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You should read “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts” - might change your perspective. It would be far more beneficial for society to learn and understand how addiction and the brain work and develop policies around that - more penalties are not going to curb drug addiction.

I highly suggest reading In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate(?). Fantastic eye-opening book. Addiction is very often about past trauma, and as few have any control over that, it might as well be considered the “addictive brain” in my opinion. Really a great book that opened my mind to new views.

An excellent book on the topic of drug abuse is Gabor Mate's, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He makes a convincing argument that the majority of drug users are struggling with severe early trauma. Given this study and Mate's book, it may just be that traumatized people are looking for ways to forget. They could be seeking the forgetfulness as exactly what they want. This is different from saying that memory loss is necessarily a bad, unintended consequence.

Excerpt: Doctors in many parts of the world — including Canada and some European countries — prescribe more powerful opiates than their peers in the United States. In England, if, say, you get hit by a car, you may be given diamorphine (the medical name for heroin) to manage your pain. Some people take it for long periods. If what we’ve been told is right, they should become addicted in huge numbers.

But this doesn’t occur. The Canadian physician Gabor Maté argues in his book “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts” that studies examining the medicinal use of narcotics for pain relief find no significant risk of addiction. I’ve talked with doctors in Canada and Europe about this very issue. They say it’s vanishingly rare for a patient given diamorphine or a comparably strong painkiller in a hospital setting to develop an addiction.

Addiction controls what you want, regardless of whether you like the thing you are addicted to. That's what makes it hard to beat by just white-knuckling it; whatever strength or will you have gets redirected against you.

You might enjoy some of the accounts in The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_the_Realm_of_Hungry_...

Why not? The obvious difference is that an adults nervous system is developed while an infant's is still developing.

"Early life stress may have a lasting impact on the developmental programming of the dopamine (DA) system implicated in psychosis." [1]

I highly recommend Gabor Maté's book "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" for a deeper discussion of how various types of pre- and postnatal stress impact a person's proclivity towards addictive behavior and ADHD.

But even for adults extreme and overwhelming stressful experiences can cause long-lasting and even multigenerational psychological consequences through epigenetic mechanisms.

1: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/648892?limo=0

Reading the 'in the realm of hungry ghosts' from Gabor Mate I learned that is not the substance itself but 3 major circumstances which trigger addiction in the human: powerlessness, isolation and stress. These key factors bring up behaviour patterns for addiction. Let it be sugar, sex, Screentime, drugs, food, sport, buying things, etc....
Really helped me to reflect on my patterns and I also learned about the difference between passion and addiction.

My 50 cents here.

I've been in (psychodynamic) therapy for around 9 months because I was addicted to porn before my relationship with my current gf. After around 1 year of honeymoon period bliss (and lots of passionate sex) the habit and urges came back stronger than ever. I lost interest in my gf sexually and it led to a lot of problems between us. I then started therapy.

I've not yet "conquered" my porn addiction, but I've realized it may have its roots in repressed anger and unable to deal with anger in a healthy way. So I echo the answer of the other comments that mention emotional displacement as the cause. I think the first step is to realize that you're addicted because subconsciously your mind is looking for relief from some difficult feeling you're unable to confront. This makes it useless to try quit by using "will power". Instead I would look for a good therapist who can help with behavioural addictions and with help and hard work you might be able to overcome it. I'm speaking only from personal experience and of course some of these things may not apply to you. But I hope it helps. Good luck my friend.

If you wish to understand more about emotional displacement, depression and addiction, I found two books particularly enlightening on the subject. One is "The body keeps the score" by Bessel Van Der kolk. The other is "In the realm of hungry ghosts" by Gabor Mate. Highly recommend both. The first is particularly great imo.

Right. The cartels shifted heavily to ecstasy and methamphetamine. Some heroin too, though they can't beat the Chinese on price per dose compared to fentanyl and carfentanil. Sure many members of these cartels will be loathe to take mundane jobs but what other choice will they have? The profit margin of legal recreational drugs will be driven down somewhere to the area of alcohol and tobacco.

I disagree with your perceived loss of justice should drug use be legalized. Laws exist to protect people. Drug laws have only served to hurt nearly every person on earth when considering supply chain and tangential effects. By opening up the law to allow people to self medicate we are actually reducing harm at every step from the companies producing raw materials to the end users. To only consider a solution that outlaws the existence of an addict is inhumane, immoral, impossible, and outright delusional. To learn more about these topics and hopefully gain some empathy for addicts I suggest reading Gabor Matès "In the realm of hungry ghosts."

https://barnesandnoble.com/w/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts-g...

Thanks for sharing your experiences, and your success with self-experimentation. It's tragic that a similar protocol is not a first-line treatment for so-called "mental illness" (a term which should be entirely discarded [edit: the most observable symptoms are behavioral but the patient's condition is a conglomeration of contributing causes]).

Reading your comment, the notion of 'biological stress' came to mind. Wikipedia redirects to this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(biology) (the subsections #Psychology and #Psychological_concepts are especially applicable to your comment).

  The ambiguity in defining this phenomenon
  was first recognized by Hans Selye 
  (1907–1982) in 1926. In 1951 a commentator 
  loosely summarized Selye's view of stress as 
  something that "...in addition to being 
  itself, was also the cause of itself, and 
  the result of itself".[30][31]
  
  First to use the term in a biological 
  context, Selye continued to define stress as 
  "the non-specific response of the body to 
  any demand placed upon it". As of 2011 
  neuroscientists such as Bruce McEwen and 
  Jaap Koolhaas believe that stress, based on 
  years of empirical research, "should be 
  restricted to conditions where an 
  environmental demand exceeds the natural 
  regulatory capacity of an organism".

Dr. Gabor Maté quotes Selye in his book about addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: "It may be said without hesitation that for man the most important stressors are emotional."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor_Mat%C3%A9_(physician)

I read 100 books last year and there were five books that changed my outlook of life in some significant aspect. The list here: https://mailchi.mp/8ff9bef428e2/want-to-know-someone-better-...

Of those five books, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" by Gabor Mate changed me the most. I actually re-read portions of the book last night.

Agree fully on the points about people working with addicts, and Purdue seem to have no moral compass to counteract the profit motive. About the enslavememt to the chemical itself, it’s more complicated. The drugs primarily tend to serve as substitutes for the natural positive reinforcers the addicted person is missing, and there’s often a history of trauma and psychological unhealth prior to the drugs entering the picture. Like for the Krokodil users in the parent post, the natural and externally imposed consequences of maintaining the habit lead to a negative spiral where there’s more pain, suffering and hopelessness to face when trying to quit. I highly recommend Johann Hari’s book ”Chasing the Scream”, and Gabor Mate’s ”In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts”. Truly enlightening reads if one wants to better understand addiction