Why Does Meth Cause Chest Pain?
The drug abuse and addiction crisis that continuously spreads and eats up the world is not about to stop soon. They are too many legal and illegal drugs in circulation, especially in the United States that people continue to abuse, even when they are aware that there are some hefty consequences later on.
Aside from the usual drugs that people commonly abuse like alcohol, cocaine, heroin and marijuana, there are others with dire consequences that are gaining momentum currently. They include the prescription opioids and meth. Already, prescription opioids are driving the US crazy because they are now an epidemic.
Meth, on the other hand, is the most lethal compared to the majority of the drugs mentioned above. It is a psychoactive drug like all the rest, very illegal indeed and the effects it causes will get you regretting your choices. After all, all your actions have consequences. If the actions are good, the consequences will be good.
Consuming meth is a wrong action and it does have some severe consequences, including chest pains that come due to a combination of other problems caused by this same drug. How do people still consume it when it can severely affect the one part of their body that holds very crucial survival organs?
Well, like many of the alcohol or marijuana abusers, the meth consumers tend to believe that one or two times will not hurt. They are sort of desperate to feel the drugs pleasurable effects without actually considering the aftermath of their actions. Since it is an addictive drug, they end up consuming hundreds of times.
If you really want to understand the way meth negatively changes people’s lives, simply carry out an observation test on consumers and non-consumers. You will get a clear insight of the miserable consumers’ lives.
Meth
Meth is the short and simple term that people use to refer to the complicated long word, methamphetamine. It pronunciation as well is tricky. Methamphetamine is a stimulant that mainly targets the central nervous system.
As a psychoactive substance, it alters several actions in your body and eventually causes addiction because you will continue to consume more and more of it. Your body is likely to build a tolerance for the drug and so the initial pleasurable effects will fade.
Since you desire that level of high, you will not hesitate to increase the amounts you are used to taking. Eventually, the increase in amount every now and then will lead to an addiction and may also put you at the risk of an overdose, mostly indicated by chest pains, which signal a reaction from your heart.
The long lasting effecting of this drug on your body can hardly be compared to any other. As scholars classify methamphetamine together with other drugs like cocaine, they still admit that the level of long-term effects is not the same.
The consumers of methamphetamine, like many others, consume the drug for recreational purposes. This behavior, especially in America has caused its abuse that has lasted for years, and still continues to takes place regardless of the various warnings that people receive on a regular basis.
The US government prohibits the consumption of methamphetamine. Therefore, it is illicitly trafficked by criminals who know that it will definitely be consumed by quite a huge population. The potential to cause pleasurable effects that last for longer hours than other drugs is what mainly attracts people. Consequently, it has been prevalent among the US drug abusers.
Experts have concluded that the consumption of methamphetamine in low, moderate and high doses brings forth different effects. In the low and moderate, you are bound to experience increased energy, concentration and alertness. Fatigued abusers often benefit here. Other effects include promotion of weight loss among the obese, since the drug causes a reduction in appetite.
The high energy acquired is used in sexual activity by the higher population of abusers due to the increased sexual desire as well. The period of such engagement can last for longer periods than the normal for non-abusers, going up to several days after consumption.
If consumed in high doses, the severe consequence may include post-acute-withdrawal period that addiction doctors claim goes on for many months, thus extends the withdrawal period as one seek medical intervention to quit methamphetamine addiction.
Methamphetamine Creation and Consumption
After the illegal meth is trafficked into American, abusers consume it mostly as crack methamphetamine, which is the concentrated form of the drug that appears as crystals. When obtaining it from the sellers, the most terms used include crank, ice, meth and speed, among others.
Crystal meth is also rock-like and comes in various colors, including semi-transparent white and blue. As long as you use the right names to obtain it from shady drug dealers, you are likely to get it regardless of your age. This could mean that people below eighteen years also have access.
During the creation of this form of meth, the dealers use a variety of chemicals because their intent to get you addicted, go back to buy more and more and help them make more money. These addictions are very deadly and it is sad that people still find it right to include them in the drug and sell to fellow humans.
This manufacturing takes place in shady grounds in the dealers’ homes, where they save some space for home labs. They are not actual labs but acquire the name due to the mixing of many chemicals. While at it, they also cut the drug by using hazardous impurities and adulterants.
As a result, they manage to spread the drug with the potential to make more money. Due to the poisonous chemicals used, authorities raiding and dismantling such places wear protective gear since they can come in contact with any transmitting medium like air.
The hardest fact about all this is that these dealers and criminals are narcissists and socio paths that find nothing wrong with creating such harmful substances. Many people love the thought of having bundles of money. However, only those with personality disorders will go to the extents of including poisonous chemicals just to enlarge and maintain the clientele base.
Consumption of meth is dependent on many factors including the length and intensity of high that you seek. Many of the meth abusers consume it by smoking it through glass pipes, after heating the crystals. Others may snort or inject the drug into their blood stream, after crushing the meth tablets or crystals.
