Many people like to think addicts are bad people. However addiction is not a moral failing or weakness. Those struggling with addiction aren’t bad, although they do bad things to maintain their habit. They are just very sick. Addiction is a brain disease that rewires the cerebral cortex resulting in poor judgment and impulse control. It manifests in compulsive substance use in spite of harmful consequences. It’s progressive in nature ending in jails, institutions, death or recovery.
“A common misperception is that addiction is a choice or moral problem, and all you have to do is stop. But nothing could be further from the truth,” says Dr. George Koob, director of NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “The brain actually changes with addiction, and it takes a good deal of work to get it back to its normal state. The more drugs or alcohol you’ve taken, the more disruptive it is to the brain.”
Researchers have found that much of addiction’s power lies in its ability to hijack and even destroy key brain regions that are meant to help us survive. When you’re becoming addicted to a substance, that normal hardwiring of helpful brain processes can begin to work against you. Drugs or alcohol can hijack the pleasure/reward circuits in your brain and hook you into wanting more and more. Addiction can also send your emotional danger-sensing circuits into overdrive, making you feel anxious and stressed when you’re not using the drugs or alcohol. At this stage, people often use drugs or alcohol to keep from feeling bad rather than for their pleasurable effects.
Scientists don’t yet understand why some people become addicted while others don’t. Addiction tends to run in families, and certain types of genes have been linked to different forms of addiction. But not all members of an affected family are necessarily prone to addiction. Teens are especially vulnerable to possible addiction because their brains are not yet fully developed—particularly the frontal regions that help with impulse control and assessing risk. Pleasure circuits in adolescent brains also operate in overdrive, making drug and alcohol use even more rewarding and enticing.