in fact, drugs, lest she suspect I was popping tangerine colored pills
between social studies and spelling. I was raised to be terrified of
drugs, and so my well-learned terror overrode any curiosity that
may have bubbled up. This is quite different from my friend in
elementary school, who seemed weaned on beer and Ja ̈germeister
before he was allowed to cross the street without adult supervision.
Where my family and I saw substance use as highly risky, my
friend’s more relaxed attitude was probably influenced by having
sensation-seekers among his family and other friends. To these
sensation-seekers, everything, including substance use, seemed
less risky than it did to me. This doesn’t mean that my friend
grew up in a culture that encouraged drug use. Instead, the barrier
between curiosity and use for him may have simply been a bit
thinner.FROM CURIOSITY TO PLEASURE
Getting past the curiosity leads to trying the drug and the next
motivational phase: pleasure. The effects of many psychoactive
drugs on the neurotransmitter dopamine make using these drugs
feel good. Dopamine, as you may remember fromChapter 2,is
a neurotransmitter or chemical messenger involved in experiences
of pleasure. It’s dopamine that’s involved in your reward center,
reinforcing natural things such as laughter, sex, and grooming
behavior like combing your hair and even picking your nose.
When dopamine is released, you feel good.
While the natural release of dopamine induces good feel-
ings, substances such as methamphetamine interact with dopa-
mine to produce pleasurable feelings in a very different way.
Because methamphetamine resembles dopamine in the body, it is
easily absorbed by neurons. Methamphetamine molecules slip into
the neurons and displace the naturally occurring dopamine. The
dopamine receptors become overstimulated when the displaced
dopamine becomes trapped in the synapse, causing the neuron to
bind to the dopamine again and again. This overstimulation creates
a sense of pleasure.
Pleasure is reinforcing to all of us. However, it may even be
more impactful on people with high sensation-seeking personal-
ities. As you know from previous chapters, HSSs tend to release
more dopamine in high sensation experiences. So it may be that
drug use is even more pleasurable for them than it is for average or
low sensation-seekers.147 / The Dark Side of High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:20:10, subject to the Cambridge