Drug Addiction and Drug Abuse

One might think that the concept of addiction is as old as time. Not so: the idea is relatively recent – and those who have defended always were driven by political or moral. The modern version of the concept was invented in the eighteenth by the physician Benjamin Rush, with his friends in the anti-alcohol, he had the addiction as the cause of (and argument against) the dangers of demon alcohol. Alcoholic beverages were then accused of causing a “disease control”.

Later, the theory of “degeneration” would make its way into the medical field, it was thought that mental disorders could be hereditary; this heredity condemning its victims to the mental and social failure. In the nineteenth in the Colonies, alcohol was rampant among the natives, deemed “inferior” the psychiatrists concluded that the two states – Alcoholism and degeneration – went together. The addiction as such was less attributable to the harmfulness of drugs, it is then attributed to the physiological weakness of the victims. He was complaining addicts, not condemn them.

The “degeneration” and eugenics eventually disappear in the 1950s – a death-deserved and well overdue. One idea, however, survived these concepts: the claim that addiction is caused by vulnerability to be a susceptibility which existed even before the person came into contact with drugs. This line of thought seems to have peaked in 2004: a report from the World Health said while substance dependence was “a mental disorder, as well as the neurological or psychiatric illness.

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