Joy Kong, MDRegenerative Medicine Physician, Educator, and Entrepreneur

Every Drug Is a Credit Card

10 May 2026 · 1 min

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In this short talk, Dr. Joy Kong explains that all synthetic drugs—including benzodiazepines, opiates, stimulants, and even alcohol—function as “biochemical credit cards.” They are foreign molecules that temporarily override the nervous system, borrowing from the brain’s future feel‑good chemistry to produce immediate effects. This borrowing creates a debt that, with repeated use, leads to tolerance, habituation, dependence, and withdrawal. She notes that when drugs are used intermittently for legitimate medical reasons (e.g., seizure control) and allow the body to recover, the trade‑off is less severe, but the underlying principle remains the same.

Chapters

All synthetic drugs, all drugs, and I would include alcohol in that, so pharmaceutical drugs like, say, like benzodiazepines, like an anti-anxiety drug like a Xanax, or opiates, or focusing drugs like Adderall, they all work on a basic principle. They're all foreign synthetic molecules, or alcohol's a toxic byproduct that acts in the same way, that basically override the nervous system. And so what they're acting as is basically, I call them biochemical credit cards. They borrow from tomorrow's feel-good chemistry to pay for today. So it's just, it's a basic principle of understanding that that's what you're doing whenever you're doing that. If you need a drug, you know, to stop a seizure, for a medical condition, all that kind of stuff, and if you do it intermittently and let the body recover and stuff, then there's a trade-off there. But just knowing that that is what's happening. But it leads a lot of people to believe, and so the problem with like a credit card is the more that you spend, the more in debt you get with your body's own chemistry, which is what leads to tolerance, habituation, you know, dependency, and eventually withdrawal.