zlacker

In my experience, having watched friends enter that position, it's drugs which cause drug addiction. Mental health might play a factor, but if I gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, their brain chemistry would be almost irreversibly changed and would spend years, if not the rest of their life, wanting more. Same goes for powerful opioids.

One can argue that certain people are more predisposed to enjoy being high, I'm one of those people. When you see incredibly rich and successful people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, and Philip Seymour Hoffman ultimately losing it all to that desire, I feel like it's hard to blame something like lack of opportunity or government welfare dependence.

The "bad" drugs, crack/meth/opioids/etc. make your brain feel a way sober-type people can't really imagine. I don't know what the answer is.

>>hector+(OP)
> In my experience, having watched friends enter that position, it's drugs which cause drug addiction. Mental health might play a factor, but if I gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, their brain chemistry would be almost irreversibly changed and would spend years, if not the rest of their life, wanting more. Same goes for powerful opioids.

I bet if you gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, almost certainly nothing would change except their toilet flushing slightly more frequently!

My point was not about basic mechanism of dependence which sure will happen to anybody. It was about what causes them to seek out and take those things in excess in the first place.

> One can argue that certain people are more predisposed to enjoy being high, I'm one of those people. When you see incredibly rich and successful people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, and Philip Seymour Hoffman ultimately losing it all to that desire, I feel like it's hard to blame something like lack of opportunity or government welfare dependence.

Individual cases and especially these extreme outliers are no good. It's not that one single government policy or social problem is the cause of all drug addiction, but they could contribute to the issue on a population level.

>>hector+(OP)
Not like people in other countries don't have access to the same drugs. It's not solved 100% anywhere, but the magnitude is very different in say Canada.

End of the day, it's still societal issues that's causing some people to go down this path. Most of the drug addicts have some level of "atypical" upbringing. Maybe abusive childhood, constant foster care, growing up in a bad neighborhood with the wrong influence etc. Seems like we should be focusing on solving those issues, which not only benefits the topic at hand but society and communities in general.

>>hector+(OP)
I don't think this is true. "Only" a quarter of people that try heroin become addicted. Similar numbers with alcohol (15% of people that try alcohol develop a problem with it), but given alcohol is more widespread, there is some selection bias because only a subset of people try heroin, whereas nearly everyone tries alcohol. I would not be surprised if the overall addiction risk is very similar between alcohol and heroin.

I think it's much more likely some sort of genetic trait underlying it.