Dr. Richard Rawson, associate director of the University of California, Los Angeles’s Integrated Substance Abuse Program, reports that food seeking can increase brain dopamine levels in some key brain centers by 50 percent. Sexual arousal will do so by a factor of 100 percent, as will nicotine and alcohol. But none of these can compete with cocaine, which more than triples dopamine levels. Yet cocaine is a miser compared with crystal meth, or “speed,” whose dopamine-enhancing effect is an astounding 1,200 percent.10
