Addiction can be considered a disease from an epidemiological point of view. From a public health perspective, addiction is a social disorder. Addiction is the result of environments designed to exploit naturally vulnerable brains. Drug addiction is a complex disease that has serious and harmful effects on a person's health and social relationships.
How do you get addicted to drugs? The answer is not that simple, no single factor determines whether a person will become addicted to drugs. Drug addiction is defined as a treatable brain disease that makes it difficult to resist drug use. The risk factors that contribute to addiction are biological or environmental, or many different combinations of both types of factors. It is estimated that genes, combined with other factors, contribute between 40 and 60% of the risk of drug addiction.
As noted above, the ability to participate in controlled use after substance use disorder can vary depending on the individual, the severity of the problem, and the characteristics of the substances or addictive behaviors involved. Therefore, these people would be at greater risk of developing an addiction due to their genetic vulnerability. Importantly, research has revealed that certain biological risk factors increase the likelihood of addictive outcomes, but not a single factor has been discovered that predicts addiction with certainty. The biological basis of addiction helps explain why people need much more than good intentions or willpower to end their addictions.
But based on biological theories of addiction, we will analyze some of the biological effects of drug use and its effects on addiction. Food, family and friends lose their former value, while the need to seek and use drugs becomes total consumption, this is the essence of addiction. Jellinek (195) admitted that his was an “average trend model” in which individuals do not necessarily exhibit all of the symptoms associated with a phase, may differ in the sequence of symptoms, and may differ in the duration of each phase; in addition, “non-addictive alcoholic individuals may experience identified negative consequences of alcoholism without experiencing a loss of control over alcohol consumption, and women may experience the disease differently. Underlying harm reduction is recognition of potential harms associated with engaging in addictive behavior (e.g., this is true, but just because someone in your family has struggled with addiction doesn't mean you're destined to do the same.
Research shows that the sooner a person starts using drugs, the higher the risk of addiction later in life.
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