Addiction is defined as an obsessive bond between a person and a substance or behavior. When you’re addicted to something, you’re bound to it – psychologically, and in some cases physically, to the point that it interferes with your work and other living responsibilities.
Escaping severe addiction isn’t just hard – it’s like going against your nature. Imagine being in a desert, wandering about aimlessly for days at a time, the hot sands beneath your feet making their mark on your soles through red blisters. Every step is a stumble, every breath a pain, your throat dry and covered in mucus. A stranger appears and offers salvation in a bottle: pure, cold water.
Do You Refuse?
Once a drug addiction truly sets in, it’s not just a matter of liking the world better with a little bit of a high – getting high is almost necessary to continue leading a tolerable existence. Drug use can hijack the brain, and in severe cases will create a physical dependence that manifests itself as a painful need for drugs, the lack of which is punished through harsh withdrawal symptoms.
Cutting yourself off from that level of dependence requires an iron will, and probably an iron door. It’s not easy – and to some it most definitely feels impossible.
But not all addictions make it that far. You see, addiction is a spectrum – just like most other mental illnesses, every case of addiction falls within a very specific spectrum of severity. Depending on where you are on the spectrum, it’s easier (or harder) to undo the damage you’ve done to your brain, and rewire yourself to ignore the lure of whatever you were taking.
What Determines Dependence?
The broad definitions of addiction are mild, moderate and severe addiction, with increasing levels of physical dependence and signs of abuse. The more severe an addiction, the more severe both the mental and physical consequences of the addiction – including an ever-growing need to depend on the drug not just for physical reasons, but for happiness (or more aptly, to stave off the terror of sobriety).
Physical dependence is achieved through drugs that can cause great amounts of physical harm if quit cold turkey, called withdrawal symptoms. Taking drugs for a long time increases your tolerance to them, requiring increasingly higher doses, driving you to the brink of overdose and threatening you with painful withdrawal if you try to stop.
The Most Dangerous Drugs
In terms of sheer addictiveness, heroin is up there at number one, followed by crack and nicotine. Then comes methadone, meth, and alcohol.
As for what these substances do the body, heroin is an opiate that acts like the body’s own natural morphine, released as an analgesic (painkiller) during a particularly painful experiences. The thing is, heroin is much more powerful than what your body gives you to fight off the pain, and it also gives you a quick, extremely intense (and captivating) high.
Once in the body, heroin is converted into morphine, like any opioid (including prescription painkillers, which cause far more overdoses in America). Take too much of it, or take it for too long, and your heart fails either because of an arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) or because your body forgets to breathe.
Nicotine toxicity isn’t very hard to achieve with the pure chemical itself (rubbing pure nicotine on your skin will cause nausea and a host of other negative effects), but smoking primarily kills through lung cancer due to the effects of inhaling burnt tobacco and tar.
Alcoholism is often followed by cirrhosis of the liver, although binge drinking – particularly among younger adults, and especially in circles where alcohol use isn’t adequately discussed – can cause alcohol poisoning.
Methamphetamine mimics amphetamine, a natural high-producing neurotransmitter, can also cause heart failure in an overdose – although if it doesn’t kill you that way, it probably will through a host of organ failures. Amphetamines are used by the body in extreme fight-or-flight situations to amplify your senses and reduce your body’s natural “limiters” (pain), allowing you to push yourself beyond the brink of your normal strength. That is why “meth heads” are often quite violent while high.
Caffeine can kill you as well if you’re sensitive to it, but you’d need quite a lot of coffee. On a technical level, that makes it a dangerous and addictive drug. However, it’s statistically far easier to kill yourself with cigarettes, alcohol, prescription medication or any number of illicit drugs than it is with a latte.
When Does Drug Use Become Addiction?
It’s not something most people think about, but drug use doesn’t equate to addiction. Here’s a statistic you probably did not expect: about a third of all adults will try an illegal drug, and a much smaller fraction will get addicted.
The thing about drugs is that their definition is a little relative, and some might even say it’s arbitrary. Nicotine is a dangerously addictive substance, far more addictive statistically than alcohol, cocaine, methadone and methamphetamine – yet there’s much less of a movement to fight against nicotine addiction and treat it in the same manner as alcoholism. Alcohol is available to everyone over the age of 21, yet it’s even more addicting than powdered cocaine. Coffee is also a psychostimulant, even more legal and unregulated than alcohol or nicotine – and cases of caffeine addiction have been recorded. Of course, it’s not as deadly.
We’re not trying to argue that coffee should be outlawed or that heroin should be sold at Starbucks. But it helps to understand the fact that drug use does not always lead to addiction – drugs have differing levels of addiction, and there is no such thing as a substance that gets you hooked on the first hit 100 percent of the time. Drug use becomes addiction quite simply when the recreational use of drugs becomes a mental obsession, in which the user goes through great lengths to get their next fix, including criminal behavior.
Understand Rather Than Vilify
The problem with anti-drug messaging is that it’s hard to take it seriously when it utilizes lies and fear-mongering to scare teens out of trying drugs. Oftentimes, teens will find out that drugs aren’t quite as dangerous as the authorities make them out be, relativizing it to smoking and alcohol use.
Of course, with a lack of judgment and the wrong crowd, a little experimentation can escalate into something more sinister and permanent. Better understanding the truth about drugs and their usage, though, can help you instill a better understanding in your friends and your kids, and give them a more reasonable, truthful view of the drug issue.
Not everyone who uses drugs gets addicted – for heroin, the statistic on addiction-at-first-use is about 23 percent. For those 23 percent, however, getting out is extremely hard – and that’s the difference between, say, alcohol and coffee. When’s the last time you heard of someone starting a bar fight before blacking out while high on caffeine? Drugs, particularly opiates and amphetamines, are never ever to be underestimated. But misunderstanding them can lead to just as much trouble.