Drug Addiction . A Disease or Not ?

I've just been reading: Narcotics Anonymous . 6th Addition.Pub .NAWS.Inc.

ISBN9781557767349.

P3: Chap 1 :

 

"Who Is an Addict" ?

 

"We do not choose to be an addict.We suffer from a disease....."

PMC , say ,drug addiction is not a disease

Who is right?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3314045/https://www.ncbi.nlm

MY apologises. The link indicates that the page is not

available .

The article is under PMC. " Addiction is Not A Disease".

MY apologises. The link indicates that the page is not available .

That's because you've somehow managed to add an extra URL to the end of it. This one works.

That link is a letter published in the CMAJ as a response to this article which might give a bit of context for those without access to the book you mentioned.

It's not a disease. It's a lifestyle choice.

At best it's a self-induced condition that needs medical treatment and intervention.

It's not a disease. It's a lifestyle choice.

 

At best it's a self-induced condition that needs medical treatment and intervention.

Yo do know that addictions are built into each individual? we all have our own addictions?

Aswell as drink and drugs, theres also food, shopping, sex, internet, everything we enjoy could be an addiction and could lead to issues if taken to excess

Yo do know that addictions are built into each individual? we all have our own addictions?

Aswell as drink and drugs, theres also food, shopping, sex, internet, everything we enjoy could be an addiction and could lead to issues if taken to excess

Quite, but is self dicipline of the individual the key aspect between doing something at a level that allows a reasonably normal life compared to a life destroyed by doing it to excess?

Quite, but is self dicipline of the individual the key aspect between doing something at a level that allows a reasonably normal life compared to a life destroyed by doing it to excess?

yup, but also dont individuals have different levels of common sense, self discipline etc?

For example i might not be able to curtail my hobby compared to you?

Humans have created a life way beyond our evolution. We have, like all animals, evolved to take and use as much of anything that we can get our hands on, which is a great evolutionary standpoint when literally everything is only available sporadically or at a minimal level.

As soon as you start having a system where more things are available than are needed, our evolution is worse than useless. It actually sabotages our lives. We are programmed to desire the highest calorific food and to eat as much of it as possible in order to survive the lean times, and to hoard as many resources as we can get hold of (of every type) just so that we will be able to cope with times when they aren't available.

Pretty much all of us have one addiction or another, although some are more harmless than others. I'm a collector and sometimes have to concentrate hard on reasons not to buy more things for collections for which I have no further space.

If you take our evolutionary hoarding and consuming urges and add that to the very real and physical need to continue flooding receptors with whatever has previously stimulated them (whether that's with nicotine or a whole selection of drugs) and what you've created is a race of animals for whom addiction was always going to happen in one way or another.

You could blame someone for taking drugs in the first place, but given that this has already happened and no matter how much you blame them you can't turn time backwards for them to take back that decision, what's the point in that? There is plenty of evidence that after the first few instances, our bodies create an awful lot of pain when we try to stop taking drugs, so it really isn't a case of having self discipline getting off them.

In order to get off drugs there needs to be a wholesale change in the addict's life as well as a way to get through the immediate issues and dealing with the reasons why that person chose to self-medicate in the first place. Just having one of those parts in place doesn't make the other parts go away.

There but for the grace of whatever deity you choose go most of us. How many hundreds of thousands of housewives addicted to diazepam by their own family doctors do we need to have to show that this is not always down to bad decisions and not having self-discipline?

 

Pretty much all of us have one addiction or another, although some are more harmless than others. I'm a collector and sometimes have to concentrate hard on reasons not to buy more things for collections for which I have no further space.

I collect, always have, as a kid it was keyrings, and then adam and the ants stuff, then i got into punk, and built up a massive punk record collection. now i collect cds, vinyl, retro computer systems and consoles and games, also have a hell of a lot of badges and music postcards / stickers etc

People have said collecting could be part of the autism spectrum? It does become an obsession

It's not a disease. It's a lifestyle choice.

 

At best it's a self-induced condition that needs medical treatment and intervention.

Don't be ridiculous, nobody chooses to be addicted, that's sort of the definition of the word.

addicted

əˈdɪktɪd/Submit

adjective

physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance.

Dependent means not a choice.

Obviously you'll want to make reference to some poor decision have lead to the addiction in the first place. But that's like telling someone with lung cancer that it's a lifestyle choice because they once smoked a cigarette.

It's not a disease. It's a lifestyle choice.

 

At best it's a self-induced condition that needs medical treatment and intervention.

To right, it's just like being fat, alcoholic or a smoker.

We all eat, possibly drink or in my case used to be a smoker, but what we eat, drink, smoke or otherwise put in our body's in purely down to us.

No one chooses to become and addict, but every addict chooses not to stop being one.

No not a disease, its a choice you make to take drugs,nobody is forced to be an addict.