------Program code: NS-080723-02976 (what's this?)
Source: CCTV.com
07-23-2008 10:48
When mentioning drugs, people will immediately think of opium, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, etc. These drugs are mostly extracted from natural plants such as the poppy and the cannabis plant. They are called traditional drugs.
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With the advance of science and technology, some drugs have been created in laboratories, such as methamphetamine, ecstasy and ketamine. Because these new types of drugs don’t have the same addictive properties of traditional drugs, they were once considered safe drugs. In fact, they are very dangerous.
In Fujian Province, due to hallucinations after taking excessive methamphetamine, a businessman once jumped from the top of a hotel and died. Another person named Chen Wang gunned down 18 people and then drove a car into a crowd, killing another 5 other people, including a pregnant woman. This case was infamous not only in Fujian Province but even nationwide.
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Because traditional drugs have strong addictive properties, crimes stemming from them are usually done in order to obtain money to buy the drugs. New types of drugs don’t have obvious addictive properties, but they can directly act on the user’s central nervous system, causing excitement, hallucinations and depression and leading to violence, sex abuse and even suicide.
According to their effects on the human body, drugs can be basically divided into stimulants, hallucinogens and inhibitors. Methamphetamines are a type of central nerve stimulant. It's a type of white crystal, that looks like ice, but has strong toxicity, so it’s called crystal meth.
Crystal meth originated in Japan in 1919, when Japanese scientists synthesized methamphetamine. It was able to excite the central nervous system and eliminate sleepiness and tiredness.
During World War II, Japan produced a large quantity of methamphetamine pills and used it on military personnel and workers.
After World War II, methamphetamine addiction became a serious problem in Japan and the problem gradually spread to South Korea and Taiwan. In the 1990s, it began to enter the Chinese mainland and gradually became a popular new type of drug among Chinese youngsters.
What will happen after several milliliters of crystal meth is injected into the human body? To learn this, let’s first learn a bit about the human body structure.
All activities of the human body are controlled by the central nervous system which is composed of the brain and the spinal cord. The brain consists of billions of neurons.
Neurons have different sizes and shapes. But most of them consist of 3 important parts: the cell body, the dendrite and the axon.
The short dendrite is used to receive messages from other neurons and transfer the messages to the cell body. The long axon has only one root and transfers the cell body's messages to other neurons' dendrites. The brain relies on the signal transfer between neurons to function.
For example, when a person's finger is burnt, the nerve endings will pass a signal to the brain's sensory area and create a feeling of pain. Meanwhile, the brain's motor zone will send signals through the spinal cord to the finger to move away from the fire.
The neurons rely on weak electric signals to transfer messages. Although the axons and dendrites of two neighboring neurons are very close, they don’t really come into contact with each other.
