William Burroughs, perhaps the world’s most famous drug addict, once confided to Whitley Strieber that an addict is always chasing the thrill he got from his first hit. The more they take a drug, the less pleasure they get, which is what makes them so frantic to get more. This is because cocaine actually damages the brain cells that cause pleasure.

Dr. Karley Little studied postmortem brain samples of 35 people who “had cocaine in their system when they died,” although it was not the direct cause of death. What the brain samples showed is that those who took cocaine had problems with the amount of dopamine their brains produced and how it was released by the brain.
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