Interesting article from Divine Caroline:
Researchers don’t completely understand addiction and perhaps never will, but the majority does agree that the recipes for addiction vary and can include an array of factors including psychological demons, social environment, lack of intellectual stimulation, learned behavior from family members, genetics, and depression. Parsing out the ingredients and determining what causes addiction versus what was caused by it is like trying to decide if the meat was tough before being cooked or if it was tough because it was cooked improperly. But scientists have come a long way in understanding the brain circuitry involved in addiction. The research has raised hopes for medications that will quash insatiable cravings, not simply quench them with another drug as methadone does for heroin. – from Divine Caroline