INTRODUCTION

These pages have been designed and put together by a group of individuals who've actually been there.  The aim of the pages is to offer advice and information to anyone who needs it - from those who have actually been at the "coal face".  We hope you find them entertaining as well as informative and useful.  If you feel you need to contact us you can view the contact info via the appropriate text link on the navigation bar at the top of each page, but first a little preamble.

WHAT IS ADDICTION ?

We are using the term addiction here because we believe it's a word that most people think and understand.  Most people also seem to think that addiction is a relatively new phenomena, however the old testament refers to drunkenness and addictive behaviours and there seems to have been times in Ancient Greece when alcohol worried the philosophers and politicians of that country.  So it's as old as man itself. What might be happening in the present day is we have a greater awareness of these behaviours and problems.  The question is then what is "an addiction".  Our definition is any behaviour that is repeated over and over despite negative consequences.  Addiction features two other occurrences, these are tolerance and withdrawal.  Tolerance happens when it takes more and more of the drug to get the same sorts of effects we got when we used the substance for the first time.  This can happen because our bodies can work more efficiently at braking down the substances, all because our brain cells don't get the same feelings from the drug as they use to.  Withdrawal differs from drug to drug but relates to a severity, discomfort, or a risk to health when we stop using a particular drug.  Withdrawal can be relatively mild or very painful where an individual can have seizures, or perhaps risk dying.  You could call the types of hangover that many people experience over the weekend as withdrawal.  There are other terms you could come across when talking about substance misuse; dependency and abuse.  We don't intend here to get into a long debate about clarifying and defining these meanings suffice to say that all are fairly similar.

HOW DO DRUGS WORK ?

Most drugs, in fact most behaviours, affect the brain and brain chemicals.   Thinking, mood, feelings - all seem to depend to a certain extent on the brain's chemicals.  Essentially some substances will act directly on receptor cells that are designed to receives naturally occurring chemicals in the body or they will block as what's known as the re-uptake mechanism. This means that there will be more of certain chemicals around the brain which will then over-stimulate the receptors and cause an individual to feel "stoned".  Substances seem to effect the brain's reward systems including neuro-transmitters such as dopamine and endorphins.  The major question though is why do people use? There seems to be as many reasons for people using drugs as there are people using.  Here are a few thoughts.   People use because it changes their mood and what is interesting about our experience is that as many people seem to like to get "low" as they do "high".  They use simple to feel different. Some of us like to get a little disorientated so that we can become more extravert in our behaviour.  Sometimes our substance use acts as a social lubricant.  It's easier for us to be with a group of people once we've had a few drinks and loosened up.  Problems occur if this is the only strategy that people have for interacting well with people.

Some people use in order to feel that they belong in a group.  Peer pressure or peer pull could be an important reason why particularly young people get involved in drug use.  Some people just like to experiment with all types of different behaviour - again this is particularly relevant to young people.

Other people use because significant others in their lives have also used.  Parents, close relatives, family friends, can also have an important influence.

Many people have used to enhance their performance.  We know about athletes using anabolic steroids, but also musicians and artists of one sort or another have used mind-altering substances to assist in becoming more creative or work harder.

Some of us use in order to self-medicate - substances are used to feel normal.  There are also a host of other reasons that we don't have enough time to go into here.  The thing is that all these reasons have influenced the theories of what causes addiction but before we look at that let's look at what some of these substances actually do.  Remember though, the only way to absolutely avoid having any sort of drug problem is not to use at all.