In order to understand addiction, it is essential to ask what relief the addicts find or anticipate to find in the drug. Far beyond the pursuit for enjoyment, long-lasting drug use is the addicts’ effort to flee from pain. From a clinical viewpoint, an addict self-medicates illnesses such as anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, or post-traumatic stress. Addictions always originate from distress. Also, they are emotional painkillers (Maté, 2008). For instance, cocaine and heroin are strong physical anesthetics, and they also alleviate psychological pain. The current paper seeks to describe the origins of addiction, discuss Mate’s claim that drugs do not cause addiction and discuss “the different state of the brain” that addiction represents.
According to Vincent Felitti, hardcore drug users stem from abusive families (Maté, 2008). These individuals went through serious mistreatment and neglect in their early childhood. Most addicts were sexually oppressed early in life. The feeling of emptiness permeates addicts’ whole behavior. A drug addict is more excruciatingly mindful of this emptiness and has scarce methods of running from it. At all costs, a drug addict wants to flee from expending “alone moment” with his/her brain. Dullness entrenched in a critical pain in the self is among the minimum bearable mental conditions (Maté, 2008). Addicts believe that drugs provide a path for feeling alive again. The amazing impact of the drugs is to give the addicts the safeguard from discomfort while simultaneously allowing them to engage the world with meaning and excitement.
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Emotionally-drained individuals normally lack bodily vigor, which is the key origin of physical tiredness, which plagues numerous addicts. Others include a debilitating lifestyle, dismal nutrition, disturbed sleep patterns which date back to babyhood, illnesses such as hepatitis C and HIV, in addition to their complications.
Mate (2008) argues that the view that drug consumption by itself would cause addiction is a misconception. He holds that this misconception is among the basis tales that sustain the drug war. The misconception also confuses the presence of primary addiction procedure, of which drug is simply a single likely item, amongst several. Mate argues that obsessive gambling, for instance, is regarded as a type of addiction, while no one argues that it is triggered by the cards. According to Mate, if a drug by itself can cause addiction, then it would not be safe for physicians to offer narcotics to any patient. Clinical data has repetitively revealed that opioids recommended for cancer pain do not cause addiction except in a small group of vulnerable individuals. Addiction denotes a human issue that are inside individuals and not inside the drugs or in their capacity to cause physical impacts. Mate argues that simple exposure to narcotics or stimulants does not make an individual vulnerable. In case the person turns into an addict, it is for the reason that she is already vulnerable.
Mate argues (2008) that although heroin is perceived to be a greatly addictive drug, it is only for a small group of individuals. This is illustrated in the Vietnam soldier study (Mate, 2008). Numerous U.S. soldiers that served in the Vietnam Warfare in the 1960s and 70s were frequent users of heroin. Besides heroin, a majority of the fighters used amphetamines or barbiturates. About twenty percent of returning recruited soldiers met the provisions for diagnosis of addiction when they lived in Southeast Asia, while before they were transported abroad, less than one percent were opiate addicts. The research findings revealed that after the Vietnam war, the consumption of specific drugs dropped to less than before-the-service levels (Maté, 2008). Furthermore, the remission, (that is the reduction of symptoms in addiction or disorder), level was ninety-five percent, a rate that is unprecedented amongst the narcotic addicts treated within America. These research findings suggested that the addiction did not originate from the drug itself but rather from the desires of the soldiers who consumed heroin. Otherwise, a majority of these soldiers would have stayed addicts. Mate holds that whatever the drugs’ physical impacts they have, they could not be the sole origin of addiction.
Mate also provides the Rat Park experiments to show that drugs do not cause addiction (Mate, 2008). The study revealed that morphine had a small attraction such that they could develop disturbing physical withdrawal signs in case they did not consume it. Thus, in a typical setting, the rat would avoid the drug if offered an option, even in case the rat is previously physically reliant on the narcotic. Nothing rooted a robust craving for morphine, or yielded something that resembles addiction in the rats placed in fairly natural surroundings. On the contrary, confined rats used about twenty times more morphine than their comparatively free counterparts. Certain environmental states tend to trigger animals to consume drugs. The study of Vietnam soldiers indicated the same deduction: in some situations of stress, numerous individuals may become vulnerable to addiction. However, if the situation changes for the better, the addictive motivation will lessen (Maté, 2008). Thus, according to Mate, drugs do not make any person an addict; there must be a preexisting susceptibility.
Addiction represents “the different state of the brain”. A drug-addicted brain does not function in a similar manner as a non-addicted brain, and it does not appear alike when imaged using magnetic resonance imaging and positron-emission tomography (Maté, 2008). For a cocaine addict, the age-associated expansion of white matter in the brain is absent, which implies a loss of learning capability, a reduced capacity to absorb new knowledge, adjust to new situations and make new decisions. In worst cases, the gray matter density is reduced as well, which implies that the addicts have fewer nerve cells than normal.
Dopamine is a main brain chemical messenger that play a key role in all forms of addiction. Cocaine, along with other stimulating drugs, intensely upsurges the level of dopamine obtainable to the cells within crucial brain cores. The sudden increase in dopamine levels explains the euphoria as well as the feeling of unbounded potential felt by the drug user (Maté, 2008). Since dopamine is essential for motivation and energy, a reduced number of receptors would lower the user’s stamina and motivation for usual undertakings when not taking the drugs.
The effect of cocaine can be compared to that of Prozac, which belongs to drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) (Maté, 2008). A person might say that cocaine is a dopamine inhibitor. Unlike Prozac, cocaine is nonselective. In comparison, nicotine directly stimulates dopamine discharge from the cells to the synaptic space. Alcohol decreases the obstruction of dopamine-discharging cells. On the other hand, narcotic acts on typical opiate receptors over the surfaces of cells to stimulate dopamine release.
Long-term use of drugs remodels the chemical structure of the brain, its anatomy, as well as its physiological functioning. It changes how the genetic factors behave within the brain cells’ nuclei, which causes it to crave these drugs after repeated use. Once the brain is impaired, the functions which become addictive are the individual’s behavior, emotional life, and thought process. This forms the central dilemma of addiction: if recovery is to happen, the brain must initiate its healing procedure. Given this dilemma, society should not blame or punish the addicts (Maté, 2008). Society should understand that the addict’s capacity to decide is definitely impaired.
Reference
Maté, G. (2008). In the realm of hungry ghosts: Close encounters with addiction . Random House Digital, Inc..
