Word: leshner
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...everyone who uses painkillers for more than a few weeks at a time will become an addict, says Dr. Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He suspects that most of those abusing Vicodin obtained the drug illegally. Says Leshner: "It's important to separate when the substance is a medicine and when it is abused." Just ask Eminem, who in Under the Influence declares, "I'm like a mummy at night/fightin' with bright lightning/frightened with five little white Vicodin pills bitin...
...pretty typical for someone who is addicted to drugs or alcohol. Experts and addicts alike have long understood that willpower alone is helpless in the face of addiction, and in recent years science has started to figure out why. "The brain of a drug user," explains Dr. Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, "is physically altered in ways that make it difficult to resist further...
...good news, say experts, is that recovery is still possible after multiple relapses, although whether or not serving jail time has a beneficial effect is hotly contested. "Addiction," says Leshner, "is a chronic illness, just like high blood pressure. We can't cure it, but we're getting better at managing it all the time." So while Downey's situation looks very bad at the moment and for the immediate future, it may not be entirely hopeless...
...even when an addict has been clean for a long time, says Leshner, the addictive brain has been permanently primed for relapse. One common trigger for returning to drugs is stress, which can send the recovering addict back to a proven stress reliever. Another is contact with people, places and things associated with drugs--cues that bring up dormant memory circuits laid down during active addiction and thus reawaken craving...
Since addiction is caused by drug exposure, Leshner believes, anyone who takes drugs long enough will become an addict. But "long enough" can vary dramatically from one person to the next. In Downey's case, it can't have helped that when he was six, he was given a joint by his filmmaker father (Downey Sr. has since expressed regret for that action). But without an understanding of individual biological differences, which scientists have yet to unravel, nobody can say whether those experiences turned Downey into an addict right from the start or whether repeated drug use over many years...