Prescription Drug Abuse Addiction

Prescription-Abuse.org an online educational resource on prescription drug abuse and information on help available to overcome prescription drug addiction. Prescription drug abuse occurs when medicine is used for non-medical reasons or its prescribed use has lead to dependence.

Physically, drugs have three basic effects on the body. Either the drug is a stimulant which gives the body a feeling of being “high” or energized; it can be a depressant where it gives the body a feeling of being calm or even sleepy; or a drug can distort the senses.

When any chemical enters the brain, it is absorbed into the brain through receptor sites. When the body is getting a drug from outside sources, the brain stops making some of its own chemicals, such as dopamine and endorphins, which it makes naturally. The brain then becomes dependent on the outside source of drugs. While dependence takes hold, the brain adapts to the drug's presence whereby the individual must use more of the addictive drugs to try to reach the same feeling they got when they first started taking the drugs. (Most do not reach that initial feeling).

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, most people take medicines only for the reasons their doctors prescribe them. But an estimated 20 percent of people in the United States have used prescription drugs for non-medical reasons. This is prescription drug abuse. It is a serious and growing problem.

Experts don't know exactly why this type of drug abuse is increasing. The availability of drugs is probably one reason. Doctors are prescribing more drugs for more health problems than ever before. Online pharmacies make it easy to get prescription drugs without a prescription, even for youngsters.

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Addiction is a chronic condition. WebMD reports, It (addiction) causes compulsive drug seeking and use despite harmful consequences to the addicted person as well as the people around that person. The abuse of drugs -- even prescription drugs -- leads to changes in the structure and function of the brain.

For most people, the initial decision to take prescription drugs is voluntary. Over a period of time, however, changes in the brain caused by repeated drug abuse affect a person's self control and ability to make sound decisions. While this is going on, the person continues to experience intense impulses to take more drugs.

In an article written by Gary W. Smith, C.C.D.C., Executive Director of Narconon Arrowhead, entitled, The Life Cycle and Mechanics of Addiction, Smith notes, "Whether a person is genetically or bio-chemically predisposed to addiction or alcoholism is a controversy that has been debated for years within the scientific, medical and chemical dependency communities. One school of thought advocates the “disease concept” which embraces the notion that addiction is an inherited disease, and that the individual is permanently ill at a genetic level, even for those experiencing long periods of sobriety.

Another philosophy argues that addiction is a dual problem consisting of a physical and mental dependency on chemicals, compounded by a pre-existing mental disorder (i.e., clinical depression, bipolar disorder or some other mental illness), and that the mental disorder needs to be treated first as the primary cause of the addiction.

A third philosophy subscribes to the idea that chemical dependency leads to permanent “chemical imbalances” in the neurological system that must be treated with psychotropic medications after the person has withdrawn from their drug of choice.

The fact remains that there is some scientific research that favors each of these addiction concepts, but none of them are absolute. Based on national averages, addiction treatment has a 16% to 20% recovery rate. The message is pretty clear that these theories are just that, theories, and we have a lot more to learn if we are to bring the national recovery rate to a more desirable level.

There is a fourth school of thought which has proven to be more accurate. It has to do with the life cycle of addiction. This data is universally applicable to addiction, no matter which hypothesis is used to explain the phenomenon of chemical dependency.

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