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Why are nearly all downer physically addictive but no uppers are?

Ho-Chi-Minh said:
I thought opiates were effective antidepressants like amphetamine if the dose isn't increased exponentially. That is, they work as antidepressants, but not nearly as well as at first.
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I'm sure that's true. But due to the physical dependency, the cure may be worse than the disease, and depression seems to be a catalyst for developing dependency. The human ability to delude oneself is quite profound. Opioids have very strong negative reinforcements to continue use once you reach a certain pass. I have yet to meet a more slippery slope.
 
atara said:
Consider a car with no brakes, and one with no engine. Which are you more likely to get injured in? Too much neural activity and it might cause a big problem -- the literal translation of grand mal; too little and you just fall asleep.
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Nope, too little and you fall asleep and you stop breathing and then you die. BOTH of them can be dangerous.
 
WSH said:
Nope, too little and you fall asleep and you stop breathing and then you die. BOTH of them can be dangerous.
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I'm not entirely sure you're familiar with just how hard it is for this to happen. Even a person in a PVS can often breathe. Drugs which cause respiratory depression do so by specifically affecting the function of parts of the brain responsible for breathing, not by "too little neural activity" in general. See for example:

http://bja.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/6/747.long

A useful addendum to my post is "the function of the brainstem is not easily disrupted in the absence of chemical stressors"; a person who is not currently on drugs will almost never stop breathing.
 
edit- made a new thread so as to not derail the subject matter of this one.
 
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atara said:
I'm not entirely sure you're familiar with just how hard it is for this to happen. Even a person in a PVS can often breathe. Drugs which cause respiratory depression do so by specifically affecting the function of parts of the brain responsible for breathing, not by "too little neural activity" in general. See for example:

http://bja.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/6/747.long

A useful addendum to my post is "the function of the brainstem is not easily disrupted in the absence of chemical stressors"; a person who is not currently on drugs will almost never stop breathing.
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Good post. I thought as well it was merely a function of depressing the autonomic functions of the nervous system.
 
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