The Science of Addiction

most part. Yeah, yeah, you're there. Yes. When I was in New York, I attended the World Science Festival, which if you guys have never heard about it, you should immediately well after this episode check it out because they have some online offerings that are wonderful. But when I was there, I checked out this panel on something called the craving brain. And that's what we're going to talk about today, this idea of what addiction is and what it is not. Ah, So it's about the craving brain,

not craving brains. Not that. Okay. Yeah, No zombie content, as far as I know, is going to tumble forth from our lips today because it's my understanding of you showed up for this this talk expecting a light hearted discussion about zombies. You would have been pretty disappointed. And so that's what we're discussing in this episode addiction the science of addiction, and it's really fascinating this topic because

for me, I had not really looked into it. Before I had, I wouldn't say there's just a surface level understanding of addiction, like I was prevy to some of the science and some of the levels of deeper understanding involved in addiction research. But still it's so misunderstood at large in our culture even today. Yeah, and I feel like we are only now getting a baseline understanding of it, and a lot of that has to do with the

brain itself. We talk about this all the time. We still don't know exactly how the brain works, and we have more of a clue now than we did one hundred years ago or even twenty years ago. But the fact of the matter that addiction written large is still going to be something that we can't fully cover in depth, and in fact, for us to do that, we would just have to become the addiction podcasts, so we could really give it its due day to talk about every

single aspect. But what we want to talk about today is just sort of like this, this idea of addiction in the past in the present, and what are some of the driving conditions. Yeah, so this idea of addictive substances, you go back far enough in history and you get into it. I mean, you don't have to go far back in history at all, where our culture is full of simplistic examples of what's going on, simplistic explanations for

what's going on. Yeah, you know, you can say, oh, well that person is addicted, clearly there's a flaw in their character. Or that person is addicted, there's there you know, they're completely controlled by this demonic substance. Or you can throw it to environment and say, well, they're just not in a good environment to you know, and that is

what's making them weak to this substance. And that's the thing too, it's often seen, even among people who have a better understanding it of it, it's seen as some sort of of a weakness of character. Even know there that we have so much science to argue differently, Yeah, there's this real need to blame someone or something when it comes to addiction. And so you had mentioned the substance, right, Oh, it's the substance that it is the problem that has

demonic possession of the person. Well, if that were the case, then everybody who ever put a bottle of whiskey to their lips would be addicted to whiskey. Right, So we just know that logic is faulty, and yes, it's also looked at as a shortcoming in a person's moral compass, you know, a lack of willpower. But finally we are beginning to understand addiction in terms of a disease, with genetics and environment really playing into how the human brain

can change a person's behavior. Indeed, it's that disease model of addiction that has really taken hold and become our major means of understanding exactly what's going on, even though again that still hasn't quite seeped into every you know, level of our culture in terms of viewing addiction in

those round us. Yeah, but I do think that the more and more information that is that's really given to the disease brain part, the more we can understand it as a disease like diabetes or anything else that's sort of chronic. But let's talk really about what an addiction is, because when I think about it, I think about this irresistible urge to consume a substance or engage in a behavior over and over again, even though I know it's going to cause me some sort of problem later on.

And it turns out there are three dimensions to addiction. Craving kind of binging to just intoxic intoxicating yourself, and three the withdrawal or the negative effect. So you have to think about addiction in that way. It's not just I really like cremberlay and so I eat that ten times a year. It's that you can't stop eating cremberlay even though you keep throwing it up. Yeah. Yeah, there's some people may you know, jokingly say oh, I'm addicted

to this, that or the other. But unless it's unless you're actually throwing up that crimber lay again, you're you're probably not hitting all the points in the addiction. So some of the basics here that you just alluded to, we've discussed many times just in terms of what it is to be human, and that's that's one of the interesting things about addiction is that it is really tied

in with the human experience. Because you mentioned the short term goal versus short term vision versus long term problems. You know that that that consonant inability in humans to really decide on the on the long term benefit over the short benefit benefit. And then the other thing is that this is of course all tied in to the pleasure centers of the brain, the reward circuit about you know, in which we have neurotransmitters of dopamine, and it's tied

into the basic genetic mission of the human creature. Right, we're getting guitting this pleasure, and the pleasure is a reward for things like eating, drinking, mating, the very basic things that we have to check check off the list into to meet that genetic mission. But when you layer up on you know, all the complexity of cognitive evolution, human culture, it gets more complicated. So suddenly we have all these other different activities that can end up releasing dopamine.

