What Is A Drug?

In medical terms, a drug is any substance that when taken into a living organism may modify one or more of its functions. Drugs can provide temporary relief from unhealthy symptoms and/or permanently supply the body with a necessary substance the body can no longer make. Some drugs produce unwanted side affects. Some drugs lead to an unhealthy dependency that has both physiological and behavioral roots.

How Do Drugs Affect The Mind?

The ability of addictive drugs to strongly activate brain reward mechanisms and their ability to chemically alter the normal functioning of these systems can produce an addiction.

Drugs also reduce a person’s level of consciousness, harming the ability to think or be fully aware of present surroundings.

Because of the effects of drugs on the mind, a person with a history of drug use isn’t quite tracking with what is going on around him. Right before your eyes, while apparently in the same room as you are, doing the same things, he is really only partially there and partially in some past events. The drug taker is not moving in the same series of events as others. This can be slight, wherein the person is seen to make occasional mistakes, or it can be as serious as total insanity – where the events apparent to him are completely different from those apparent to anyone else. And it can be all grades in between.

It isn’t that the drug user doesn’t know what’s going on. It is that he perceives something else going on instead of the actual series of events that are happening around him.

What Is Addiction?

Whether a person is genetically or biochemically predisposed to addiction or alcoholism is a controversy that has been debated for years within the scientific community. One school of thought advocates the "disease concept", embracing the notion that addiction is an inherited disease, and that the individual is permanently ill at a genetic level, even for those experiencing long periods of sobriety.

Another philosophy argues that addiction is a dual problem consisting of a physical and mental dependency on chemicals, compounded by a pre-existing mental disorder that physicians categorize into diagnoses such as clinical depression, bipolar disorder, etc. It is true that addictive drugs stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers causing either a reduction of pain or a heightening of mood.

A third philosophy subscribes to the idea that chemical dependency stems from chemical imbalances in the neurological system. The truth in this theory is that repeated use of addictive drugs results in a physical dependency or tolerance where increased amounts of the drug must be taken to achieve the same results. Tolerance occurs when the person no longer responds to the drug in the way that person initially responded. So for example, in the case of heroin or morphine, tolerance develops rapidly to the analgesic (painkilling) effects of the drug. While the development of tolerance is not addiction, many drugs that produce tolerance also have addictive potential.

The fact remains that there is scientific research to support all of these concepts. The question of whether addiction is genetic, behavioral or biochemical does not have an absolute answer. The distinguishing feature of the condition commonly referred to as addiction is the ability of the drug to dominate the individual’s behavior, regardless of whether physical dependence is also produced by the drug.

There are a wide variety of treatment methods being used today, administered based on whatever school of thought the treatment provider believes in. With a 16% to 20% recovery rate based on statistical analysis of national averages, the message is clear that we have a lot more to learn if we are to bring the national recovery rate to a more desirable level.

There is a 4th school of thought that has proven to be more accurate. It has to do with the life cycle of addiction. This data is universally applicable to addiction no matter which hypothesis is used to explain the phenomenon of drug dependency.

Addicts Cannot Stop Using Drugs For Two Reasons. These are:

1. Mental and physical cravings caused by drug residues which remain in the body.

2. The Biochemical Personality caused by drugs and the lifestyle the person adopts to get them.
   

Left unhandled, these manifestations will haunt a person for years even if they have sobered up. Left untreated, this will trigger a relapse. These unresolved symptoms, whether physical or mental in origin, create an underlying low-level type of stress which cannot be completely ignored by the addict. The addict can "just say no" a thousand times, but it only takes him saying "yes" one time to start the cycle of addiction again.

The Narconon® program, first established in 1966, is unique. It is a proven get off and stay off drugs program. The key to the successes of the Narconon® program is the Drug Rehabilitation program developed by author and humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard. This methodology has been used successfully by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to rid themselves of the need for drugs and regain control of their lives.

The Narconon® program, unlike more traditional treatment, deals with both the physical and mental problems brought about by drug use. We restore the addict, both mentally and physically, to the person he was before he began using drugs or alcohol. The end result is a success rate that is 3 to 4 times that of other programs. None of these solutions involves the use of any drug.