The Most Addictive Drugs Ranked & Other Insane Substance Stories

Kind: captions Language: en A man staggers down the garbage laden street. Men and women clothed in rags lie on the sidewalk as he pushes forward through a sea of semi-conscious drug addicts standing stooped, arms down by their sides like zombies. The man stops and talks to a friend. His legs are covered in infected pestules. To his side, a woman lies unconscious, looking all but dead. Blood running down her bandaged left leg where a flesh-eating condition has caused a gaping hole. This is addiction at its very worst and it is the epitome of 21st century drugreated civil disorder. The scene is just a regular day in the American heart of urban squalor. A site unimaginable when the US kicked off its war on drugs decades ago. Today we'll cover all of the most addictive drugs, including the terrifying ones that have led to the description you just heard. We'll try to get our heads around what has happened with drugs in the USA, the most addicted country on the planet, which as you'll see is home to some disturbing statistics along with those ultra dystopian city streets. Coming in at number five is alcohol, also known as booze, brew, juice, hooch, sauce, fire, water, and liquid courage, which can get you drunk, wasted, wrecked, smashed, trashed, hammered, plastered, battered, blasted, sloshed, trolleyed, and our favorite of the British expressions, absolutely wankered. Booze is, of course, legal, but it's still a drug, and an extremely addictive one at that. Alcohol addicts are everywhere you look. According to studies, 50 to 60% of Americans aged 21 to 64 are regular consumers. 31 12% of American people aged 18 to 21 are drinkers. As are 14 1.5% of people aed 16 and 17. 4.7% of 14 and 15 year olds. And shockingly, even 1.6% 6% of 12 and 13 year olds, 29 1.5 million or 10.5% of all Americans aed 12 and older qualify for what's called alcohol use disorder. 17.3 million of them males and 12.3 million female. That is a lot of addiction. The National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism wrote that each year there are around 178,000 booze related deaths in the US, about 120,000 male deaths and 59,000 female deaths. Around the world, over 3 million people a year die because of alcohol abuse, or about 5.3% of all global deaths. In people aged 20 to 39 years, close to 13 1.5% of total deaths in the world are attributable to alcohol. Alcohol is deadly, but in small amounts, it gives you a nice dopamine hit, causing relaxation and reducing social inhibition. Hence the term Dutch courage, relating to Dutch soldiers drinking before going into battle. The calming effect is down to something called gamma aminobuteric acid or GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter that blocks specific signals to your central nervous system. In layman's terms, it helps you chill out, lessening anxiety, stress, and fear. It's always good to be calmed down. But booze does a lot more than that in the brain. And the results aren't always positive. It literally makes you stupid, and stupid people do stupid things, as can be seen in just about any city in the world on a Saturday night. Alcohol affects a part of the brain called the cerebellum, which is vital for motor skills. Hence why drinking makes walking or driving difficult, especially if you've had a lot. That rush of dopamine also affects the brain's prefrontal cortex, our so-called executive suite associated with self-control, decision-making, and restraint. Have you ever woken up after a crazy night out and discovered you spent all your rent money? That's a result of your prefrontal cortex not working as it should. But it also leads to a 40% to 360% increase in dopamine activity, which also means that people use it to self-medicate, making it especially addictive to people with issues like PTSD, anxiety, or depression. In fact, 22% of people who drink in the world will develop a dependence. And for many of them, it's a way to deal with the psychological issues. Even so, the vast majority of people in the world can't control their drinking. It's an ongoing debate if there is a safe limit as to how much you can drink. But people for the most part will drink with friends, have a glass of wine at home, watch sports with a couple of beers, drink some champagne at weddings, and it won't kill them or lead to an arrest. But for those who do become addicted and try to quit, they quickly find the most insidious aspect of alcohol addiction, the withdrawal symptoms. And these can be severe, arguably the very worst of all drug withdrawal symptoms. Putting all that alcohol inside you has affected how your central nervous system works. And because it has a depressant effect on your body, the body tries hard to keep you awake or alert while on booze. When you suddenly quit drinking, the body is still in this ramped up mode. So, you can feel very wired and you start to shake and feel severe anxiety. And these are the mild symptoms. Those