I have to disagree on that one (but agree on the rest of what you have said). I do think that a lot of the potential of addiction is external. What you psychologically lack, and what substance fills that lack, causes you to gravitate towards that substance, but how hard that substance sticks to you (or you to it, depending on how you view it) is determined by a very large portion by the neuropharmacological nature of said drug. Opioids for instance rewire your brain in a way that can make you crave the substance even if you don't like it anymore. Many opioid addicts who don't even get anything out of their smack anymore, still get intense cravings, not because of some obscure, freudian need that has remained unfulfilled (even though that certainly CAN be the reason), but simply by easily explainable neurochemical processes that go on in the brain of everybody who has been hooked on this substance class for a long enough time, due to long-term neuroplastic changes. Even if you have a person who doesn't crave any drugs at all, a total normie, and force heroin on him for a long enough time (and he never even develops a taste for it) and then stop exogenously providing him with the opioid, his brain will react with intense cravings. So I do think that a lot of the psychological component of addiction is in fact caused by the inherent nature of the psychoactive substance, and the way it interacts with our brains. A good explanation on why opioid addiction is primarily a neurobiological issue instead of a psychological one, can be found in Enno Freye's "Opioide in der Medizin". There is also an english translation of the book, but only up to the sixth edition.
The process you describe is called conditioning. It's also well-known that 'neurons that fire together, wire together'. You end up in a self-perpetuating loop where doing the drug forms neural pathways specifically to do with doing the drug, which then in return facilitates the repeat of the drug-taking, which re-enforces those neural connections etc.
None of this is new and none of this is specific to one particular class of drug.
'opiates change your brain'. And people talk about it like that's some inescapable absolute.
EVERYTHING you do on a regular basis CHANGES YOUR BRAIN, ffs.
'Brain changes' be damned. It's meaningless.
The brain is neuroplastic and even drug-induced brain changes can be reversed or overwritten by learning new behaviour patterns.
Sure by virtue of their own individual brain chemistry some people have greater affinities for some drugs than others, and are therefore more likely to develop an unhealthy relationship to those drugs. I'm a classic case in point. But that STILL doesn't locate some property of 'addiction' PHYSICALLY in the drug.
What I'm saying here is ask any chemist and tell him to show you the particular molecular component in which 'addictiveness' is encoded, and he won't be able to do it because it does not exist.
That narrative also can't sensibly account for how some people use heroin, meth or coke on a recreational basis without ever developing an addiction, while others are hopelessly addicted to weed.
... As for opiates allegedly having this special 'brain changing' inherent capacity as compared to other drugs (and I bought this assertion for a LONG time), explain to me the statistic that says only a paltry 2% of pain patients on high continuous doses of morphine are found to be 'addicted' (rather than just physically dependent), while a whopping proportion of 76% of street heroin users are.
The drug in question is essentially pretty much the same substance. And heck I've had occasional better highs on medical-grade morphine than cut-to-fuck street heroin (an experience I won't be surprised if you corroborated); pretty sure the pharma M is mostly more potent. Yet you still get this vast discrepancy in addiction rates.
Well, one portion of users is strictly looking to the drug as a medical treatment to alleviate a medical issue. The other cohort is blatantly valuing the drug in a whole different way and seeking to get something else from it.
It clearly depends far more on the motivation of the user, how he regards his drug and what he expects it to do for him, than the pharmacological properties of the drug.
PS for clarity, opiates absolutely do mess with dopamine levels and production if used to excess or too regularly, but again this is a reversible process.
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