I mean everything from eating and drinking and mating to going shopping. Studies have shown you get that release sometimes even when you're you're you know, donating to charity, but also when you're engaging in something like illicited drug use or even even quote unquote non illicit drug use, legal drug use, or even just a you know, a cup of coffee in the morning. Yeah, I mean to put it really simply, pleasure is tied into our survival. It's the way that our bodies and our minds are wired.

And so when you think about these different things that we become addicted to, you can kind of think about them in terms of super normal stimuli. And we talked about this how that has such a pull on us, because that's that thing just kind of like with lights blinking around it, saying, hey, this is awesome. You should try me. If you get pleasure from me, you should do it again. And in this way, you could think of a drug as being a sort of like heroin,

being super normal stimuli. That sense of contentment and pleasure that you would get. Your body doesn't know whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing. It just knows the feeling. So most drugs activate this pleasure circuitry, this dopamine circuitry that we're talking about here. So we're talking alcohol, we're talking nicotine, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis. The only things that really don't make this list are hallucinens

LSD and mescaline. And as a side note, food can be an addiction to, but well, we can talk about that pretty much any human behavior. Yeah, so let's say that you have you know, a glass of wine. There's

that reward that occurs in the brain. You get a flood of dopamine or I shouldn't say a flood, because it's not an actual flood, but you get a significant amount or increase in the brain that feels like it flood, and that strengthens the neural pathways the memory of the behavior, making it far easier to recall the pleasure and then engage in that behavior again and again. Yeah, this is interesting. One of the presenters at the World Science Festival mentioned

nine to eleven. The whole idea. You know, everyone knows or thinks they know exactly what they were doing when nine to eleven occurred, like that strong memory, that that sort of pillar standing up standing out from the landscape of our existing memories, and drug memories are like that.

Nor a d valcohol was the presenter, by the way, But on one hand, this sounds completely obvious, right, because when one is engaging in some kind of drug, be it a cup of coffee, a cigarette, wine, heroin, et cetera, we're dealing with a heightened level level of pleasure, and therefore, conceivably that is a more memorable moment, right, you're feeling really good at that moment, and therefore your brain is encoding that memory and all the very stimuli around it.

So it's not just I had a cigarette and the cigarette was enjoyable and was pleasurable, but I had a cigarette at a bar, I had a cigarette among this group of people, this song was playing. All this stuff sort of gets encoded into the memory. Yeah, and that's the thing that makes us really complicated in the sense because it's very hard to tease out the behavior from the genetics, from the memory, from the environment. It's almost like all of these have a bit of play into addiction.

And according to the National Institute of Health, you can see that with brain imaging technology that addiction is disrupting specific brain circuits effected by addiction, and they say that these changes go beyond the brain's reward system to include regions involved in memory learning, impulse control, and we'll talk

more about that later. Stress reactivity and repeated drug exposure resets these circuits toward compulsive behavior, so that a person's control over the desire to seek and use drugs is compromised, despite whatever consequences arise. So I thought that was interesting. Again, it's not just the behavior, it's that it's creating these kind of neural pathways, these sort of ghosts in the machine of your brain. So even if you abstain from drugs or that thing, you may still have triggers that

would activate those pathways. All right, we're back. We are discussing addiction, the science of addiction. We've just finished talking about addiction, what it is, how it works, what are some of the basics in terms of our understanding of addiction from a disease model standpoint. And this leads to the inevitable question who becomes addicted? Because we've seen this, We see this all the time in the world around us. It's not an equal playing field. Addiction is not an

equally equal opportunity of fender. Some people have more of a problem with it than others. And how do we figure that out? Like what's going on there? We can't just say it's you know, God shooting lightning bolts of addiction down at people and making you know, packets of drugs land in front of some and not others. I mean, they're just as Addiction itself is more complex than that.

