The Prozac-Cocaine Connection

As time goes by and millions of more people turn to antidepressant drugs to ‘escape’ the anxiety, stress and depression that modern life can sometimes cause, alarming horror stories about antidepressant use are piling up.  The SSRI or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor was introduced as a ‘miracle’ drug that would greatly reduce the side effects of the previous class of tricyclic antidepressants with little or no downside.  Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical companies are not telling the whole story.  These drugs can be dangerous for some people in ways that most people have no idea about.  Not surprising really when you realize they work the same way that cocaine does.

One of the little known things about antidepressants is that the process in which SSRI drugs function in order to increase the levels of serotonin is remarkably similar to the way that cocaine works.  In selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the drugs function by preventing existing serotonin from exiting the brain by crossing the brain/blood barrier.  This creates a ‘backlog’ of serotonin in the brain and as new serotonin is produced it is simply added to the ‘old’ serotonin that is being prevented from leaving the brain.  The theory is that since serotonin is one of the primary neurotransmitters responsible for the ‘feel good’ emotion of happiness and satiety that this is a good thing.

The same holds true for the other feel good neurotransmitters of dopamine and norepinephrine.  There’s only one problem.  The substance that causes dopamine to be kept in the brain and to not cross the blood/brain barrier so to increase levels of dopamine in the brain is…you guessed it…cocaine.  Our experience with cocaine however shows that there is a distinct downside of having all this ‘old’ dopamine circulating in the brain along with the new.  At a certain point, the brain simply stops making fresh dopamine causing the famous cocaine ‘crash’.  Could the same be true of Serotonin?  Is it really ‘good’ to have old serotonin and new serotonin circulating in the brain together, especially for long periods like months and years?  Perhaps this is why some people have an opposite reaction to antidepressants and end up more depressed than they began after a short while.

The truth is that scientists willingly admit that they don’t truly understand many of the implications of ssri and similar drugs on the human brain.  The studies initially submitted to the FDA only followed patients for very short periods.  No long term studies that delved into the safety or efficacy of patients were ever done on people taking these drugs for months and years.  Now, after almost 2 decades and millions of users later it is coming out that there are many adverse side effects and even life changing and personality altering reactions that were never known or disclosed when these medications first became legal.   You won’t find many of these adverse or dangerous outcomes listed on the back of your medicine bottle.  But is it any wonder why?

Would you expect to see negative reviews in a brochure printed up by a car manufacturer about their newest car?  Would you purchase a home without doing any research on if the homebuilder or town was any good?  Of course not.  But this is exactly what doctors and patients do every day by simply accepting the limited warnings, usually physical and not mental, that are on the inserts in antidepressant medications.  To find out unbiased and very revealing stories and experiences from people that have actually been on the drugs and know firsthand one should search the internet for the numerous sites that people use to tell their real life stories on these drugs.  One such site is where we are building a community that tells the real story and not just the ‘corporate line’ about antidepressant and other mood altering drugs.