Defining Addiction:

Providing a Clear Definition of What the Disease of Addiction Is and Isn't

Addiction is a complex, misunderstood illess rife with judgment, biases, and misconceptions. The number one misconception about addiction is that it is a moral failing, that somehow the individuals who suffer from it are immoral, or acting in a way that is "wrong" under the scope of morality. This is entirely inaccurate, as the ingestion of drugs is not solely enough to make one a good or bad person, and in fact there exist amongst you thousands of addicts that exist in secrecy, flying under the radar in the miserable state of "functioning addiction."

What addiction truly is can be defined using one of two schools of thought, with both being a good way to go about it:

In clinical terms, addiction is a mental illness that is caused by physiological changes in brain chemistry resulting in self-destructive behaviors triggered by an unnatural response to changes in brain chemistry caused by the ingestion of certain psychoactive drugs. It is a complex, all-encompassing illness that affects mental processes on a primitive level, effecting our needs and wants to a core level. In spiritual terms, which is what the 12 Step Program teaches, the most popular and widespread system of recovery available with the most research and highest rate of success, addiction is a spiritual disease, that the drugs are only a symptom of a deeper issue. The true problem of addicts is their spiritual nature, which encompasses everything about a person from their beliefs and values to who they love to the foods they enjoy to the ways they behave socially to independently and on and on until you have embodied the entirety of the indivudal. Now, I must say I do have a few personal qualms with the teachings of the 12 Step Program. I have many criticisms to its structures as a system as well the social natures of its groups. However, it is without a doubt a very in-depth and thorough system looking into the disease of addiction, and it has laid the foundation of recovery as a whole with its principles.
If you take the drugs away from an addict, he's still an addict he's just dry, incapable of getting his fix. Despite his inability to use drugs he still suffers from a meddley of spiritual ailments that are the root cause of his need to use drugs. These maladies can range across the entire spectrum of human experience, with each individual having their own personal afflictions they must work out solutions for themselves.

For example, to use myself, I have a deep desire for acceptance and am incredibly rejection sensitive. I often find myself doubting people's feelings and intentions towards me, often believing they are against me and don't really like me, even in spite of evidence to the contrary. This malady is a deep-rooted issue from me, stemming back to my early childhood and the trauma I experienced growing up. Now, due to this ailment, I find myself using drugs (at least when I was younger, now that I am 30 years old and have gained a sense of confidence I never had in my youth I do not do this so much) as a way to make friends, encourage people to spend time with me, and curry their favor. This is a toxic behavior that is manipulative and self-defeating. If I entice the people I want around with drugs instead of me, I am essentially saying the drugs are a more important factor in the relationship, and that I come second. This leads to people using me and only wanting to hang out if they can catch a buzz, among other issues.

This particular spiritual ailment has caused me large amounts of grief throughout my life, leading to toxic, dishonest relationships and a shattered sense of self-worth. And the worst part? That is simply one of a long laundry list of others that must be addressed in order to achieve long lasting recovery.

This page will aim to provide a detailed look at addiction from both viewpoints, and will explain complicated concepts in an easy to digest way so that people can understand the depths addiction affects the individual, and that it is not, by any means, a moral failing.

I am not a bad person. I am a thoughtful, intelligent, caring individual with a big heart and yearning for knowledge. I have the mental illness known as addiction, which causes me extreme issues in my personal life, social life, and overall health. I am, at this point in time (2:17pm, 12/12/23), still in active addiction. I use meth on a near daily basis, typically through IV use, the most dangerous way of all with the most intense addictive potential. I continuously strive to get clean, but fail to do so time and again. It is maddening, and causes intense feelings of shame and guilt.

I have had brief moments of recovery at different points throughtout my life, yet I keep finding myself falling into the same old destructive patterns I always find myself in. The process of recovery is lifelong, and involves intense soul searching and personal development. It is a Herculean task to find long lasting recovery, and I, unfortunately, have not unrooted the disease from the grips of my mind.

However, I have started this site as a personal strive towards recovery, as a way of recording my progress along with my failures, of giving myself a physical, tangible thing that I can observe that outlines the disease itself and my own mind. If I don't find recovery soon, I will die. That is the unfortunate truth, and I pray to all the gods of all the pantheons past, present, and future I find it before my untimely death. The sad part, even if I do find it, it is practically guaranteed I will still die young due to the irreversible damage I have done to my body as a result of years of drug abuse. It is a personal Hell to be trapped in a cycle of destruction that is the result of your own sick, twisted, diseased decision making. I am going to die by my own hand, whether it be from overdose or health complications due to my use, rest assured my death will be caused by drugs. I do not say this a way to gain sympathy or prayers, I am simply stating it as a matter of fact that I have had to accept. It is not easy to do, but I ultimately must accept my responsibility for my actions, even if my hand was forced by the cruel demon of addiction that has possessed me for 12 years now. I do not wish to pass the buck and make myself a victim. I am not ignorant to the effects of these drugs, I knew when I was doing them they were toxic and deadly, yet due to some insanity-inducing drive to escape myself I continued to make the decision to use them. I am my own worst enemy, my mother has told me that my entire life,long before I even touched a drug. I guess that's the case for all addicts.

