It is not easy to understand the complex nature of drug abuse, drug abuse and drug addiction is an extremely devastating disease that claims hundreds of lives and thousands of lives each and every year.
Drug addiction and drug abuse is not something that only affects the user or the person taking the drugs, the fallout of drug abuse and drug addiction is immense and effects dozens of people in consequential waves that ripple out from the person abusing drugs and affecting everyone related to that person or anyone who comes into contact with and deals with that person.
To begin to understand drug addiction one needs to understand what causes the addiction in a physiological sense, as well as identifying and understanding other root causes such as emotional trauma, social economic factors and much more.
Every medical expert agrees that drug addiction is in fact a chronic brain disease with a wide range of contributing factors including psychological factors, social factors and even biological factors as well.
From a social point of view, the absence of a normal and nurturing home environment that promotes healthy choices or a home life that is filled or characterized by abuse, either mental, emotional or physical can drastically increase the chances that the child or teenager will attempt one or another form of drug in order to compensate for emotional needs or indeed even social ones, often the taking of drugs has a great deal to do with social and peer acceptance.
There is also a strong belief within the medical and scientific communities that drug addiction has a genetic root cause.
Other factors that cause drug addiction may even be quite harmless at first, legitimate and legal drugs that have been prescribed for severe pain due to injury or operation to correct an injury can also very easily lead to addiction in patients, the warning signs are there, it begins with dependence, moves on to abuse and the final phase is full blown addiction.
Regardless of the type of drug or how the addiction actually started, all heavy drugs carry with them very severe health risks and dangers from serious changes in the way that the brain functions and even how the brain restructures itself because of drug addiction, to severe changes in behavior and personality that can even result in criminal behavior in a person that would not normally be prone to violent or criminal behavior at all.