What Causes Drug Addiction?

You may be curious about what causes drug addiction. Drug addiction is a disease of the body and brain. Also called substance use disorder, drug addiction triggers uncontrollable behaviours and renders a person unable to control their use of medication, alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs—whether legal or not. Addictive substances such as nicotine, alcohol, opioid medications, and marijuana are considered drugs just as much as heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine. Once you are addicted to a substance, you will feel compelled to use it, regardless of the damage that use does to your body, brain, and life. read more. webcomputerworld

Drug addiction isn't always an instantly obvious problem; it often starts small. Drug addiction sometimes begins with simple recreational use, a "one-time" experiment, trying something new, or even a prescription for a much-needed painkiller after an accident or surgery. The trouble is that for some people—the ones who become addicted—the use of the addictive substance becomes frequent and a necessity.

How fast one can become addicted, and the overall risk of addiction varies from person to person and by the drug. The method of administration also affects how addictive a drug is; injectable and smoked drugs, for example, affect the brain right away and are, therefore, more addictive.

Over time, most users need more and more of the same drug to achieve the same effects they experienced when consuming a lower dosage less frequently. Stopping the use of the drug often causes intense cravings, which is another symptom of withdrawal and addiction. Eventually, the user must have the drug simply to function and avoid feeling sick or terrible; this is one of the hallmarks of addiction.

Almost everyone needs help and support to beat addiction.

Causes of Drug Addiction

Like many other mental and physical health problems, multiple factors can and usually do contribute to drug addiction. The most frequently observed contributing causes of drug addiction include:

Genetics. How your body and brain react to a particular drug is determined mainly by your inherited traits, those encoded by your genes. Those traits can speed up or slow down the way the disease of addiction develops.

Environment Environmental factors, such as your access to healthcare, exposure to a peer group that tolerates or encourages drug abuse, your educational opportunities, the presence of drugs in your home, your beliefs and attitudes, and your family's use of drugs are factors in the first use of drugs for most people, and whether that use escalates into addiction.

Genetics and Drug Addiction

Genetics determine about 50 per cent of your drug and alcohol addiction risk, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A person's disposition to engage in a specific behaviour is influenced by three factors:

Capability: the psychological or physical ability a person has to engage in the behaviour.

Motivation: both the automatic and reflective mental processes that guide behaviour; this includes both the euphoric feelings you experience right after using the drug and your more conscious, chosen attitudes about drug use.

Opportunity: physical and social factors in your environment, including the age of first use, that either constrain or promote behaviour.

Environment and Drug Addiction

The environment also plays an essential part in developing an addiction because the environment influences behaviour. The environmental factors which may contribute to drug addiction include:

Absence of social support

Use of drugs among peers

socioeconomic status

Stress and the ability to cope with it

Parental and family involvement

History of abuse or neglect

History of compulsive behaviour

It isn't easy to change environmental factors such as socioeconomic status. Still, there are ways to mitigate against unfavourable ecological factors and work to fight drug addiction or prevent it from happening in the first place. One tactic is to delay the onset of drug use entirely. Another is to nurture environmental motivators for positive behaviour, such as educational attainment and job training. Vigilant friends and family can also model positive behaviours and engage with at-risk users in sober activities.

All of these actions can help counter environmental factors that might contribute to causing drug addiction.

Drug Addiction and Changes in the Brain

Drug addiction often causes actual physical changes in the brain. Specifically, addiction ages how the brain experiences pleasure, modifying specific nerve cells (neurons). Neurons communicate with each other and create moods and other sensations using chemicals called neurotransmitters, and drug addiction can change the way neurotransmitters work in the brain.

Historically, drug addiction and those suffering from it were malignant as morally weak people who made terrible choices. This pure behavioural model, however, fails to account for the biological changes that addiction triggers in the body and brain. Further. read more. healthnutritionhints