Frequently, when people get the desire to try any drug, they are willing to achieve a sense of pleasure and relaxation. While a person injects drugs into the body, the brain system releases the neurotransmitter called dopamine. It helps drug consumers feel the desired effect of pleasure and reward and, consequently, motivates users to try the drug one more time for a similar outcome. At some point, scientists started to realize that the amount of drug consumption is directly proportional to the amount of dopamine released in the human body. According to Levinthal, the reduction of this release can help diminish a person’s desire to consume the drug. Hence, over the past years, researchers have found some ways to deal with the issue and reduce the number of drug-dependent users.
Over the years of examinations, researchers agreed upon the fact that one way to limit the dopamine release was to find medications, which could potentially cause the same effect as the dopamine would have. Another option was to invent substances that could block the dopamine release and, as a result, limit the level of satisfaction obtained by a drug. With time, these theories were developed and put into practice known as dopamine agonists and antagonists. With the help of these medications, drug abusers’ minds are not affected by dopamine, and hence, the body can try to naturally resist the drug injected into the organism. Speaking of substances’ efficiency, agonists such as buprenorphine are more effective in terms of fighting drug dependence than antagonists like naloxone. Thus, agonists and partial agonists are more widely used in order to combat drug misuse due to their high efficiency.