We feed like mindless parasites on the irresistible pleasure addiction provides us.  We attach ourselves to obsessive behaviors and chemicals ripe with enjoyment and ask nothing in return.  At least, nothing is asked of us at first; the bad things happen later.  Our brains grow fat but remain unsatisfied even after feasting too long at a toxic but intoxicating meal.  No one can forget the first time their brain responded ecstatically to a potentially addictive chemical or behavior.  The flavors, smells, sounds, mental images and body sensations of a neurologically intense dopamine fugue are impossible to resist.

Davey’s Suffering – We usually become addicted when we are old enough to distinguish between a reasonable risk and a foolish one. The case of a little boy named Davey was different. His addictive process began when he was only four years old.  He wasn’t even in kindergarten yet, and he was already starting down the road to chemical obsession through a nasty twist of karma from his environment.

Davey’s family lived in a smoggy part of Los Angeles in the early 1950s. He developed acute bronchial asthma, because his young lungs were especially sensitive to airborne toxins.  His bronchial tubes would constrict until he actually started to asphyxiate. This happened without warning and grew worse in the dead heat of the LA summer. Over-the-counter remedies provided no relief, and with dread in their hearts one day, his parents sent him off in a 911 ambulance for adrenaline treatment at the Pasadena Huntington Hospital at the insistence of the family physician.

When he woke up under an oxygen tent for the first time after receiving a strong injection of adrenaline, he recalled a frightening dream about being cocooned in a giant spider’s web.  This hospitalization nightmare repeated itself too often as he approached his fifth birthday.  Eventually, the family doctor recommended Tedral, a promising new bronchial dilator drug. His parents agreed without hesitation.  They would do anything to save Davey from his intense suffering.

What they did not know and what did not seem to concern the doctor was that Tedral was an ephedrine-based phenobarbital drug. It acted as a central nervous system depressant, just like alcohol, but also had sedative-hypnotic and hallucination-inducing properties. By the age of five, Davey was in for a trip that made anything at Disneyland look like a cheap pony ride.

Davey’s Delight – In 1951 Davey was too young to understand medicine, but he worshipped his parents and they worshipped the doctor who prescribed the medicine.

So, Davey ended up loving and worshipping Tedral.  Every time he took it, the medicine overwhelmed his immature nervous system with a powerful tsunami of phenobarbital intoxication.

No matter how severe an asthma attack was, Tedral brought almost-instant symptom relief. Davey became ecstatic every time he took the drug, because he could breathe deep, long breaths. that used to seem impossible. Tedral completely erased his fear of asthma, but it stimulated and intoxicated him at the same time.

His brain’s hypothalamus gland started shooting out more of the pleasure hormone dopamine than it was ever designed to secrete. He would lie in bed for five hours at a time, half-drunk with a central nervous system sedated by a powerful drug his body was too young to metabolize. He especially liked to lay back with the warm summer breeze blowing in the window at night and listen to the faint sound of LA Dodger baseball games being played down the hill at Chavez Ravine.

When the hallucinations started, he though he was flying, hovering over the baseball diamond like a giant butterfly, watching tiny players in the game below.  Other times he imagined he was an outfielder with 30-foot legs who could leap into the sky and catch balls from sailing over the fence. For a little boy who grew up on Saturday morning cartoons, none of this seemed too odd.  Davey was just grateful he could breathe, and being a kindergarten stoner in the process didn’t bother him a bit.  Tedral was his breath of life, not to mention his first drug of choice.

Cravings – Within a few months he started craving the intoxicating effects of Tedral, even when he had no asthmatic symptoms. His mother usually gave it to him out of love, but when she didn’t, Davey would fake an attack so she would be sure to administer another dose.

Now the story gets worse. At night when his parents were asleep, Davey began to sneak into the bathroom, climb up onto the counter and take a pill. When the pharmaceutical company converted Tedral from pills to syrup, he quickly learned how to take nips out of the small jar and refill with enough water to hide his action.  This type of behavior is what we expect from adult addicts ashamed of their behavior, but not from a child. Addiction is obviously no respecter of age.

Tedral became a Drug Enforcement Agency Class IV drug in the late 1980s and was taken off the market entirely in 1993, one year after Davey was age 45, his first year of continuous sobriety. What starts innocently with drugs can lead to years of trouble with usually take a long time to heal.

If you have stories of people who were exposed to addiction to chemicals of other behaviors at an early age, please comment below. Thank you![/text_output]

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