in the grips of severe symptoms can start to hallucinate, possibly talking to people who aren't even there or brushing spiders off their body. This might happen within the first 2 days of stopping and the nightmare can get much worse. About 5% of people will have what are called delirium trimmans or DTS. After the initial anxiety, the person will become extremely agitated. In a medical setting, they may have to be strapped down so as to not hurt themselves or someone else. Their hallucinations can be so vivid that they barely see the people around them. Instead, they might be looking at snakes or some other frightening apparition. In the early 20th century, the condition would sometimes be called seeing pink elephants. This can be very frightening, not to mention dangerous. According to a 2022 research paper, the mortality rate for DTS is between 5 and 15% when the person gets treatment, but around 37% when they don't. Coming off alcohol dependency is serious business. Ironically, one of the drugs that doctors will give to people to counteract the dangerous symptoms of alcohol withdrawal is a drug that can cause similar withdrawal symptoms after long-term use, resulting in what sufferers have called a living nightmare. Welcome to benzo hell. Unlike alcohol, bzzoazipines or benzo are prescribed by doctors, although they're also sold on the streets. But as you'll soon see, the street versions, which are often times counterfeit, can be dangerously contaminated. For decades, society and much of the medical world seem to ignore or underestimate just how dangerous and terrifying benzo could be when they're stopped abruptly. And taking one of those so-called chill pills with brand names such as Xanax, Clonopin, Valium, or Adavan is often talked about in a light-hearted way in the movies or on TV. But chill pills in fact are not to be messed with. Like alcohol, they work on the GABA system. So indeed, they chill you out. But also like alcohol, your body gets used to being in chill mode. So when you stop and you have a dependence, your body keeps trying to make you switched on. You become tremendously wired, maybe not sleeping for days on end, unable to do anything except bewired and panic. You get rebound to anxiety for the anxiety you've been trying to prevent. You can become so worked up that it leads to seizures that could kill you. We visited a benzo withdrawal forum online and there are many, many reports of people having seizures and lots of people lose their minds to the point of a complete nervous breakdown. Many lose their partners, their jobs, their savings, everything. Benzo used to be handed out like candy by doctors who underestimated just how serious withdrawal could be. What's now referred to as benzoazipene withdrawal syndrome. Thankfully, today doctors will not usually prescribe benzo for weeks unless it's absolutely necessary. It's hard to say how long it takes to form a dependency, though everyone is different. It could be months or it could be just weeks of daily use. The pills themselves can be lifesavers for panickers or insomniacs. They're incredibly effective at calming a person down, but this leads to people taking them when not absolutely necessary. They might then become tolerant, so they increase the dose or their doctor does. We visited a lot of forums to research this video and reading what people say about benzo withdrawal is enough to turn anyone off from ever taking them. People talked about chemical brain damage that even years after stopping they said still made their lives difficult. Others discussed their paralyzing anxiety during withdrawal or feeling like bugs crawling on their skin, the night terrors, their tremors, their inability to barely speak, having body spasms, hallucinations, psychosis, mania, paranoia. derealization, depression, intractable insomnia, and for one person, what he described as an incredible Hulk rage. Another person, a self-confessed lifelong recreational drug taker, called benzo the most dangerous drug I've ever taken. According to the US National Institutes of Health, 30.6 million American adults, or 12.6% of the population, use bzzoazipines. 25.3 million or 10.4% take them as prescribed by their physician. and 5.3 million or 2.2% misuse them. And the highest incident of misuse falls into the 18 to 25 years of age category. In Scotland, according to the BBC, there was so much misuse that it was dubbed a Valium crisis. In 2019, the BBC published a story with the headline, "Sreal blamed for unprecedented spike in drug deaths." The so-called street blues were selling for pennies since traffickers were producing so many. Some of them were coming from China, something we'll get to later. In 2023, an Australian newspaper wrote the headline, "Common anti-anxiety meds turning Australians into accidental addicts." Usage in Australia over the last 20 years has shot up with 1.4 million Australians being prescribed 5.1 million scripts of these chill pills from 2020 to 2021. The same article