AHS Views

There was an article posted on several news sites today about researchers ‘defining’ the mechanism of addiction to methamphetamine. Not surprisingly, addiction was defined in physical terms. However, although a person does dry out from drugs while doing a drug rehab program or getting any kind of drug addiction help that doesn’t involve taking drugs, and although their brain chemistry will no doubt go through some changes, addressing the changes that happen in someone’s brain after long-term exposure to a drug doesn’t address the reasons why the person started drugs in the first place and why they took them long enough to get addicted - which, by the way, usually doesn’t take long.

There are literally thousands of reasons a person is driven to drugs - maybe they wanted to be accepted by peers, maybe they had an urge to do something others wouldn’t approve of, maybe they felt insecure about something and the drugs numbed or distracted them from that insecurity, maybe they were just bored with life, maybe they were confused, maybe they felt they didn’t have much of a future, maybe they felt pressured, maybe they felt bad because they were overweight - whatever. There is no end to what might be going on in a person’s mind. And what they’re thinking or feeling might not make the slightest bit of sense to someone else.

Many people wonder how some celeb with tons of money, work, admiration, success, friends, and so on, would want to get involved in drugs. I’m sure there are millions of people who read news stories about some celeb in need of addiction help services and think to themselves “They have everything. Why would they possibly want to do that to themselves?”

There’s something behind it, and the chances are pretty slim that that something is not brain chemistry.

If you know someone with a drug problem, make sure the addiction help services they get dig in, find the underlying problem, and help them overcome it. No matter how dried out they get, there’s an excellent chance the person will go back to drugs if they don’t handle the reason they started them in the first place.