How Easy Is It to Get Addicted to Drugs?

There are a lot of factors that may make you more susceptible to one drug over another. Everyone is different and there are too many factors to give anyone an easy answer as to how easy it is to get hooked on drugs.

Varying factors can include the biological make-up of your body, how sensitive you may be to a certain drug and the chemical make-up of the drug itself.

Some people might be able to use a drug many times without suffering any ill effects, while another person might take the same drug and have a bad reaction or even overdose the first time they use it. Likewise, you can become addicted to a drug the first time you try it, while another person might never form an addiction at all.

Some Drugs More Addictive Than Others

Just as there are vast differences between the people doing drugs, there are also big differences between the types of drugs out there. For example, you may use powdered cocaine and never become addicted to it, but you if you were to sample crack cocaine or heroin, you might get addicted the first time you try it.

Sometimes an addiction can sneak up on you slowly and insidiously. As you continue to use a drug, you can slowly build up a tolerance to it, which means that you no longer get the same feeling or "high" that you once got by taking a small amount.

Tolerance Is a Key Symptom of Addiction

Once your tolerance begins to build, you might increase the dose or frequency of taking the drug. You are trying to get that same "high" that you felt in the beginning when your body was not used to the drug. As you continue to build tolerance, you end up taking more of the drug.

Your body becomes chemically dependent on the drug. Which means, you discover that you need to take the drug just to feel normal or leveled out.

Changing the Brain's Reward System

Drug addiction is considered a brain disease because drugs change the brain—they change its structure and how it works. These brain changes can be long-lasting and can lead to harmful behaviors.

Brain imaging studies of people with addiction show physical changes in areas of the brain that are critical to judgment, decision-making, learning and memory, and behavior control.

Research tells us that repeated use of a drug actually begins to make chemical changes in the brain that alters the brain's reward system. When someone continues to use a substance even when it no longer provides pleasure, it's called the pathological pursuit of rewards, or addiction.

Usually, it takes some time for a drug to begin to change the brain's reward system to the point that a person forms an addiction, but some drugs can do so very quickly.

The bottom line is, all drugs can potentially have life-threatening consequences, and individuals can have very different reactions to the same drug. If you are particularly sensitive to the effects of a certain drug, trying it even once could potentially be dangerous.

Source:

Fowler JS, Volkow ND, Kassed CA, Chang L. Imaging the Addicted Human Brain. Sci Pract Perspect 3(2):4-16, 2007.

National Institute on Drug Abuse. Drugs, Brains and Behavior. The Science of Addiction. 2014.