which is more than addicts’ response to seeing any drug.
Toward the end of the discussion, Dewey spoke about some of the new ways some teenagers seem to be administering alcohol, which include pouring liquor into the eye, soaking tampons with liquor and inserting it in the vagina or rectum, and even heating liquor and breathing in the vapor.
Tara McElynn, a teacher at South Side High School, told the Herald that the presentation was eye-opening. “I’ve been teaching for 20 years, but I don’t have my own children, so I was not up on all the current things,” she said.
Gabriel Guimaraes, the father of an 11-year-old, said the addictiveness of certain video games caught his attention. “It changed my whole perception,” he said. “Now I have to find new tools to tackle that problem.”
Most shocking to Christine Perinelli, whose children are in the Oceanside School District, was the ways in which kids use alcohol to feel high. “It’s scary,” she said. “I’m disturbed by it.”
Maia Jershower, a junior at Oceanside High School, noted that the different methods of consumption were unsettling to her as well. “I can’t believe that kids are doing it,” she said. “It’s insane.”
Rose Cammarata, assistant principal of South Side Middle School, said learning about the toxic metals that get stuck in the body from vaping was especially upsetting, and noted that she would look to further limit students’ playing of certain games on school-issued iPads.
Clearly, she said, “There are many more addictions now besides pot and drinking.”
