Here's what happens if you take the drug Bill Cosby said he obtained for sex
A brief history of quaaludes
Quaaludes, or methaqualone, were first produced in labs in India in 1955; the scientists who made the drug were trying to find a malaria cure. While it was ineffective against the disease, it appeared to work as a sedative. After it was patented in 1962, doctors in the UK began prescribing it to patients who had trouble sleeping; it started being widely used in the US in the '70s.
As early as the late 1960s, people at dance clubs were using quaaludes, known then as "disco biscuits." By the '80s, they were outlawed.
Quaaludes and the brain
Like other drugs, quaaludes affect our brain chemistry by altering the levels of neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers that pass along the signals that control our thinking and behavior.
Quaaludes are a sedative, which work in the brain by halting the functioning of our "excitatory" messengers, the ones that typically increase our energy levels, and boosting the activity of our "inhibitory" messengers, those that usually work to calm things down.
Jordan Belfort, the real-life person on which the film "The Wolf of Wall Street" was based, described his experience with the drug in his autobiography:
The key important inhibitory messenger that quaaludes act on is GABA, short for gamma-aminobutyric acid.
This action is why quaaludes make us drowsy and slow down our heart rate and breathing. It's also one of the reasons they're so dangerous - a quaalude overdose can result in coma or even death.