Decades of research have revealed addiction to be a disease that alters the brain.
We now know that while the initial decision to use drugs is voluntary, drug addiction is a disease of the brain that
compels a person to become singularly obsessed with obtaining and abusing drugs despite their many adverse health and life consequences.
Science has come a long way in helping us understand how drugs of abuse change the brain.
Research has revealed that addiction affects the brain circuits involved in reward, motivation, memory, and inhibitory control. When these circuits are disrupted, so is a person’s capacity to freely choose not to use drugs, even when it means losing everything they used to value. In fact, the inability to stop is the essence of addiction, like riding in a car with no brakes.
Drugs of abuse change the brain, and new technologies such as CAT, MRI and SPECT scans are showing us how.
Indeed we’ve come a long way from this primitive depiction of a “brain on drugs.”
We can now measure the brain’s response to drugs of abuse in real time.
We are able to take images of a human brain at different intervals following administration of radioactive cocaine. Because the drug was “radiolabeled,” scientists can see precisely where cocaine binds in the brain and for how long. Studies such as these teach scientists more about how cocaine exerts its devastating effects, and can illustrate to people in real time what happens to their brains on drugs.
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A subject this post didn’t touch on, is the startling effects that legal drugs also have on us as well. I’ve known people who had an operation, and are still receiving prescription pain medicine a year later, due to the “pain from the operation.”.