I will begin by going over the clinical side of addiction, laying out the diagnostic criteria and explaining the physical process the brain goes through when using and addicted to drugs. After that I wil look at the spiritual side of the illness, which will be a very personal and deep look at how the disease affects every area of life. Not one fragment of your being is left unscathed from the trauma of addiction. This section will have plenty of scholarly sources, I'm a sucker for a good source, but will also include my personal beliefs and views. It is not my intention to sway anyone to my side of the spiritual paradigm. I believe spirituality is an intensely personal matter, and each person has their own relationship with it. If you find what I say insightful, please let me know. Validation feels good, and it's nice to know people can see my side of things.

The Clinical Side of Addiction

Addiction is officially listed in the DSM-V (that's the Diagnostics and Statistic Manual of Mental Health Disorders, Fifth Edition, which is used in clinical psychiatry to diagnose mental illness) with the label of "Substance Use Disorder". The DSM-V has a list of certain criteria necessary to meet an official diagnosis, and if a certain number of these criteria are met, you are diagnosed with that particular illness. The criteria to be diagnosed with Substance Use Disorder are the following: As you can see, "Substance Use Disorder has a long list of symptoms that can be met, and when looked at beyond surface level, paint a picture of self-destruction, isolation, health problems, relationship problems, and, most unfortunate of all, death. The DSM-V also provides a scale of severity for clinicians to measure exactly how bad the affliction is. This is the scale they use:

  • Mild: Two or three symptoms indicate a mild substance use disorder.
  • Moderate:Four or five symptoms indicate a moderate substance use disorder.
  • Severe:Six or more symptoms indicate a severe substance use disorder.

    • Clinicians can also add “in early remission,” “in sustained remission,” “on maintenance therapy” for certain substances, and “in a controlled environment.” These further describe the current state of the substance use disorder, and are indicators to the status of the illness.

    Not only does "Substance Use Disorder have a long list of debilitating symptoms on its own, it also can cause a long list of other afflictions that arise as a result of drug abuse. These secondary illnesses are a direct response to the body and mind being bombarded with a barrage of inorganic, unnatural stimuli that are induced by the ingestion of drugs. By ingesting a psychoactive drug, particularly in the quanitities and frequencies addiction leads to, it causes our bodies to respond in ways that are irregular from its typical function. This can be an incredibly positive thing in many cases (i.e taking Tylenol to relieve minor pain, psychiatric drugs that alleviate symptoms of mental illness, drugs that alleviate symptoms of physical ailments such as IBS, Crohns, etc.), but in the case of drugs that are used for their recreational, psychoactive effects it is reacting in a way that is damaging to the overall function of your body's complex system.

    When you ingest a drug, your brain is triggered to release (or block, in some cases) specific neurotransmitters that are responsible for our moods, perceptions, mental processes, and many more complex, not-fully-understood ways. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals found within our brains that are responsible for certain mental functions, specifically those involved with feelings of euphoria, satisfaction, contentment, tranquility, and a myriad of other possible feelings. The biggest neurotransmitter responsible for addiction is the one known as dopamine.

    Dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, drive, and focus. It's organic function is to serve as our brain's built-in positive reinforcement tool whose original purpose was ensuring our survival. Dopamine is actively involved a system known as the dopamine reward system, which is a product of our evolutionary progress and serves an important role in the functioning of human beings.

    To put it simply, when you perform a task that is deemed in your mind as positive to your well-being (whether it is or not is not a factor, it's a matter of preconceived perception dictated by the subconscious) your mind releases a burst of dopamine. This burst causes a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction, which reinforces it in our minds to repeat it, since it makes sense to repeat the behaviors that we find beneficial. This process was incredibly useful in development of mankind as a species, with its original intent being used primarily for surival.
    You hunt down an antelope; you get to eat, fulfilling a biological need of top importance; your brain releases dopamine, making you feel a sense of pleasure for achieving this act which ensured your continued existence; you are now more likely to repeat the behavior since not only did it fulfill a biological need, it also provided a positive emotional response.
    Humans are highly emotional creatures, with the standard thought process behind making a decision being triggered by an emotional response. It is taught in CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy, a school of therapy that aims to teach people how to respond in healthier ways and make better decisions) that the process behind a decision goes: emotion->thought->decision, or sometimes simply emotion->decision, rather than the much more logical approach of thought->decision->emotion, which would give us the emotional response appropriate for the decision made based on conscious decision making after we have made the decision using logic and reason.

    But this is not how our minds work, at least not automatically. If we wish to make rational decisions not based on irrational emotions we must learn to pause, reflect, and contemplate our choices objectively. All too often we find ourselves responding immediately to a trigger using simply the evoked emotional response, throwing reason right out the window and basing our lives on the turbulent, often illogical emotional responses that are first to pop up in our minds.