Who becomes an addict is also a fairly complex situation. Yeah, and of course the older model would be, oh, it's the person who has no willpower, it's the person who just doesn't have any integrity. And we know this is not true. We know that addiction is not any one sort of magic bullet that arrives in a person's chest. You could have a genetic disposition which would cause you to have a blunted reaction to dopamine, and that would require more and more of the substance to produce the

same sense of pleasure in someone else. So in other words, for me, I genetically have stuff that has to do with addiction in my family. So it may maybe that I need six beers to your two beers to have that same level of dope mean activity in the brain in that sense of pleasure. So that's one way that a person might be become addicted, because they have the

circumstances in place. And then of course we have you know the environment, how much stress is in that environment, and we also have the way that the brain develops. So genetics, let's talk about this real quick. Studies of identical twins indicate that as much as half of an individual's risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, alcohol, or other

drugs depends on his or her genes and twins. Studies on addiction don't reveal the full reaction range of genotype, right, but they do indicate that under a particular and really relevant societal scenarios, genotype plays a substantial role in your vulnerability. Yeah, fifty percent is pretty impressive because that is that is higher than some cancers in terms of how much genetics is playing a role. Now, it's also not as simple as saying, oh, well, here's the gene for a day,

can we zapt that. No, it's it's more complicated than that. We're not at the point yet where we can just say we can look at somebody and do some sort of funny little scan or blood test and say, oh, well, this person's prone to addiction, although one day we may be able to. But of course, it's just it's a hard thing to answer right now, because you know, if you were to scan a child and say you, it would appear that you may become addicted to something or

you may have addictive behavior. Part of that environment is going to factor into that. Right. So again, it's just not that you know, cut and dried, so David Linden, the neuroscientists and author of the Compass of Pleasure, has some really good information out there about variants and genes that turn down the function of dopamine signaling in the

brain if anybody wants to read more about that. But we should probably talk about environments and its stressors triggering self medicating behavior, because David Lindon says that stress hormones are secreted by your adrenal glands that sits on top of your kidneys, and they pass into your brain and they bind stress hormone receptors on neurons in your pleasure circuit, and they set in motion a series of biochemical steps that end with you, say, having a bowl of ice

cream or smoking a cigarette, essentially anything that's pleasurable to try to negate the stress chemical reaction happening in your body. Right, and then we eventually end up encoding the habit right where we associate feeling stressful with the release of having that cigarette, that ice cream, or of course been in Jerry's cigarette ice cream. Yeah, and we'll talk a little

bit more about habit later on. But then you also have other conditions like you might have PTSD, you might have depression or ADHD, and those underlying factors could certainly ramp up this feeling of stress, anxiety, or depression. Add to this, you have teenagers who are beginning to take on some of these substances, and their brains are pretty male.

We know this. We know that the proofnabal cortex, for instance, the seat of judgment, doesn't even really complete itself until the age of twenty five, in some cases much older. So we know already that teenagers are at risk in the sense that they don't have the sort of executive functions that might stop them from engaging in risky behavior. But moreover, there's some evidence that, say, dabbling with nicotine with cigarettes could actually prepare their brains to become more

receptive to other substances. Yeah, this is really interesting research because it deals in part with that idea of something as a gateway substance, as a gateway drug, which is a term that has really lost a lot of value, I feel, thanks to its overuse in drug war campaigning, because because you know, we all heard this growing up. You know, the substance, this experience is a gateway to

other experiences. It's like you know, stepping your foot into the water, and then that undertow is going to grab you and just drag you down through worse and worse drug experiences into some sort of ultimate doom. And of course people's realities tend to be you know, they say, oh, well, you know, don't smoke cigarettes. It's a it's a it's a gateway drug. And then when one eventually tries a cigarette and they realize, hey, my life didn't just end.

You know, I don't feel the world collapsing around me. I don't feel that undertow dragging me down. Therefore this can't be that bad. And those he must have been just completely full of it and trying to scare me with scare tactics into not trying these things. So it's you know, reasons like that that you often end up throwing the idea of a gateway drug out out the window.

