The Chemistry Of Addiction Analysis

Cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, alcohol, opium, tobacco, hypnotics, just to name a few. Addiction is a chronic disease that affects the chemicals in the brain. It dysfunctions the circuits in the brain that deal with memory, reward, sex, motivation, behavior, relationships and emotions all mostly resulting in substance use or other behaviors to fulfill those circuit rewards. This world is in a current addiction epidemic on drugs. Let’s try to understand addiction to make it a little clearer.

Brain chemistry can affect different addicts more then others. Drugs and alcohol are more of the main addictions that brain chemistry affects. Once taking these addictive substances your internal natural drug dopamine is lowers causing you to seek more external addictive substances. This causes craving and makes it a lot harder for the addict to stop. In Olds and Milner’s later experiments, they allowed the rats to press a particular lever to arouse themselves, to the effect that they would press it as much as seven-hundred times per hour. This region soon came to be known as the "pleasure center". Using drugs and alcohol stimulates the pleasure center in the brain that makes your brain think, “feels good- want more“. This can make it increasingly harder for an addict to stop using, until they hit a point called “rock bottom”. This is where choice comes back into play.

Addiction causes changes in the chemical makeup of the brain itself. Once the chemicals from the substance are introduced past the blood brain barrier the chemical reactions are changed. The neurons and neurotransmitters function a differently. Survival instincts that are the responsibility of the deeper recesses of the brain are changed. Cancer cells are changed by chemicals or radiation so too are

To understand addiction further, it is important to look at how drugs have neurological effects in a human body. Drugs can be ingested in various ways; while some are taken orally, some are smoked (cannabis) while others are injected directly into the blood stream (Heroin). Once in the body, they mainly affect the reward pathway in the brain, known as the dopaminergic pathway, which in turn gives pleasure. Even though all drugs affect the reward and motivation pathways in the brain, their speed depends on the way the drug has been consumed. Over constant use of drugs, the cognitive functions are impaired as the effects become more prominent in learning, memory

Americans today tend to not realize we’re slowly being separated from each other. Whether it be electronics keeping us away from the family at night or just social media that keeps us from going outside and actually socializing. It has become a serious problem and it happens more and more as we continue to advance in technology. Not to mention it's forming another problem in the way we’ve shaped our societies so that it's extremely easy to be cut off from human connections without even realizing it. Johann Hari, The author of “The Likely Cause of Addiction” pulled my attention towards realizing that this addiction is a fast paced growing problem. Hari Specifically states,"We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before." He’s basically stating that it’s become way too easy to be disconnected from our society and its gotten worse over time. Honestly I agree with how he thinks, we don’t realize it but we’re all being slowly cut off from our society. Whether we like it or not we’ve created our society to be the way it is, and it caused us to be so easily disconnected from one another.

Technology has allowed us to gain greater insight into the effects that these substances have on the body, and the research largely affected the ways in which I thought about addiction. The largest influencer on my opinions on addiction were the arguments originating in the research on neurobiology, with my interest focusing largely on neurotransmitters and processes such as the down-regulation of receptor sites in response to the overproduction or inhibited reuptake of certain neurotransmitters (Inaba & Cohen, 2011). To me it would make sense that these actions would encourage the user to continue using whatever substance caused the changes to happen in the first place. In their article arguing for medication-assisted therapy for inmates in the criminal justice system, Bruce and Schleifer (2008) summarized my ideas surrounding addiction: “In essence, the overwhelming physical and psychological reward that comes from heroin derails a neurobiological system designed to preserve the individual” (p. 18). Rather than being limited just to heroin, this was my opinion on all addicting psychoactive

Across all addictions, there is a central theory as to how such an addiction can occur. The common mechanism of all addictive substances is the activation of the brain’s “reward system”, made up of dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain and their extensions to the limbic system (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3272277/). This system is normally used in advancing evolutionary fitness promoting activity, such as sex, food, or social interactions (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3272277/). In such normal natural behaviors, the reward system activity is relatively brief and weak. However, addictive substances abuse the system’s circuitry, causing

