Street fentanyl is toxic , you don't know what analogue you're getting or what's mixed in
I wasn't talking about cut drugs. I'm talking about pure opioid substances and not street drugs mixed with rat poison or xylazine that cause systemic infections upon injection and god knows what damage to the nervous system and the brain...
hate to burst your bubble, but that is absolutely not the case. like most drugs of abuse, opioids cause honest to god excitotoxic brain damage as well:
Read the actual studies that OP linked in the reddit post and you'll see that the cell death resulting from the toxic actions of excitatory amino acids is so miniscule that it's negligible and not even worth mentioning. It's in fact comparable to the oxidative stress that caffeine causes. I mean, we don't even need studies to prove that. Just compare the intellectual capacity of your average meth addict with the average opioid addict and you'll see the difference. 15 years of opioid addiction hasn't changed my cognitive abilities at all, which most certainly wouldn't be the case if I had fried my brain with meth or alcohol. Or take a look at all the notable historical individuals who happened to be Opium addicts and yet produced works of marvel (Paracelsus' medical books and discoveries for example, Frederic Chopin's works of musical genius, or Winston Churchill who although didn't produce anything notable was mentally sharp as a fox) that a materially degenerating brain wouldn't be able to produce. Thomas De Quincy's verbal intelligence alone is proof of that fact. Show me one meth fiend or heavy alcoholic who after decades of use can still talk in the most sophisticated manner. No matter the study, at the end of the day the practical examples that I'm seeing disprove the very notion that opioids damage the brain and if they do, the damage is so insignificant to not be worthy of entertaining any further thought.
Aside from these things, the actual methods of those studies themselves are problematic (I know, something that nobody actually seems to care about anymore. People just see the word "study" and are immediately convinced without actually looking into the details). The first study that OP linked (
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772392522000220) comes to its conclusions by using theoretical models and extrapolates from there on to its conclusions. That method is even worse and less reliable than using rats. The quality of this study would have been much better if the researchers would have actually studied the brain of opioid addicts before addiction, while addiction develops and during glial cell inflammation which occurs during wd. But this study as it stands, is as useful as all those climate studies that work exclusivly with computer models. Well, surprise: the world isn't a computer model and cannot be accurately simulated. Even less so with the human brain of which we understand approximately less than 10%.
The second study by Cross and Linker isn't talking about acute and/or chronic toxicity but (temporary) neuroplastic changes that occur due to the nature of substance addiction itself.
See that'S the problem. The OP of the reddit post probably knew that people these days don't read more than headlines anymore due to their shortened attention spans (dopamine damaged people due to excessive smartphone and app use like TikTok...so much for brain damage) and then used these studies in a manipulative way to suggest something about opioids which objectively isn't true. Or perhaps he didn't have any nefarious intentions and was himself one of those people who didn't read past the headline and thus became the victim of a false conclusion. Whatever the case may be, those studies either have a) used bad methods and therefore result in a bad study quality, or b) are actually saying and concluding something very different than what OP is saying and concluding.