But the science behind this really argues in the favor of cigarettes, particularly serving as I almost don't want to say gateway drug because again the term is so so bad, but it But what is occurring here is that the nicket is essentially opening up the pathways, loosening the pathway for addictive behavior with other substances. Yeah, according to neurobiologists Amir Levine, and he was on the panel, ninety seven percent of cocaine users smoked first in their teenage years,

which is astounding. So he thought, well, is this is just, you know, cause correlation here is there's something actually to this, And so he and his colleagues began to look to see if there are any long lasting changes in nicotine use in the formative years, in the teenage years, so

whether they do. They applied mice with nicotine, followed seven days later by cocaine, and compared with mice on cocaine who had not previously received nicotine, the animals were ninety eight percent more active and seventy eight percent more likely to return to areas previously associated with the cocaine. Yeah, and the reverse did not hold true. The cocaine had no effect on nicotine induced behavior and the mind tested

in the study. Right, So this all has to do with something called the foss Be gene, which is related to addiction. And what we see is sort of a this is sort of Blameman's terms, or I'm not going to get too deep into it. Probably the best way to say this is that there's a sort of a greater expression of that gene, of that foss B gene if, as you say that, the pathways have been loosened by nicotine. So when cocaine comes along, Hey look at this, we

sort of know the drill here is what we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah, it loosens up the DNA packaging system. That's that's involved here, and it's in it, and it allows greater expression of that foss Be gene. Now, the added problem here is, as we've talked about before, the amygdala in teenagers has a heightened sense of fear and a heightened sense of stress when you're a teenager. And amygdala is so interesting to me because it processes both physical pain and emotional pain.

So if you're a teenager and you're brooding, you really may feel like life is terrible, life is ending, you're being hurt. Yeah, we did that whole episode on the what I was a teenage teenager? I think, Yeah, I was a teenage teenager, and so it was I think we had mentioned then. So as an adult, you hear a teenager talking about this and you feel like they're just being history onic, when in fact they are actually feeling that level of pain and discomfort. Yeah, and there

I think we discussed in that episode. One of the things about the teenager's brain is that, from you know, an evolutionary standpoint, the teenager is primed to leave his or her community and find a new community in which to thrive, which means that there's an increased dependence on social pressures, on fitting in with a social group, because that,

in an evolutionary sense, means survival. And you know, to add more fuel to the fire, if you happen to be that person whose genes dictate an amygdala in the first place that's more reactive to stress, then you are going to feel things a little bit stronger than your average bear, both as a teenager and an adult. So that makes dealing with environmental factors emotions a lot harder.

And you can see how people begin to turn to things to comfort themselves, right, whether it be food or smoking, or drugs or some other you need, sex addiction, there are so many different ways to actually try to stoke those I guess if you call them members of pleasure and content. Now, an important thing to keep in mind about about addiction is that it actually changes the brain in many ways. Physically changes the brain of the addict, and so we're going to run through some of the

changes that are happening here. Yeah, we mentioned that there is a loss of dopamine receptors in the brains of addicts as D two receptors, So again you would see that it takes more dopamine to get that same sort of level in your brain of pleasure. And I think we mentioned that more in genetics. But when you're taking a substance repeatedly, of course you're going to have some

changes in your dopamine receptors. And what's interesting here too is that it's not not just the dopamine receptors as affected by the drug, because that's kind of an obvious, almost a cliche that we understand with with drug addiction. Oh well, now you have to use more to try and chase that original high, where you're having to drink more to to to to reach the same level that

you're reaching previously. But it also bleeds over to other areas of the dopamine experience into things such as love, appreciation of food, various you know, other things in life that would give you the same dopamine effect, you feel less of it. So an addict ends up feeling their connection to the rest of the world dampened or even deadened. Uh. And and the easiest way to feel normal again in regards to those connections is to turn back to that

drug that's warped the dopamine cycle to begin with. Yeah, it's terrible, right, because at first you're just chasing pleasure, and then that the effects of that substance have taken such a toll that you're just trying to chase a sort of equilibrium. Yeah, that's an important thing to keep

in mind. And also something that they hit on in the presentation of the World Science Festival is that there's it's easy to fall into this outsider mode of thinking that owen attic just likes to feel good and that's why they keep taking the substance in order to feel good and to get high and to escape. Whereas to your point, it eventually becomes not about feeling good and about recreation, it's about treating self medicating their own illness.

