Drug Use/Addiction: Why why why?

[Astor]

I would like to know everyone's view on why a person would continue to use hard drugs (not MJ) and or alcohol even though though their could be all kinds of negative consequences like: losing their job, flunking out of school, overdosing, negative long term health effects, damaging and or destroying relationships with family and friends, getting arrested, going to prison, and being labeled a drug user.

I am in a discussion on another thread, and I wanted to get everyone's opinion on the issue. For my opinion, please read my posts in the other thread:

http://www.911jobforums.com/vB/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=24761


Trying to approach this issue from every angle, I can only come with the following reasons:

1. They were pressured into taking the drug and are now
physically addicted, and the addiction is so powerful, it will
make them do almost anything to get it. Maybe they are trying
to quit, maybe they're not.

2. They chose to try the drug, and got hooked on it, and would
like to stop but can't because the addiction is so powerful.

3. They grew up in a bad neighborhood, maybe had bad parents,
and that influenced how they live their life.

4. They are weak-willed and don't have enough will power to
stop using drugs.

5. They have nothing to lose (no job, no family/friends).

6. The person made a free will choice to use drugs, and chooses
to continue using drugs.

Can anyone think of anything else?

2nd Question: Is addiction biological, psychological, or perhaps both?

Astor

[DoD NucE]

I don't have any idea why people use drugs at all. Why even experiment when you can do so much damage to your body? Would you cut your finger off, just to experiment what it felt like? The whole drug abuse thing to me is a mystery. I think that once you try a drug though, addiction most certainly is a combination of physiological and pyschiatric causes. On a related note, I just had to start termination proceedings on one of my employees for failing his DOT required random drug tests for the second time in 1 year. I don't get it. You try hard to earn a job and then you blow it with something so stupid. I don't have any answers for that at all.

[DelC]

Illegal drug use destroys a person’s sense of reasoning. (Sooner or later they become brain dead, so to speak) Most likely, they probably didn’t have a very high sense of reasoning in the first place!!

[ATF SAC]

I love the judgemental nature of this conversation. Let's try another approach, everybody posting here can be addicted to drugs to a greater or lesser extent. You are all junkies, no better or worse than some H skell nodding in a doorway.

Think not? OK, take a bullet, particularly through a bone. Sucks out and a doctor to manage it will probably put you on Demerol if not something more potent. Not only mitigates the pain, which is kind of important unless you want to open the wound and bleed out, but actually produces a euphoric state. Maybe your body will crave the drug or maybe you have a fear state that unless you get the drug you will experience excruciating, better to be dead pain.

Some of you will reject the mitigation. You are like me, essentially Spartans. I hurt therefore I live. Some of you will enjoy the mitigation, until a point in which you find the mitigation worse than an imagined but potential suffering. Others of you go immediately to mitigation of all kinds of pain.

Life is full of pain unless you are a sociopath, drugs will mitigate all of it, or at least the feeling of it. No absolutes here, but I would suggest critical thinking. Do I hate junkies, or do I hate those that pander and profit from what is essentially the human condition?

Well, hell. It doesn't matter. Whatever I think got me through 31 years behind a badge. Will what you think do the same?

[Raven231]

I can't say why anyone would take drugs, I think it is different for each person. It could be because of peer pressure, curiosity, bad home life etc. In the end it's a choice made by each person to do so. No as far a sperscription drugs go that are perscribed for real medical issues is a different issue.

With that being said I will tell you what addiction is. I am a certified Drug Recognition Expert and have studied the affects of drugs for a long time.

Addiction has to do with what the drug itself does. Drugs for the most part imitate a neruotransmitter of the brain ie Stimulants (Coke, Meth, Speed etc.) imitate Epinephrine and Norepinephrine which means they act similar to these neurotransmitters. In the body when these neruotransmitters are released they act like a gas pedal. The body gets extremely excited, pulse, blood pressure, temperature etc. Basically what you see when someone is on Meth. As a person continues to take this drug because of several reasons mainly they like the feeling and addiction to a point starts to take affect. Your body realizes that there is an over abundance of these neurotransmitters in the body and it reacts by dumping opposite neurotransmitters (dopamine) into the body to try and obtain a normallity again. When the drugs wear off the body goes into a withdrawl because it still has all the dopamine in the system and you crash to the other end of the spectrum.

The body constantly tries to maintain whats called homeostasis which is a happy medium as far as chemicals go inside of the body. Well a person will take the drug again to get themselves up because they don't care for the down. eventually the body says well I always have to much of the neurotransmitter that makes the body excited so the body quits making this drug completely.

So here is where addiction comes into play a person even if they want to quit has to go through a serious withdrawl of the drug because the body doesn't make that chemical that the drug was imitating. The body will stay in a state of being down until the body stays off of the drug long enough for the body to start making the natural neurotransmitter again and reach homeostasis on it's own.

So addiction is a person attempgting to maintain a somewhat normal body chemical level. addiction does not mean they are always high they will take what is called a maintanence dose to feel somewhat normal.

This is a short explination on complex topic. I spoke of stimulants in this topoc but is works the same way for depressants, narcotics etc.

Hope this helps

Raven231

[hopefulskeptic2]

Raven,
Any evidence of genetic predisposition to drug addiction? I've heard rumors of such for alcoholism but don't know if they hold any water.
I was just wondering b/c, as I've mentioned before, I went through an MJ phase in my mid-teens but never used regularly and had no problem with deciding against use cold-turkey. I'm not sure why I stayed away from other stuff - mostly b/c it wasn't available or I'd have had to pay for it and my use was solely when others were sharing. Never did LSD 'cuz I'm a control freak and the stories I'd heard about walls crying and whatnot freaked me out. I'm just not THAT crazy.
Incidentally, I also quit smoking cigs cold-turkey, but that was a LOT harder (and a lot more recent). When I smell weed now, I'm not tempted to get any. But when I have a couple beers with smokers around, I have been known to take a drag and then yell at whoever gave it to me 'cuz it tastes like $%&* (why blame myself?? :rolleyes:.
So, I wonder why MJ was so much easier to walk away from and why I was able to (eventually for cigs) quit both cold.
Just ponderin' . . .

[Raven231]

Well nicotine is the hardest drug to kick and most addictive drug according to research. The reason marijuana is easier than other drugs is that it doesn't react like the chemicals in the brain so much as others do however addiction and withdrawl still occur.

Paranoia can occur with marijuana along with other diseases. I don't know about genetic predisposition in drugs haven't read any studies that would confirm it, like they have shown with alcohol. I think that some of why people try drugs can do with enviorment, but just like alcohol, drugs know no boundires when it comes to financial or racial lines.

Just for my clarification what did you mean by But when I have a couple beers with smokers around, I have been known to take a drag and then yell at whoever gave it to me 'cuz it tastes like $%&* (why blame myself?? .


Raven231

[hopefulskeptic2]

Cigarettes. Is that what you're asking? If I have a beer or two, they start to smell good instead of bad but then I take a puff of a friends and it tastes like sewage sludge. ;) Which, actually, thank God for that 'cuz otherwise I'd probably start smoking cigs again. :rolleyes:

[Raven231]

Oh I thought you were talking about marijuana.

Raven231