The continued response is the "high" or a feeling of euphoria created by the drug, since the brain learns to function in this pattern other normal behavioral patterns such as, planning tasks, memory, motivation and execution of tasks become overloaded (Volkow). This is when addiction happens in the brain. It is more than just liking the substance and what it does; it is now the psychological need to have it to maintain a new normal. When your brain is without a substance, it will send a message to the body that something is wrong. Withdrawal from a drug starts when there is a stop of using the drug. Withdrawal symptoms are different based on the type of drug used. Withdrawal patterns consist of sweating, tension, panic attacks, headaches, heart palpitations, disturbed sleep, nausea and much more (NIDA

Basic neurobiological research has improved our understanding of the biological and genetic causes of addiction. These findings have helped establish addiction as a biological brain disease that is chronic and relapsing in nature (Leshner, 1997). As the central nervous system is considered to be the communication pathway to the entire body with the brain being its control mechanism. The brain processes sensory information from throughout the body, guides muscle movement and locomotion, regulates a multitude of bodily functions, forms thoughts and feelings, modulates perception and moods, and essentially controls all behavior (Leshner, 1997). The body and brain then become defendant on this stimuli, as the body and brain adjust to the rewards of receiving this type of sensation. This is where the substance abuse and addiction problems

Drug addiction is a brain disease because drugs change the brain’s structure and how they work. Over a period of time drugs start to affect the brain by challenging an addicted person’s self-control and interfere with their ability to resist intense urges to take drugs. “Most drugs affect the brain's reward circuit by flooding it with the chemical messenger dopamine. This overstimulation of the reward circuit causes the intensely pleasurable "high" that leads people to take a drug again and again. Over time, the brain adjusts to the excess dopamine, which reduces the high that the person feels compared to the high they felt when first taking the drug—an effect known as tolerance. They might take more of the drug, trying to achieve the same dopamine high.”, States National Institute on Drug Abuse. After long term use of drugs it affects functions such as learning, judgment, decision-making, stress, memory, and behavior. Even though an addict knows this, they still use

Addiction is defined as a chronic brain disease that is characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences. In my opinion, compulsive drug use is a hallmark of addiction, yet a mechanistic understanding of this process has been elusive. Drug use is initiated primarily to obtain the excitatory actions of addictive drugs on brain reward systems. The reward pathway evolved to promote activities that are essential to the survival of the human race as well as other mammals (Bailey 2004). When stimulated by drugs of abuse, addiction often occurs especially in those who are genetically or otherwise “neurochemically” vulnerable

Ideas about addiction have mainly been developed from neurobiological evidence and data from studies of learning behavior and memory mechanisms. They overlap in some aspects and are not mutually exclusive. None of them can explain all aspects of addiction. Generally, addictive drugs can act as positive reinforcers or as negative ones. Environmental stimuli associated with drug use itself can also induce a conditioned response in the absence of the drug.

Many people do not understand why individuals become addicted to drugs. The truth is drugs change the brain and cause repeated drug abuse. Drug addiction is a brain disease. Drug use leads to changes in the function and structure of the brain. Although it is true that for most people the initial decision to take drugs is voluntary, over time, the changes in the

In this website “ True Story of Addiction”, written Tuesday October 2nd, 2012 exclaims the harsh things that can happen from seeing a family member or friend hurt herself from an addiction and how they caop, so when you get older that’s all you know how to do. This website gives amazing stories of how families and friends go through these struggles to get out of their loved one out of this addiction. Savannah is the one that wrote about herself and told us about her addiction and her struggle and she said, “Both of my parents are active addicts, so it was my mom who got me into it. She’s always acted like a teenager, more like a friend than a mom, and she gave me pills for the first time. I was living with her back then and I started using

There has been much research to prove that drugs cause chemical and structural changes in the brain and its function. As stated by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “[Addiction] is considered a brain disease because drugs change the brain—they change its structure and how it works. These brain changes can be long-lasting, and can lead to the harmful behaviors seen in people who abuse drugs” (2014). When the brain is chemically or structurally altered, it changes how the brain functions, influencing continued use of the drug (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2014). Even though the changes in the brain lead to continued use of the drug and other harmful behaviors exhibited by those who use drugs, people often begin and continue taking drugs because of a lack of healthy connections to other people. Once a person learns to develop healthy relationships with other people, he or she stops taking drugs (Hari,