Is Addiction A Disease Or Disease Essay

Is Addiction a Disease or a Choice?

Addiction should be considered a disease, and people who are suffering from drug abuse should have the right for treatment and medication. In modern culture, (addiction) it refers to the uncontrollable seeking of an experience, usually through use of a substance that either gratifies or relieves pain (Gazzaniga, 1988). Drug addiction can be either psychological or physiological. Some of the causes of why a group in a particular society may tend to the use of drugs as an alternative to look for help, or medical assistance are due to socioeconomic factors, such as being at a disadvantage position in society, or facing unemployment and, as a consequence, poverty. This can later be translated into serious damage

In attempting to separate behaviors (which are always choices) from symptoms (the result of a disease process), the Choice Argument ignores almost all of the findings of neurology. Defects in the brain can cause brain processes to falter. Free will is not an all or nothing thing. It fluctuates under survival stress.

Both alcohol, and drug addiction causes stress-induced hedonic (pleasure) dysregulation in the midbrain while alcohol produces high levels of morphine- like substance that provokes the sensation of pleasure which causes the addiction. Morphine is in a class of medications called opiate (narcotic) analgesics. It works by changing the way the brain and nervous system respond to pain.

Addiction should be treated like a disease despite the individual, or addict behavior or choice to recur to drugs to cope with personal problems, or changes in the environment or society. Addiction must be treated as a disease that needs to be cured using the right medical treatment and assistance because at the end when it comes to treating a disease we look to ameliorate the symptoms in order to fixed the problem, not the what the person did in past, or the environment that caused the person to be in that state. In my opinion, we haven’t come so far with recognizing and treating drug addiction because drug addiction is still being view from the Choice Argument perspective instead of being treated as a