Why Do People Take Drugs?
Why do you think people take drugs? Do you know anyone with an addiction-prone personality? What does the medical literature indicate about addictive personalities?
I think people take drugs because there trying to escape or forget about something in their lives. And when they take drugs they don’t have to worry about anything that is bothering them. They also don’t have to face anything that is bothering them because there not ready or don’t wont to so they get high. Medical literature indicates they don’t completely understand addiction and perhaps never will, but the majority does agree that the recipes for addiction vary and can include an array of factors including psychological demons, social environment, lack of intellectual stimulation, learned behavior from family members, genetics, and depression. Parsing out the ingredients and determining what causes addiction versus what was caused by it is like trying to decide if the meat was tough before being cooked or if it was tough because it was cooked improperly. But scientists have come a long way in understanding the brain circuitry involved in addiction. The research has raised hopes for medications that will quash insatiable cravings, not simply quench them with another drug as methadone does for heroin. Much research points to effects of the neurotransmitter dopamine as a key to addiction. The brain chemical involved in motivation, pleasure, and learning, dopamine helps us feel alert and excited about life. For people who don’t derive satisfaction or find joy in everyday life, theorists say that flooding the brain with dopamine provides the “fix” that they don’t normally get. But the excess of dopamine eventually inhibits the function of other stimulating parts of the brain, increasing the need for the substance or activity to recreate the feeling. Environmental factors play a large role in dopamine processing. An experiment demonstrated that when monkeys were relegated to lower social status, they
I think people take drugs because there trying to escape or forget about something in their lives. And when they take drugs they don’t have to worry about anything that is bothering them. They also don’t have to face anything that is bothering them because there not ready or don’t wont to so they get high. Medical literature indicates they don’t completely understand addiction and perhaps never will, but the majority does agree that the recipes for addiction vary and can include an array of factors including psychological demons, social environment, lack of intellectual stimulation, learned behavior from family members, genetics, and depression. Parsing out the ingredients and determining what causes addiction versus what was caused by it is like trying to decide if the meat was tough before being cooked or if it was tough because it was cooked improperly. But scientists have come a long way in understanding the brain circuitry involved in addiction. The research has raised hopes for medications that will quash insatiable cravings, not simply quench them with another drug as methadone does for heroin. Much research points to effects of the neurotransmitter dopamine as a key to addiction. The brain chemical involved in motivation, pleasure, and learning, dopamine helps us feel alert and excited about life. For people who don’t derive satisfaction or find joy in everyday life, theorists say that flooding the brain with dopamine provides the “fix” that they don’t normally get. But the excess of dopamine eventually inhibits the function of other stimulating parts of the brain, increasing the need for the substance or activity to recreate the feeling. Environmental factors play a large role in dopamine processing. An experiment demonstrated that when monkeys were relegated to lower social status, they
References: NELSON, B. (1983, January 18). THE ADDICTIVE PERSONALITY: COMMON TRAITS ARE FOUND. Retrieved july 6, 2012, from new york times: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/18/science/the-addictive-personality-common-traits-are-found.html?pagewanted=all