Smoking delivers meth directly to the bloodstream through your lungs. Therefore, the high feeling takes effect immediately since pumping of blood by the heart is instant. The intensity of this high feeling then lasts for longer periods than majority of other drugs, including cocaine.
Smoking meth will get you hooked very fast as compared to snorting or injecting, and thus it promotes addiction. After all injecting and snorting will take several seconds to cause effects. However, injecting puts you at great risk of acquiring infectious diseases, due to the sharing of needles and syringes. Among them are HIV and various types of hepatitis.
Effects
Similar to any other drug, the consumption of methamphetamine causes several effects. They include: the immediate side effects that are quite prevalent in the first hour of consumption, the coming down effects that come after twenty-four hours, the side effects when not high on the drug and the short and long-term.
Immediate Effects
In the first hour of meth consumption, messages passing between the brain and your body increase in speed. This takes place because the dopamine levels increase from the normal level by roughly one thousand times.
Therefore, you are prone to experience the following:
- Intense clarity
- Pleasure
- A lot of energy
- Your thinking becomes clear thus you can make good decisions
- Effective planning of activities
These effects can last for long; four to twelve hours, before the drug wears off.
Come down effects
When the drugs begin to wear off, the come down effects begin. They are usually the direct opposite of the immediate effects. They include the following:
- Exhaustion
- difficulty sleeping
- Feeling completely down
- irritability
- Hallucinations
- Blurred vision
- Paranoia
- Headaches
- Confusion
Side Effects
For most people that abuse meth regularly, they began with one take. The high feeling they got lasted hours as mentioned above and so they thought it was wise to continue consuming it. If they walked away by questioning the long lasting effects’ relation to negative consequences, they would not experience the following side effects that come after regular consumption:
- Significant weight loss
- Agitation
- Exhilaration
- Confusion
- Appetite loss
- Unpredictable behavior
- Severe mood swings
- Irregular heart rhythm
- Changes in sleeping patterns
- Rapid heart rate
- Tremor
- Hyperthermia
- Elevated blood pressure
Short Term Effects
As long as you continue taking meth, you can never escape the short-term effects. They are such as:
- Excessive sweating
- Dilation of pupils
- Teeth grinding
- Scratching and itching
- Increased body temperature
- Nausea
- Panic and psychosis
- Hallucinations
- Bizarre and violent behavior
- Irritability
- Hyper excitability
- Seizures
- Death
Long Term Effects
The damage caused by meth is not a joke, considering that it contains more dangerous chemicals. The accumulation of the toxins builds every moment you consume it and damage your organs progressively. Consequently, small issues begin to take effect, heading to larger problems that lack treatment for full recovery. Death becomes something that you keep approximating.
They include these listed below;
- Respiratory problems due to smoking
- Nose tissue damage due to snorting
- Malnutrition
- Weight loss
- Dry mouth
- Severe tooth decay
- Lung damage
- Kidney damage
- Liver damage
- Depression
- Muscle stiffness
- Regular occurrence of colds and flus
- Psychosis
- Concentration challenges
- Strong psychological dependence
- Disorientation
- Confused exhaustion
- Apathy
- Infectious diseases due to injections
- Strokes
- Heart attacks
- High blood pressure
- Death
The majority of these effects are indicated by severe chest pains, because the chest area organs are the first to suffer from meth consumption consequences.
The Chest
The human body comprises of various body parts; the limbs, the head, thorax also known as chest, and the abdomen. The chest is the body part that is usually between your neck that connects your head to the body, and the abdomen.
The chest houses some of the most crucial internal organs, namely the heart and lungs. These parts are quite significant in your survival because any serious damage on them can easily cause your death or long term diseases that may never be cured till your demise.
The heart acts by circulating blood to the rest of the body organs, thus allowing oxygen and nutrients to be well distributed. It performs these functions without a hitch because it has muscles that aid, as well as blood vessels that assist in blood transportation in and out of the heart.
It is actually one of the most important parts that support your life, alongside the lungs. It is situated on the left side of your chest.
The lungs are a pair of organs that cater for the transfer of oxygen from the atmosphere through the nose and respiratory tract, to the blood stream. While at it, it also releases the carbon dioxide from the blood stream to the atmosphere. The lungs are near your backbone, and one either side of your heart.
Therefore, the heart and lungs can hardly do without each other based on their functions. The lungs act as the link between the oxygen in the atmosphere and the blood stream. As soon as the oxygen reaches this blood stream, it goes to the heart, whose purpose is to distribute it through the blood cells to the rest of the body.
While conducting this distribution, it collects the deoxygenated blood cells and pumps them to the lungs to release the carbon dioxide and further collect oxygen. This cycle happens every moment you breathe in and out, throughout your life time.
