HOW METH AFFECTS YOUR BODY

All the components in Meth -- substances like Draino and car battery acid -- are devastating to your body. Meth causes increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, and can cause irreversible damage to blood vessels in the brain, which can cause strokes. Other effects of Meth include respiratory problems, irregular heartbeat, and extreme anorexia. Taking even small amounts of Meth affects your central nervous system (CNS). Meth can make it hard to fall asleep (insomnia), lead to feelings of confusion and cause tremors, convulsions, anxiety, paranoia, and aggression. Meth damages the brain cells that contain a natural feel-good chemical - a neurotransmitter called dopamine. This is what doctors call a "neurotoxic effect" that buys you a lifetime of hurt. Over time, Meth appears to reduce the amount of dopamine in your brain. This may take on symptoms of Parkinson's disease, a severe movement disorder that perhaps you have seen in grandparents or other elderly people with uncontrollable shaking. Meth also damages another neurotransmitter called serotonin. Serotonin carries information back and forth in your brain so your body knows to eat and rest and function normally. Meth can cause hyperthermia, a dangerous elevated body temperature, convulsions, and death.

HOW METH AFFECTS YOUR BRAIN

Meth is as bad for your mind as it is your body. Long-term Meth abuse results in damaging effects. Abusing Meth may also make you experience mental problems, including paranoia, auditory hallucinations, mood disturbances, and delusions (for example, the sensation of insects creeping on the skin). Over time, you may take higher doses of the drug, take it more frequently, or change the way you take it to get the same rush or high that small amounts of Meth once gave you. Sometimes, people stop eating and sleeping to shoot Meth for several days until they run out or are too confused to continue. This binging is called a "run," as in "run down," or "run out of luck." Such abuse can lead to crazy, unpredictable behavior like intense paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, and even out-of-control rages with extremely violent behavior. When a chronic user stops taking the drug, he or she may feel depressed, uncontrollably anxious, fatigued, paranoid, aggressive, and of course crave more Meth.