False Facts About Drugs You Always Thought Were True

Ever since human beings crawled out of the primordial ooze, they have been searching for substances to alter their physical, mental, or emotional state; to perk them up, to relieve pain, to help them have a good time, or to ... well, to return their brains to the primordial ooze. People have used mind-altering substances for pretty much as long as there have been people – archaeologists have found evidence of psychotropic plants being used by early, pre-homosapien hominids. For that matter, it's easy to forget that it's only been within the last century that drug use has been not just lightly frowned upon but criminalized; your great-grandparents may have relieved pain with a nice, relaxing dose of heroin or enjoyed a cocaine-laden soft drink as a pick-me-up before those substances became illegal.

Before the advent of the internet, there were all kinds of weird notions about drugs that were difficult to disprove, some of which were apt to be taken at face value as fact by those who didn't know any better. You may have always believed some of these drug "facts" yourself, ingrained as they have become in our collective psyche — but that doesn't make them true.

You may have heard this one bandied about in admonition of your raver friends back in the day: The club drug MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy, can eat holes in your brain. Now, there may very well be users of MDMA who will tell you that this one feels right. It is, however, very not right. It's not that MDMA isn't potentially dangerous; there have even been studies suggesting that the drug can damage the brain's ability to produce serotonin, which is quite necessary for normal brain function. But the idea that it could eat literal holes in your brain is wildly unscientific — and in this case, it's pretty easy to pinpoint how the myth got started.

In 1999, as usage of the drug was increasing, Oprah Winfrey presented an image on her show, one which also popped up on MTV — a brain scan of a heavy Ecstasy user that appeared to show, you guessed it, holes that had formed in her brain. However, the "holes" were artifacts of the imaging process, showing areas of the brain with relatively low electrical activity. But like many incredibly dramatic yet blatantly misleading assertions about drug use, this falsehood became ... well, bored into the brains of the public, and the misconception persists even today.

Here's one that you may have heard one or two times after one or two too many: If you need to sober up, just brew a fresh, hot pot of coffee. All that awesome caffeine will counteract the effects of the alcohol, and soon you'll be as fresh as a daisy. Heck, you might even have found this to work once or twice — sort of. Having a strong cup or two certainly might have an effect on you if you're drunk, but that effect won't be sobering you up — it'll make you wide awake. And still drunk. 

You see, while stimulants like caffeine will make you more alert under most circumstances, one thing they rather obviously will not do is to slow your body's absorption of alcohol. A 2009 study in Behavioral Neuroscience confirmed this to be true, and the results are clear — being slightly more alert does nothing to mitigate the delayed reaction time and impaired cognitive function of being tipsy. In fact, the Center for Disease Control has suggested quite rightly that drinking caffeine while drunk amounts to mixing drugs, and that the increased level of alertness from the caffeine may give one a false sense of decreased drunkenness, which may encourage them to put themselves into potentially dangerous situations like, you know, driving. So if you want to sober up, skip the coffee and rely on the one thing that works: time.

Any cigarette smoker will tell you, usually between multiple puffs on a cigarette, that their habit helps to relieve their stress. It's pretty much a cliché; at times of great stress, smokers puff away, former smokers will relapse, and even those who have never smoked might pick up the habit, just for that sweet, soothing effect. Sure, they're terrible for you, but so is stress, right? Well, it may surprise you to learn that the stress-relieving properties of tobacco are all smoke and mirrors. Well, all smoke, at any rate. 

Now, to be sure, nicotine is a mood-altering drug that releases dopamine and endorphins, which can cause (very temporary) feelings of calm and relaxation. It is also a stimulant, and studies have shown that frequent use can have the opposite of a calming effect, actually exacerbating stress. In addition, as an addictive drug, smokers tend to feel stress when (wait for it) they're not smoking. Having a cigarette and satisfying the addiction will then obviously appear to have a calming, relaxing effect — but over time, as with most drugs, the amount needed to produce the same effect steadily increases, causing smokers to smoke more heavily, which creates a vicious cycle of withdrawal symptoms and mega-smoking. Combined with the overall negative effect on your health that smoking can have, it's safe to say that if you're looking for an effective stress reliever, cigarettes are not the way to go.

Here's another myth that has become absolutely drilled into our collective consciousness: that drinking alcohol will help warm you up if you're cold, perhaps even staving off oncoming frostbite. Heck, readers of a certain age will remember those cartoons with the Saint Bernard, toting some booze in the little wooden barrel, who rescues the frozen mountaineer by dumping a shot down his throat, rendering him instantly toasty, and also drunk. Well, get ready to have your mind blown: While it can certainly feel like you're warming up when drinking booze, that feeling is quite literally only on the surface.

It has long been known, and a 2005 study published in the journal Alcohol verified, that the feeling of increased warmth is due to alcohol opening up the blood vessels close to the surface of the skin, drawing more blood to that area and making you feel warmer. The problem is that the blood is being drawn from somewhere, and that somewhere is your body's core — and this results in an overall drop in body temperature. So, while the skin encasing your body becomes more toasty, the temperature of your actual insides decreases — which can be a recipe for disaster. So, if you're going to be having some recreational time out in the cold, maybe don't drink — and if you do, bundle the heck up.

The number of people dying every year from opioid overdoses has increased sixfold in the last quarter century, and this is thanks largely to the rise of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is about 50 times stronger than heroin and which street drugs can often be cut with. In 2017, then-DEA boss Chuck Rosenberg appeared in a video with a terrifying warning for cops: "Fentanyl is deadly," he said. (This is true.) "Exposure to an amount equivalent to a few grains of sand can kill you." (This is not.)

Just months later, the American College of Medical Toxicology issued a report completely contradicting this statement, but the damage had been done: Reports began coming in of cops keeling over on the job after just having thought about touching a small amount of powdered fentanyl, complete with dramatic bodycam footage of panicked officers flatly stating that their colleagues are overdosing after such an event. Put bluntly, this is impossible — fentanyl cannot be absorbed through the skin in any meaningful way, and these instances of cops straight-up passing out and suffering bizarre symptoms after coming into incidental contact with it are almost certainly ... well, pretty much panic attacks brought on by the fearmongering of the type found in Rosenberg's video. Speaking with NPR, former police chief and addiction researcher Brandon Del Pozo put it this way: "Imagine you do a job every day where you just think being near [a substance] could kill you," he said. "It's a real mental health problem for officers."