Magnesium in Drug Abuse and Addiction (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Magnesium in Drug Abuse and Addiction (2011)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

28 pointsSpod_Gaju6 comments

As someone who has been a pain patient for a decade and a half, and as someone who has been supplementing with magnesium off and on for even longer... If you're a pain patient you should definitely investigate this, and probably just supplement and see how it goes. I certainly feel better about my relationship with opioids when I'm consistent about my magnesium.

Magnesium will increase ATP. And ATP is the energy that is needed to sensitize G protein coupled receptors. One of those G protein coupled receptors is the opioid receptor.

So what magnesium is doing is making your opioid receptors more sensitive to your natural opioids.

I think severe withdrawals are associated with Magnesium deficiency. This research has been going on for decades as there isn't a dose response curve for how severe a narcotic withdrawal will be based on dosing alone.

Such a commonly available intervention, I'm a bit skeptical that this works.

In my own first-person experience, magnesium supplementation has had no discernable effect on Cocaine Use Disorder.

N-acetylcysteine (NAC), on the other hand, has had a minor but noticeable ability to mitigate cravings.[1]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28213190/

I am sure magnesium is in no way universal cure. But interestingly cysteine is used to reduce ATP so you might have the same condition I have, which is instead of low ATP, high ATP.

High ATP could end up, creating a lot of oxidative stress in the mitochondria and end up inhibiting ATP as well. And the cystine can reduce oxidative stress inside the mitochondria to repair it.

https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/P48506/entry

Some people use magnesium citrate for GI motility and reduce calcium oxalate kidney stone formation. In higher doses, it's used as a pre-surgical laxative.

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