    This makes the allure of dopamine and its promises of sweet, sweet pleasure an almost impossible to deny temptation, and it is, in fact, our natural, evolutionary response to seek out dopamine-inducing activities, since, as previously stated, this guaranteed our survival.

    Humans love to feel good, and we hate to feel bad. For the most part. And we seek out things that induce good feelings while rejecting those that cause bad feelings- for the most part. The problem with drugs, however, is that they release such a substantial, unnatural amount of dopamine at such a highly accelerated rate it causes unnatural feelings of pleasure to occur

    Now, in a relaxed state with no stimuli, our dopamine levels are at a baseline level, 0%. Then, through performing certain behaviors we may release dopamine in little bursts that bump up our baseline level to 5%, 10%, not much more for typical tasks, and these little bursts lasts mere seconds. The highest level possible the baseline can be raised through an organic means is an orgasm, which when it's really good can bump it up to around 200%. Again, that lasts mere moments before our brains quickly returns to equilibrium, and we return back our baseline level. This is a positive thing, despite how desperately we may wish our orgasms lasted a bit longer, because our brains (and bodies) are constantly striving to maintain a certain functioning equilibrium that works best for the system as a whole. Our brains have a feature known as "neuroplasticity", which means our brains are "plastic", which in this case means capable of undergoing change in response to stimuli in order to best maintain this equilibrium.

    When you introduce a foreign agent that induces mass release of neurotransmitters completely unnatural to your brains organic function, this creates the high users so desperately seek, but it also causes physical changes to occur within the brain's chemistry that have long-lasting, life-changing, and likely debilitating effects.

    As an example, I will use my drug of choice (DOC), crystal meth, which I refer to amongst my tweaker associates as "ice." Meth releases a substantial amount of dopamine in an extremely short amount of time. If one were to inject a moderate dose of the drug, say 100mg for a nontolerant user, their brains would cause a spike in their baseline dopamine levels to go from 0% to approximately 1500% within a matter of seconds. This intense peak lasts as long as what is known as "the rush", which is the sudden surge of intense euphoria that "rushes" over you when injecting (or sometimes smoking and snorting, depends on the person's personal sensitivity and experience). This rush is the most amazing, hedonistic feeling that is impossible to imagine without performing the act itself. It is such an unnatural feeling of pure euphoria our brain's our incapable of producing naturally that someone who hasn't experienced it can't even begin to understnad what it feels like. This high is so good it causes mothers to abandon their children for it and makes average, everyday people throw away their entire lives from a regular, normal dude down to the depths of homeless, diseased, and dying- and it happens quickly.

    After the rush, which can last anywhere from a couple minutes up to 15 minutes typically, you dip down slightly, and plateau at a level still extremely elevated from your baseline, which encompasses the main body of the high. This can last, with meth, anywhere from 6-18 hours from a single dose (official sources will not make claims so far up on the high end as I have, but I speak from personal experience from both myself doing the drug and witnessing others do it that in the beginning stages of meth use, the high can lasts forever from just a single dose), with repeated doses capable of lasting days on end until users have been awake for a week straight and are now hallucinating, paranoid, and delusional. The duration depends on a variety of factors such as how high of a dose was taken, personal tolerance to the drug, and the (very likely) possibility of redosing.

    This high causes such an unnatural release of dopamine that it causes the dopamine reward system to malfunction- the drug is like a virus that glitches the natural processes of the system and hijacks it. Since our dopamine reward system is based on survival, and the things that release dopamine are deemed necessary to live, that means the result of causing a spike of 1500% within seconds that goes on for hours to even days on end tricks our minds into believing the drug we just did was the greatest thing for our survival we've ever done by a very long shot. Our minds just went through an inexperience perceived as so essential it causes people to throw away their lives for it in a cruel attempt at trying to stay alive.

    To wrap things up, addiction is a disease of the mind that is triggered by the use of psychoactive drugs in a response to the dopamine response experienced due to the ingestion of it. It causes physical changes to brain chemistry that affect the user to a primitive level, hijacking the system used normally for survival and rewiring it to seek the drug instead. It is not, by any means, a moral failing or caused by a person being weak. These physical changes to brain chemistry are severe, traumatizing, and the effects are long lasting, with recovery from its effects involving a long, difficult, intensesly personal process that requires monumental levels of work and drive to achieve success. It is, quite simply, the hardest thing a person will ever do in their life.
    That wraps up this portion on the clinical, physiological portion of the disease. My explanations are simplified and written in a way that makes understanding the complex field of neuroscience and psychology accessible to the general public. It goes much deeper than this. If you would like to learn more, please check out my -links- page under the "Clinical Knowledge" section for accurate, trustworthy sources.

    Coming Soon: The Spiritual Side of Addiction