What is addiction?
Addiction: self-induced changes in neurotransmission that result in behavior problems. Addiction is the use of a substance or activity for the purpose of lessening pain or augmenting pleasure, by a person who has lost control over the rate, frequency, or duration of its use, and whose life has become progressively unmanageable as a result.
Addiction is a worldwide mysterious plague that infests every level of society. It baffles and corrupts teachers, doctors, lawyers, police, and politicians. What is addiction, and why is it so powerful and pervasive? Addiction is a rebellion against metabolism, especially hunger. Metabolism requires food to satisfy hunger and create health. But addiction short-circuits metabolism by replacing food with addictive substances, hunger with euphoria, satisfaction with craving, and health with sickness. So addiction is a flight from hunger to euphoria, with a stopover in craving, and a crash landing in sickness. Euphoria is a false heightened sense of well-being. Euphoria enables us to control our mood and avoid feelings of inadequacy and loneliness. But euphoria disables our judgment and blinds us to the craving and sickness of addiction. Ironically, addiction makes us feel more alive with euphoria, while it insidiously kills us with craving and sickness. So addiction is a bad bargain, with
Addiction to whatever substance is the propensity to use that substance without the ability of the addicted to control the impulse. It is as if the individual is not able to put up the will to overcome the urge to use the substance. Susceptibility to addiction varies among human beings and also the addictive potential varies among different substances. The individual as with all things usually starts just by tasting or trying out a particular substance. If that substance is to his liking, especially if it allows him to escape even momentarily from any earthly problem or pressure or if he just enjoys the experience with the product or the feeling that the substance brings about, he then continues to take more of the substance. This tasting or taking, like all things in Creation germinates and grows and this becomes an urge and then the urge if not controlled at this stage grows into a propensity or craving. It is at this point that other factors usually come in.