said that since these are prescribed by the doctor, people don't see themselves as becoming drug addicts and that the proportion of accidental overdose deaths due to benzoazipines has doubled in the past 20 years, up 32.5% in 2021. As with another kind of drug we'll talk about, some of the blame for the benzo crisis lies with doctors and pharmaceutical companies who might endorse the use of benzo when it's not always medically necessary. The benzoazipene market was worth $2.35 billion US in 2022 and is expected to reach $3.1 billion by 2032. These pills can be a lifesaver, but they can also be a lif ruiner. And behind both are people profiting who don't care either way. This puts benzo high on the most addictive drugs in the world. And the next drug, while not as dangerous in terms of withdrawal symptoms, is even harder to kick. Like alcohol, nicotine is legal. And smokers consume about 5 trillion cigarettes a year, costing about $2 trillion in economic damage, but making a whole lot of people very, very wealthy. In 2024, the global tobacco market generated a revenue of almost a trillion dollars and is expected to increase by another 130.2 billion by 2029. That's why you won't be seeing an end to the tobacco business anytime soon. According to the WHO, there are around 1.3 billion smokers in the world with around 1.1 billion using cigarettes as their fix and the rest using various other kinds of tobacco products. The legal age for which you can buy cigarettes or other tobacco products differs depending on the country. In the US, you have to be 21 after being raised from 18 in 2019. In the UK, it was 16 for many years, but that changed in 2007 when it went up to 18. Most of the world 18 is the magic number. Although there are about 50 million smokers on the planet who are 13 to 15, the CDC in the US said in 2023 nearly two of every 100 high school students, 1.9% reported that they had smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days. One out of 100 middle school students had given it a go at least once in the past month, too. The CDC added 15 of every 100 middle school students, 14.7% and nearly 28 of every 100 high school students, 27.9% said they had ever tried a tobacco product in their lifetime. The same report said 9 out of 10 US adults had tried smoking at least once in their life. Considering the dangers, this isn't good news. Still, things now are a lot different from how they were in the past. Some of you out there will remember a time when smoking was pervasive. You went to a restaurant, a bar, or a pub, and the place was full of people smoking cigarettes. People smoked at the office. On planes, you went to the smoking part that was divided from the non-smoking part by a curtain. Former cabin staff have said the smoke was sometimes so thick that they couldn't see enough to carry out the in-flight service. And it was even worse in the decades before that. In the 1930s, American Tobacco, the maker of Lucky Strikes, used doctors in their ad campaigns to sell their cigarettes. 20,679 physicians say lies are less irritating to the throat, said a doctor in one ad. And believe it or not, that was an improvement over times in the past. In 1890, an ad for Dr. Baddy's asthma cigarettes said their brand helped sufferers of asthma, hay fever, head colds, diseases of the throat, and bronchial issues. That's like saying lard aids weight loss. The company did at least state that kids under six shouldn't smoke. After all, they might stick a lit one in their eye. In the 1930s, 50 to 60% of American men and 5 to 10% of women smoked. The number of male smokers was around the same in the 1940s, although around 20% of women smoked. Smoking had been viewed as somewhat unladylike at the start of the 20th century. But thanks in part to Edward Bernay, now known as the father of public relations and his marketing campaign to show strong women smoking, so-called torches of freedom, the number of female smokers, increased. Smoking had attached itself to the growing feminist movement. It was a similar story for men who were subliminally informed that smoking was a tough guy thing. Eric Lawson, one of the Marorrow men, died at the age of 72 from respiratory failure due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In 1965, about 52% of American men smoked and 34% of American women were smokers. But at the end of the 60s, the Mad Menstyle marketing campaigns were less effective with all the studies on smoking and cancer. And the decade ended with about 44% of men and 31% of women being smokers. Still, despite all the warnings, by 1987, around 29% of US adults smoked, 32% being men, 27% women. So close to equality. The numbers gradually decreased with bans on smoking and anti-smoking campaigns until we arrived at the adult smoking rate in the US of 14% of men and 11% of women at the start of the 2020s. People know it's bad, but it's still highly addictive, so they keep on doing it. It's estimated that every year around 8 million people die