Really well, anybody who has experienced the hair of the dog the next day, right, you know, let people think you have a hangover hair in your mouth, Yeah, you have a hangover. You've got a bunch of dog hair, clown knows on and you don't know what happened. No, actually you wake up and you say, I'll just have a beer to sort of reset myself. I've always wondered if that works, always read about it, and you know they're always doing that in various noir stories and all,

but yeah work. I feel like we went over this in the Hangover episode we did ages ago, but I don't recall. Oh no, it's been so long since I engaged in that. I feel like I probably did it. And then, you know, probably later that night had more of whatever like wine, and then felt terrible again, and then woke up again and again. You see how this

all plays out. What I thought was interesting about the panel at the World Times Festival is that they showed the brains of a methadict, a heroin addict, and an obese person and what they saw, again is all less D two receptors in the brain. And they said, look, this is also true for obesity, which is essentially food addiction. And if you look in terms of obesity, ninety percent of cases of severe obesity or food addiction, with only ten percent of the cases of severe obesity having to

do with a metabolic defect. Again, some of this bleeds over to this other area. When we talk about obesity, we tend to judge the person in the willpower right or the lack of willpower, when what we're seeing here is the habit becoming so ingrained. Another way, the brain changes, addiction results in more sinn apps connections. This is the idea that the pathways to the habit forms more connections,

and then the more the substance is abused. And this is in an area that the researcher are still trying to fully understand what's going on here. But my understanding based on the research materials we're looking at, is that this is thought to tie in to again those drug memories that are formed. The idea that poin one is taking the substance, you're encoding all these memories about the use of the substance, the environment in which the substance

is used, and that's playing into these various sinnaps connections. Yeah, they had a great image of that and you could see where the little synatric connections were created, and it did kind of give you this idea, here's all the stuff that's being created so that you can have a sticky, sticky memory of the path to get back to the behavior or the addiction. Yeah, sticky memory in a sense, it's like a sticky place right on the brain saying, hey,

this is the way to feel good right here. Well, it's kind of and it was sort of a terrifying image too, because I sort of showed the normal snapped the connection there and then this other sort of thing that shows up and it had sound effects to remember it kind of went right, it have some sort of alien like squid. Yeah. The other thing that has affected is your hippocampus that sort of rewired in the brains

of alcoholics. And we talk about the hippa campus. We're talking more about memory here, So it would make sense that if you're an alcoholic, a lot of your memories aren't going to be stored in the same way or even committed long term in the same way. And what has been found is that heavy drinking can reduce total hippocampus volume, and that was reported in the November two thousand and six issue of Allcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research.

I've seen other papers on this too that we'll say that the person's memory while it can suffer that the brain sort of shuttles the hippocampus, or rather some of the functions of the hippocampus to other parts of the brain to try to make up for that. But what we're talking about here is an imperfect memory, right. Also,

it has an effect on willpower, you know, with decreased willpower. Yeah, so that's kind of you know, adding links some insult to injury here, right, because you know, you engage in the behavior and if it becomes routinized enough, then all of a sudden, that part of your brain that deals with executive function, well you don't have nearly as much neural activity there because of the behavior. So even if you wanted to quit, it makes it that much harder.

Another way that we're actually seeing the brain change here

with addiction. Twenty twelve, research from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, using mice in a research product, found that a heavy alcohol use actually a rewires brain circley, making it get harder for alcoholics to recover psychologically following a traumatic experience, which again feels like another kick in the gut to this overall situation because you suddenly decreased the willpower, and you're going to have harder time bouncing

back from traumatic events. And therefore, what comfort blanket do you run to? You go to the substance that is the gateway to feeling normal again. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more specifically about relapse in the next episode, but when we talk about more of it, the future of addiction. But yeah, I mean that when do people tend to relapse, Not when things are going well, It's when something terrible, as stressful as happening in their lives.

And again, you've got those ghosts of the neural circuitry just sitting there waiting to be activated. Yeah. I think when we were discussing habits in one of our habit episodes for around the year's time, I think talked about when the brain forms a new habit, it's like a road. Okay, you have a two lane highway going from point A to point B. When you want to build a new road, you have to build next to that existing road, you know, yeah,

or even off of that existing road. So maybe you have the new four lane highway over here, but that two lane highway is still there. The brain still knows where it is and it has to, or if it thinks it has to, it will take that road. That's right. So if that road is that you take a drink at six pm and that's when all of this would begin these triggers, then you just take the other road.

