Drug & Alcohol Addiction

Drug & alcohol addiction are a dependence on a street drug or a medication or alcohol. When you’re addicted, you may not be able to control your drug use and drinking, you may continue using the drug or drinking alcohol despite the harm it causes. Drug & alcohol addiction can cause an intense craving for the drug or alcohol. You may want to quit, but most people find they can’t do it on their own.

Not everyone who uses drugs or drinks alcohol becomes addicted, but for many what starts as casual use leads to drug or alcohol addiction. Drug and alcohol addiction can cause serious, long-term consequences including problems with physical and mental health, relationships, employment and the law.

You may need help from your doctor, family, friends, support groups or an organized treatment program to overcome your drug addiction and stay drug-free.

Most drug addictions start with casual or social use of a drug. For some people, this is as far as it goes. For other people, using the drug becomes a habit and use becomes more and more frequent. As time passes, you may need larger doses of the drug to get high. Soon you may need the drug just to feel good. As your drug use increases, you may find that it becomes increasingly difficult to go without the drug. Stopping may cause intense cravings and make you feel physically ill (withdrawal symptoms).

A person may be either physically addicted, psychologically addicted, or both, depending on which specific substance they consume (only some drugs are physically addictive), and the response of the addict’s body and mind to the presence of the drug (and its absence from the system upon cessation of use) will vary accordingly.

However, in the cases of both psychological and physcal addiction, the addict will crave their substance of abuse, and procuring and consuming it will come to dominate their daily routine, their thought processes, and eventually their entire lives – often at terrible cost to their life prospects and circumstances, their relationships, their self-esteem, and their physical and mental health.