Heroin Use and Abuse essays

Heroin Use and Abuse essays Darren Aronofsky's film Requiem for a Dream follows the lives of 4 people, lost and isolated in their own worlds into the descending spiral of drug addiction. At first, their desire for the drug is a based on a desire to escape from the doldrums of everyday life. An elderly widow uses prescription pain killers in order to clam her nerves, but soon the psychokinetic effects are the focus of her desire, and she slips into a fantasy dream world. A pair of young lovers and their friend starts the journey seeking a bit of fun, which turns into a desire for power, and then an addiction to the ability to escape the devolving conditions of their lives into the drug induced dream. Unlike feel good endings of most of today's modern films, individual vignettes conclude the film, showing each of the four lived helplessly shipwrecked, somewhere in between reality and The effects of powerful drugs such as heroin, or cocaine on the lives of their users lead to self destruction. The powerful chemical interaction between the drugs and the normal neurological activity in the brain render the user unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The result of long term use is the tragic loss of an individual. In 1863 a German merchant named Friedrich Bayer (1825-76) set up a factory in Elberfeld to exploit new chemical procedures for making dyes from coal tar. German coal-tar dye manufacture expanded rapidly, but when price conventions and raw material availability deteriorated, the Bayer Company invested in scientific research to diversify its product range. In 1888, a new substance synthesized by Bayer chemists became the company's Synthetic medicines were something new. In the early years of the nineteenth century, medicines had been prepared using crude natural materials like opium, the dried milky substance derived from poppy seeds. A young German pharmacist called ...

pKa Definition in Chemistry

pKa Definition in Chemistry If youre working with acids and bases, two familiar values are pH and pKa. Here is the definition of pKa and a look at how it relates to acid strength. pKa Definition pKa is the negative base-10 logarithm of the acid dissociation constant (Ka) of a solution.pKa -log10KaThe lower the pKa value, the stronger the acid. For example, the pKa of acetic acid is 4.8, while the pKa of lactic acid is 3.8. Using the pKa values, one can see lactic acid is a stronger acid than acetic acid. The reason pKa is used is because it describes acid dissociation using small decimal numbers. The same type of information may be obtained from Ka values, but they are typically extremely small numbers given in scientific notation that are hard for most people to understand. Key Takeaways: pKa Definition The pKa value is one method used to indicate the strength of an acid.pKa is the negative log of the acid dissociation constant or Ka value.A lower pKa value indicates a stronger acid. That is, the lower value indicates the acid more fully dissociates in water. pKa and Buffer Capacity In addition to using pKa to gauge the strength of an acid, it may be used to select buffers. This is possible because of the relationship between pKa and pH: pH pKa log10([A-]/[AH]) Where the square brackets are used to indicate the concentrations of the acid and its conjugate base. The equation may be rewritten as: Ka/[H] [A-]/[AH] This shows that pKa and pH are equal when half of the acid has dissociated. The buffering capacity of a species or its ability to maintain pH of a solution is highest when the pKa and pH values are close. So, when selecting a buffer, the best choice is the one that has a pKa value close to the target pH of the chemical solution.