prematurely due to smoking. Researchers say it'll likely kill a billion people over the course of the 21st century. While smokers don't seem to be getting high, that doesn't mean it's not addictive, it actually increases dopamine levels in your brain's reward system by about 25 to 40%. If you've ever been to an airport and seen a smoking room, the toxic coughing human zoos that can be depressing enough to make smokers think twice about their so-called dirty habit, you'll see that people can't seem to go very long without a smoke. Prolonged nicotine use causes cravings. While you might not think you get high from lighting up, you do, which is why it's so hard to quit. According to the CDC, in 2015, a massive 68% of American smokers said they wanted to quit. In 2018, 55% said they tried, but only 7.5% said they were successful. Smoking is notoriously easy to start, but very hard to stop. So, is it addictive? Of course it is. People know there's a high chance of it ending their life early, not to mention causing a grocery list of possible health problems, including cancer, heart disease, lung disease, to name just a few. Yet, they still do it. Okay, now it's time to talk about the hard hitters. the drugs that can take over your life, chew you up, spit you out, and throw you into a street somewhere in the USA's heart of urban darkness. In the number two spot are the stimulants. We're going to focus more on cocaine than on amphetamines and methamphetamines. Though neurologically speaking, they both have similar actions, which is to create a dopamine and noradrenaline tsunami in your brain. They both speed up messages in your brain, affecting the sympathetic and central nervous systems, causing arousal, alertness, and giving you energy. It could also result in you talking for three non-stop hours about how much you loved your pet hamster when you were in middle school. It's thought there are around 22 million cocaine users around the world right now with as many as 1 and a half million regular users in the US. And experts say we're doing more coke than ever. In the UK, where groups of men and women are often seen bunched in toilet stalls together on a night out, there is coke in the sewage water. Scientists said in 2015 that London sewage had the highest cocaine concentrations in the whole of Europe. We kid you not, a marine biologist in Britain in 2024 said there is so much contamination in the sea around Britain that the crabs are on cocaine and the shrimp are on speed, which could affect their behavior and upset the natural ecological system. Traces of coke were even found in the houses of Parliament bathrooms just as various politicians were talking about getting tough on drugs. Coke is truly everywhere. The global report on cocaine 2023 said cocoa cultivation rose 35% from 2020 to 2021. Seizures of cocaine hit record levels at about 2,300 tons and it's believed only 20 to 25% of the coke that is shipped gets seized at some point. Most of it hits the streets where it could be cut with something and so grown in size but become weaker, sometimes to the point of it containing hardly any cocaine at all. Some British coke that was tested in a lab not too long ago had only a 10% purity. But Channel 5 News in 2019 reported that the purity of cocaine in Britain has risen from an average of 20% to 80% in just 10 years. Unlike methamphetamine, the drug that powered so many soldiers during World War II, cocaine has not been demonized as much, making it seem more acceptable in society. Meth is often viewed as kind of trashy, while Coke has throughout the decades been linked to Wall Street traders, Hollywood movie stars, high-powered sales executives, and people who can't wait to tell you about their screenplay. In short, snorting rails is not too taboo, which doesn't help where growing consumption rates are concerned. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said about 2.4% of Americans had done Coke from 2022 to 2023. What may come as a surprise to many of you is the same report said 2.5% of Spaniards had done cocaine that year as had 2.5% of Austrians, 2.7% of British people, and at the top was Australia at 4.2% of the population. The US used to be the king of coke, but things are changing. As you'll soon see, there's a perfectly rational explanation for this. It's believed that about 1/5if of cocaine users will develop a dependency at some point, which can get very, very expensive. In terms of it killing you outright in one sitting, chances are very low. Although a 2018 study of people having heart attacks under 50 showed that 6% had coke in their system. Correlation is not causation, but it can still count for something. A paper published by the National Institutes of Health explained cocaine users are at a seven-fold risk for mocardial inffection compared to non-users. The study found 6% of emergency room patients treated for chest pain had a cocaine induced myocardial inffection. Unlike powder coke, its freebased form crack seems to hav