Is Addiction a Chronic Brain Disease?

DEFINITELY POSSIBLY MAYBE!? –

Sept. 3, 2024 – “I don’t think it helps to tell people they are chronically diseased and therefore incapable of change. Then what hope do we have?” said Kirsten E. Smith, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a co-author of the paper, in the journal Psychopharmacology. “The brain is highly dynamic, as is our environment.”

The recent scientific criticisms are driven by an ominous urgency: Despite addiction’s longstanding classification as a disease, the deadly public health disaster has only worsened.

Almost no one is calling for entirely scrapping the disease model. Few dispute that constant use of stimulants like methamphetamine and opioids like fentanyl have a detrimental effect on the brain.

But some scientists argue that brain-centric disease characterizations of addiction do not sufficiently incorporate factors like social environment and genetics. In the recent critique, researchers contended that, rather than emphasizing the brain’s brokenness in perpetuity, an addiction definition should include the motivation or context in which the person chose to use drugs.