Why Drug Addiction Is So Hard to Kick

Why Is Drug Addiction So Hard To Kick?
Zach Himelright
As a recovering addict I have a lot of insight as to why drug addiction is so hard to kick. A lot of people don’t know but there are two parts to a drug addiction. You have your physical addiction, and you have your mental addiction.
Many people will disagree that addiction is not a disease, but it is an actual medical disease. The definition for a disease is, a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment. Now according to this definition an addiction is an incorrectly functioning organ (the brain) resulting from poisons (the drug).
Now with this little bit of information it gives us insight as to why an addiction is so hard to kick. The physical addiction of the drug goes away within a matter of about a week to two weeks. So you could just take an addicted person and lock them in a cell, room or just put them in a place where they have no access to drugs for a week and they won’t be addicted anymore right? Wrong, and I will tell you why. All you have done is taken away the physical addiction, but you have left the most important part of the addiction out of the picture, the mental addiction.
Let me tell you why the mental addiction is so hard to kick. The reason why is because you never stop wanting the drug. Why? Because as humans we like things that make us feel good. Another part to this is we are lazy and we like the easy way out of a problem. This is made clear by our technological advances. We have the car so we don’t have to walk, and soon we will be having robots doing our normal day to day chores.
Now you may ask what this information has to do with drug addiction. It has everything to do with drug addiction. What do drugs do? They provide an easy escape to how we are feeling. They are an easy solvent to our problem. And because of this the mental addiction never goes away. As soon as a trigger hits us we begin to brainstorm ways to solve the problem. And we always look for the easiest way to solve that problem. A person who has never done drugs doesn’t know what the relief that drug can bring. So all a person who has kicked the drug addiction have really done Is come up with a way to divert their mind so they don’t choose the easy way out and do the drug. This is what specialists, and any person who is teaching or trying to get someone to kick the habit, call coping skills. And having good healthy coping skills so that we don’t do the drug is the second most important part of a drug addiction. The first is the will to change. I am a firm believer that if a person doesn’t want to change or doesn’t think they have a problem they are not going to change no matter how much you tell them that their behavior is destructive.