Maybe you go and work out at six pm. You have to take something else and replace the behavior in order to really sort of mess with the ghosts of

the neural circuitry. In fact, when we talk about habit there are a couple of authors and researchers and m Grable and Kyle S. Smith writing for Scientific American, and they say that we learn in chunks, kind of like if you are committing the digits of pie to your your memory, you would probably do them in chunks, like say seven digits, right, And they're saying the same thing

happens with habits. And this happens when the prefrontal cortex communicates with a striatum and the stritum communicates with the midbrain where dopamine helps with learning and assigning values to values to goals. And they say that these circuits create feedback loops which help us to figure out what's working and not working in behavior. And as we that's sort of the point where you can be like, eh, I don't know about this behavior, right, Like maybe your executive

functions are sort of still intact. But let's say you keep repeating the behavior over and over again while that feedback loops becomes stronger, stamping routines into these single units or chunks. Yeah, the chunking process, which I think when we've touched on this before, the analogy I always go

to is like hot keys. You know, instead of instead of going through you know, go to the down menu in a program and then go to another sub menu to pull up this tool that you use all the time, you just start using the hot key, and then the hot key becomes such a habit you forget how to find it elsewhere. You may even forget what the hot key is. You just have the muscle memory of hitting it. And this you see the same thing in various programming, right and where the program is it X, then Y

and z. So that's what your brain is doing. It's taking the shortcuts. It's an economic way of doing the same task over and over again. Well, here's the crazy thing that these researchers saw is that and they saw this in Rats to you. By the way, they saw.

They did a ton of research on this. They saw that chunking, that imprinting getting stronger and stronger with the feedback loops, and eventually another system called the infralimbic system, well it says, oh, I'll help you out here, straat, and I'll help you chunk some more of these and imprint this stuff. And so what happens is that the infralimbics cortex begins to work in concert with dopamine and

begins to really control when we should this activity. And it's almost like that infralimbic system becomes it's sort of like this outside part of the brain going, well, okay, stratum, if you're going to keep doing this and your loops are going to get, you know, more and more well trenched,

then I'll go ahead and vet this behavior. And as we talked about with Charles Dohig in his book about habits, at some point habits become so ingrained that your prefrontal cortex is just like, you know what, I don't need to do this, I know this, this person's this is that person's habit, and don't I just need to give a radio silent here because the rest of the brain knows what to do now and pick up All right,

so I know what everyone's wondering at this point. Is all this damage we've we've talked about the changes that occurring to the brain of the damage. Is it reversible? Can you actually turn back the clock on this and sort of reclaim the brain? Kind of depends on agent genetics according to the panel from the World Science Festival, and the level of neural plasticities. So, hey, if you're younger and you catch this, well obviously the damage to your brain can be then you can kind of go

back in the time machine and work things back out. Yeah, and you're often earlier in the overall timeline of addiction too. Yeah, so you know that working in your advantage. So basically, the earlier you catch it, the earlier you were able to actually get in there, and not not as much as even turn back the clock as much as just try to prevent going further down the road, the better after you're going to be. If you are further down the road, you've got those molecular and cellular scars that

remain on the brain. You could actually maybe have a little injection of synthetic human growth hormone and Researchers from Upselling University in Sweden have been doing this. They have been looking at brain cells targeted for early death by continued opiate use, and they're seeing that some of those cells can be salvaged by this the growth hormone. Oh well, excellent. So but you know who knows sort of what the side effects are that and that's yeah, certainly down the road.

Don't head your bets on that and say, oh, well, I'll just get an injection at my brain and that'll fix everything. Once I've I have actually put put the halt on the drug use. Yeah, if you've listened to our earlier episodes, don't pe on yourself, if you've been stung by jellyfish, don't self trepidate, and don't inject yourself with HGH. Yes. Yeah, all right, So there you have it. There is a just you know, intro into the science

of addiction. What's happening in the brain, what kind of changes are occurring, and what can be done ultimately to reverse some of this damage and put a stamp on it. Yeah. And David Lyndon said something very interesting to Terry Gross when he was on her show and he was talking

about his book, The Compass of Pleasure. He said, when you understand the biology of the pleasure circuit, and when you understand how the contribution of genetics and stress and life experience actually even start in the womb and going forward, all come together. The end result is that you have to realize that any one of us, any one of us, could be an addict at any time. Addiction is not fundamentally a moral failing. It's not a disease of weak

willed losers. When you look at the biology, the only model of addiction that makes sense is a disease based model, and the only attitude toward atticts that make sense is one of compassion. I know a number of you out there probably have experience with this topic, be it personal experience or experience with a loved one, et cetera, and if so, certainly reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you on this on the science of addiction.

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