Therefore, the lungs, heart and blood vessels or arteries need to stay healthy so that your body can stay in good shape as well. This means that your heart rate should stay normal, which is between sixty to one hundred beats per minute, not unless you are an athlete.
Maintaining this health involves several activities, including avoiding the consumption of harmful substances that can tamper with the lungs, heart and blood arteries functionality.
Chest Pain
Chest pains occur due to multiple issues including digestive, respiratory and musculoskeletal complications. This pain is known to trigger cardiac problems too. However, you should never conclude that any sort of chest pain is heart associated. Instead seek medical attention immediately because it should also not be taken lightly.
Depending on the pain cause, you are bound to experience chest pain symptoms that vary. If the chest pain is due to cardiac issues, you will have sudden pressure feelings in your chest. It can also come as crushing pain in the arms, neck and back.
On the other hand, if non-cardiac issues cause this pain, the symptoms will include burning feelings in the digestive tract. Additionally, it may appear in form of pain due to deep breaths.
Many at times, chest pain comes as a myocardial infarction symptom, meaning heart attack. If you are experiencing a heart attack, you will feel some discomfort in the chest, as if a heavy weight has been placed on your body.
You will further have shortness of breath and experience sweating, irregular heart beat and lightheadedness. A heart attack can cause a great damage within the first six hours. Therefore, medical attention is required as fast as possible.
Why Meth Causes Chest Pain
The use of meth causes so many problems, especially to the heart, which explains the onset of chest pains. The more you consume the drug, the more damage you cause. You may be lucky the first time you use meth, but don’t underestimate its power, since the chest pains can even begin the fourth time you consume it. Meth does not wait for weeks or months to reveals its claws.
According to come researchers, using meth causes it to create a chemical reaction of amphetamines and sugar, thus changing the proteins. This also creates antibody responses and inflammation, which proceed to cause damage to the blood vessels and the heart.
These researchers conclude that this reaction explains the tolerance that meth abusers develop towards the drug, causing them to consume more quantities to experience the drug pleasurable effects. Note that the antibody response removes amphetamine from your cells, which makes you take high doses of meth.
The damage done on the blood vessels begins with deposition of compounds known as advanced glycation endproducts in the arteries’ walls. Due to this occurrence, inflammation takes place, which has the potential to cause serious arteries’ damage.
Due to vessel constriction whereby there is no enough blood flowing to the heart, the heart basically reacts through increased heart rate and blood pressure to try and push as much blood as possible through the inflamed vessels.
This increased heart rate means that meth speed up the working of your heart, which is not normal. As your heart continues to strain day in day out, you may end up experiencing palpitations. What’s more, your heart will begin to weaken and also enlarge.
Enlargement of the heart is never good news. It further causes less blood flow to and from the heart, to other body organs. Due to this occurrence, there are very high chances of getting a stroke. That is not all. The abnormal functioning of the heart leads to arrhythmia, meaning irregular heartbeat.
The symptoms that you will experience upon getting an irregular heartbeat include slow heartbeat and shortness of breath. If not slow, the heartbeat can also flutter or run too fast. Irregular heartbeat affects organs because they lack sufficient blood flow and hence can fail at any moment.
Generally, all these factors will cause you to experience cardiovascular problems. They may begin with the inflammation of the heart lining and muscle. If you continue consuming meth, other problems will arise like heart failure, heart attack and stroke.
The one common indicator of any of these problems is sharp chest pains that are accompanied by heavy pressure on the heart. And even if you do not experience any of these heart problems to at least give you a warning, you can still die due to sudden cardiac death.
Overdose
Drug abusers always have a weakness of overdosing as they seek to acquire the high feelings that keep reducing as tolerance increases. Therefore, you are prone to doing the same with meth, which further risks your health and survival.
The first indications of overdosing are chest pains, meaning that your heart beat is racing and other issues are coming like heart attacks, as mentioned above. You will also have breathing problems, severe headaches, confusion, clumsiness and agitation.
Eventually, you may fall into unconsciousness that is accompanied by uncontrolled fits. If medical assistance does not arrive on time, you could suffer a heart attack or stroke and death may be unpreventable.
Mixing
Some of meth consumers are naughty enough to mix the drug with others substances like alcohol. This further causes more strain to the heart and further drives it towards shutting down. What’s more, an overdose from mixing drugs can cause death very fast, especially if you have previously survived strokes and heart attacks.
Meth Dependency
The meth dependency creeps in quite slowly and you will not notice until when matters start getting out of hand, where you cannot do much without the drug. At this point, you better seek medical attention because there is likelihood that your organs, especially the heart and lungs are severely damaged.
If a near death experience happens or if chest pains occur at any single moment and you are addicted to meth, accept that it is time to call it quits because these are just warnings that the worst could come.
In conclusion, meth and chest pains are closely related due to the heart and lungs. You do not have to damage the two organs that you cannot survive without if you wish to live happily. Escape the drug choice and choose to live well.