September is National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month

There are thousands of reasons why people have a drink of alcohol or use some other drug.  There are reasons or happenstance or occasions or just excuses, but the bottom line is that just about everybody has tasted alcohol or has taken a drug of some kind at least once in their life.  I know people who would roll their eyes, cough and become indignant at the thought that they have taken drugs at any time in their life, but they would probably be wrong.

The first thing to recognize is what is a drug?  When asked, most people would say drugs are bad things such as heroin or cocaine or meth or brown acid, and they would be correct.  I would certainly not disagree that these drugs can be bad for a person to consume, but the illegal drugs are only a small part of what constitutes a drug.

A drug is any form of chemical that a person takes into his or her body by different methods and once taken, it will affect the way the body works.  Substances such as alcohol, prescription drugs, caffeine, chocolate, nicotine, aspirin, sugar, marijuana, power drinks like Red Bull, various foods, various herbs, coffee and tea…all of these are drugs.  Once inside your brain, a drug can change the messages your brain cells are sending to each other and also to the rest of your body, and once a drug interferes with the brain’s neurotransmitters which transfers signals across the synapses, the body will be affected in some way, shape or form.

It has been said that the human body has five basic needs: 
1.    Physiological – the need for food and water to survive.
2.    Safety – the need for shelter from the elements or the danger of others (animals or people).
3.    Love – the need for companionship and human touch.  This comes from family, friends, and sex.
4.    Self-esteem – the need to feel needed, to help gain confidence and respect from others.
5.    Self-actualization – the need to be creative and the need to have basic rules of morality or a lack of chaos.

According to Dr. Ronald K. Siegel, drugs were and are a biological need.  Dr. Siegel said that it seems that humans have evolved to use chemicals (from plant forms to man-made drugs like wine/beer and lab-based chemicals) to where drugs have become a biological need.  He calls it the “fourth drive”, which is a basic human pursuit so powerful it falls in line with the need for water, food and sex.  There is evidence that humans have been using drugs for millennia for a variety of reasons, primary of these is that psychoactive substances can cause a change in emotion which can influence motivation, learning and decisions.  

From wise-women and shamans, midwife and barber, and Traditional Chinese medicine to Western allopathic medicine, drugs have been a large part of healing the body and mind throughout the history of mankind. But alas, healing drugs have also been misused and abused.  Most drugs have been found or invented to make people feel better either physically, mentally or spiritually.  For most people, using a drug is a temporary occurrence to solve a painful problem or to assist or offer insight, but a percentage of people use a drug to escape, or to “feel better”, to which consequences of the drug use can lead to socially negative repercussions.

To abuse a drug can be done by anyone, be it the overweight man who eats high caloric foods, to the stressed out soccer mom who takes a steady diet of Valium, to a cigarette smoker who needs the ‘cigarette breaks’ at work, to the morning coffee drinker to help get the day started, to the man asleep on the bar after drinking alcohol all day, to the drowsy heroin user nodding off in a “shooting gallery”, to the teenager downing several Red Bulls during school, to the marijuana-smoking person listening to music while eating cookies, to the hyper, wide-eyed talker who just snorted a line of cocaine, to the mean drunk who routinely beats up on his wife and children.

Drugs are everywhere and are used and abused by people from all walks of life across the globe.  Many people can stop using their drug of choice if they want to or need to due to health or personal reasons. Yet there are a percentage of people who cannot, or will have a very difficult time not taking a drug of choice.  

It has been proven that some people are just DNA-wired to experience addiction issues. When a person is addicted to a drug, he or she may not be able to control urges and the drug use may continue despite the harm that can come from the all-encompassing addiction.  An addict may want to quit the drug(s), but often times an intense craving for the drug can overshadow most other basic needs. The individual, wanting to quit but unable to find the effort to do so, will quite often require outside help, finding that he or she cannot quit the brain-craving drug on their own.  Drug addiction, with just about any drug, be it cigarettes, sugar, cocaine, coffee, meth, alcohol, and even sex, which floods the brain’s limbic system with a surge of neurochemicals, can cause serious long-term consequences, causing problems with physical and mental health, personal relationships, employment, social status, and with the law.

In America, back in the 1980s, First Lady Nancy Reagan lead a cause to stop drug abuse by the bumper sticker statement of “Just Say No”, and unfortunately this became a popular belief during that time.  The American people thought that if someone wanted to quit drinking or taking drugs, that all he or she had to do was to be tough and just saying no would do the trick.  While this idea was good for people who never started to drink or take drugs, this misbegotten ideology was clinically incorrect for addicts who would have loved to just say no, but could not stop a serious addiction simply by uttering such a statement.  

There have been and are proven ways for addicted individuals to quit the drug of their choice but it is a daily, conscious battle to not bedevil themselves with the drug.  More often than not, to quit a drug addiction is rarely an individual act.  Support must be accepted by the addict and used when needed in place of the drug urge.  The physical or mental urge to use a drug can be overwhelming to a point where the addict will think of little or nothing else until that urge is sated, until the next time the level of the drug has reached a certain low level within the addict’s bloodstream where once again, the addict will become overwhelmed with the urge to use again.

More often than not an addict is a person with a physical sickness, not an amoral person who has a total disregard for society by choice.  Sure, many people abuse drugs for many different reasons, at times leading to accidents, personal problems, and even death. Yet many of them, by their own choosing, can quit or limit their intake of their drug of choice.  A smaller percentage of people are just addicts.  Simple as that.  As some people are born with the sickle cell gene or some are born with color blindness, some people are born to abuse drugs.  Being addicted to drugs or alcohol is not a moral weakness, it is a physical illness. To place a judgment of moral incertitude on a person who is addicted to drugs is like saying that a person with narcolepsy is lazy.

To find out more about Drug and Alcohol Addiction or if you know someone who is being harmed by drugs or alcohol, call your local Drug or Alcohol Hotline or visit the following websites.

SAMHSA - Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

NIH - National Institute on Drug Abuse

Foundation For A Drug-Free World

NCADD - National Council On Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University

United States Department of Veterans Affairs

Bill Stock
Executive Editor,
Content & Social Media Services
and
Hulet Smith, OT
Rehabmart Team Leader & CEO