All you need to know about: drug addiction

In a January advisory, the US Surgeon General urged cancer warnings for alcoholic drinks and called for guidelines on alcohol consumption limits to be reassessed.

- 

The General's warnings are also important in light of the addictive effects of consuming alcohol, and how contemporary society perceives that addiction and how contemporary science treats it. Most of us know someone who has battled a drug addiction. It's not unusual to hear the refrain: “it's all in your mind, the day you decide you want to quit, you will come out of it”. In reality, addiction is not a moral failure. Like diabetes, hypertension, thyroid dysfunction, and coronary artery disease, addiction is also a medical illness.

Drug addiction is characterised by a compulsive drive to imbibe the drug (e.g. alcohol) despite serious adverse consequences, loss of control over intake, and a negative emotional state during abstinence. Emerging lines of evidence have found that drug misuse changes the brain in profound ways, leading to disrupted behaviour. What starts as mere experimentation often turns into frequent use. Since a variety of brain circuits is affected, drug use turns into compulsive behaviour. Brain changes produced by addiction are progressive, long lasting, and persist even after years of drug use discontinuation. The evidence today suggests the brain areas governing reward, motivation, inhibitory control, and self-awareness, undergo progressive structural and functional changes. Addiction can be conceptualised as a cycle of three stages. Each stage represents the malfunctioning of a network of interacting brain circuits: the basal ganglia in the binge-intoxication stage, the extended amygdala in the withdrawal-negative affect stage, and the prefrontal cortex in the craving stage. Addiction vis-à-vis neurodevelopment