Rom J Leg Med [18] 231 – 236 [2010] DOI: 10.4323/rjlm.2010.231 © 2010 Romanian Society of Legal Medicine ________________________ 1*) Corresponding author; Associate Professor, Department of Public Health of Bucharest, Anatomy Department - U.M.F.Carol Davila, Bucharest, E-mail: popescu3dan@yahoo.com, 2) Anatomy Department - U.M.F.Carol Davila, Bucharest , 3) Neuropsychiatry Department - Serban Voda Policlinic – Bucharest, 4) Forensic Psychiatry Department, National Institute of Legal Medicine “Mina Minovici”, Sos. Vitan Birzesti 9, Sector 4, Bucharest 042122. 231 Drugs effects on the central nervous system. Forensic implications Daniel Popescu 1,2* , Gabriela Popescu 2 , George Lupu 2 , Victor Panus 2 , Sebastian Neagu-Sadoveanu 3 , Octavian Buda 4 ____________________________________________________________________________ Abstract: Addiction is a wide spread term used in our days. Some of the habits due to routine conditioning are called dependences, i.e.: eating shopping etc. These are fundamentally different of those due to chronic alcohol intake, drugs medicines (chemicals), with euphoric effect. For this reason some physicians prefer the term of addiction to drug. Unlike the benign addiction, by conditioning, drugs addiction initiates very fast (after 1 or 2 intakes), had a big resistance at treatment and show the phenomena of sever disturbance in withdrawal. In this paper we refer mainly at this kind of dependency. Nervous disturbances that are produced during drugs and even alcohol intakes refer to psychical affective and cognitive processes. The prevailing factor of these processes is the hedonist one. Key words: Addiction, Neural mechanisms, Forensic evaluation sychic processes are due to activities of complex organized nervous structures in information processing systems. They are in a complex process of relations that form in the end the personality of human been. We try to analyze drugs effects on different nervous structures. Affective moods are due to some nervous structures that make up the so called Limbic system. It is formed by different nervous units whose concentrated connections are positioned at hypothalamus level that forms the core of the vegetative-endocrine-somatic relation. Cortical contributions of these structures are in the pre-frontal zones, gurus Cingular, and some temporal zones, forming the final stage of psychic processes of emotions. In addition to these are the cognitive contributions resulting from the activities of the other cerebral areas. Very important for cerebral activities are connections with structures placed in the so called reticulate matter at brainstem level [1, 2, 3]. Some structures at this level have very important functional relations for the whole cortical- sub cortical activities. They are represented by nuclei origin groups of substances with neural- transmitters (NT) role (that work as real pace-makers for structures they are connected with). The P