THE MODELS

Each of the parts below demonstrates how someone could use a drug for the first
time. Each model represents a main and separate road, but it's crucial to remember
that many people will switch back and forth between two or more tracks.

NONSOCIALIZED DRUG USERS MODEL

A lack of socializing is one of the most often discovered antecedents to illegal drug
use. Numerous researches have contrasted the personality traits of illegal drug
users and nonusers. Drug addicts score lower on social conformity and social
responsibility scores than non-addicts, regardless of the personality type utilized.
This is to be expected, because someone who lacks internalized anti-drug standards
is more susceptible to being influenced into drug usage by environmental reasons.
Not being acclimated to traditional culture, according to idea, is a necessary but not
sufficient prerequisite for drug misuse.

Peers have a significant function in our current culture for the nonsocial zed
person. They serve a dual purpose. First, because illegal substances are rarely
available through traditional ways, it is most commonly through peers that they are
made available.

Second, the peer group may serve as role models for drug use, instructing members
on when, when, and how to take drugs. This idea, on the other hand, does not
require peer group indoctrination into a drug culture for the nonsocial zed
individual to have their first drug experience. The influence of the peer group will
vary depending on the amount of time spent inside it and the degree to which it is
free of external controls for various age groups.

Some research suggests that the absence of a mother or father is linked to illegal
drug use (Gorsuch and Butler 1976), which is likely accurate since such absences
might impair socialization processes. The fact that this impact is not always
observed is not surprising, given that the key variable should be parenting rather
than the existence of a specific biological parent.

Religious membership might potentially function in three ways in the nonsocial

zed paradigm.
First, participation in a religious organization implies that the parental figures have
participated in and supported conventional socialization, and may be anticipated to
pass these values on to their children.

Second, if the biological parents are unable or unable to give proper models and
traditional socialization, membership in a traditional group might supply
replacement parental figures. Third, religion affiliation gives a peer network of
people who are more likely to be conventional socialized and supportive of it.

PRODRUG SOCIALIZATION MODEL

It is common for people to be socialised into a pro-drug lifestyle.

Certain Native American tribes or religious or quasi-religious organisations who

take drugs for ceremonial or other purposes are some of the clearest instances of
this. It is not necessary to socialise with those who use illegal substances. Children
who use drugs illegally frequently come from households where one or more of the
parental figures used drugs, according to study.

This paradigm depicts parents as pro-drug socialisation forces. Youths are more
likely to be pro-drug and hence take drugs, whether licit or illegal, because they are
highly valued by their children and spend more time with them.

Another source of prodrug socialisation is peers. The extent to which peers

promote and actively solicit others is now debatable, since there are
counterarguments that the illicit drug subculture, which sprang from a common
desire for drugs, does not actively socialise others into the culture.

In this hypothesis, socialisation into a set of "sympathetic" personality qualities

may be just as essential as socialisation into drugs per se. Individualism and
experimentation, as well as American "left wing" value systems, are generally
found to be predisposing to the use of illegal substances by providing a set of
attitudes and beliefs that support the types of experiments that might involve illicit
drug use.
The model implies that in the individual's immediate milieu, there are prodrug
socialising agents that allow relatively simple access to illicit substances, as well as
multiple possibilities for drug use and models for drug use.

IATROGENIC MODEL

The iatrogenic model may be traced back to the early usage of opium and its
derivatives for medicinal reasons before 1900. The alleviation of physical pain or
mental suffering is the key motivator for beginning illegal drug usage in this
scenario. When life is going well, as it may be for the non-socialized or pro-drug
socialized individual, a person will seek out a drug, but when life is going badly,
he or she will seek out a drug. The fact that many people who take drugs illegally
have already tried comparable substances in hospitals shows that they may be
motivated by the effectiveness of medical usage of these drugs and see illicit drug
use as a simple extension of routine medical procedures "without troubling the
doctor."

The iatrogenic model stresses that these are the people who observe the good uses
of medications for medical reasons on a daily basis and hence may succumb to the
urge to self-prescribe.

Three models are considered:

1. the disease model

2. the physical dependency model

3. the positive reinforcement

McKim (1997) proposes three theories for understanding why people get hooked to
substances, or participates in substance misuse in current terminology:

The model of illness the paradigm of physical dependence the model of positive
reinforcement.

People who had issues with alcohol or other drugs were once considered sinners or
criminals, and whatever aid they received came through the courts or the church.
The medical establishment began to use the term addiction as an explanation for
and diagnosis of excessive drug use at the end of the nineteenth century. When the
World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Medical Association (AMA)
defined alcoholism as a disease in the 1950s, this view was established. One result
of this shift in mindset is the belief that the addict is not in control of their behavior
and that therapy rather than punishment is required.

One issue with the illness model is that it is unclear how the sickness is contracted.
The occurrence of withdrawal symptoms led to the hypothesis that patients
continued to self-administer medications to prevent withdrawal symptoms. The
physical dependence model boils down to this.

Physical Dependency Model

When certain medicines are used repeatedly, withdrawal symptoms arise if the
substance is stopped.

Withdrawal symptoms are compensatory reactions that counteract the drug's

principal effects. As a result, they are the polar opposite of the drug's effects.

Because withdrawal symptoms are unpleasant, reducing them would be considered

negative reinforcement. Addicts' continued use of the substance might be explained
by negative reinforcement. However, some addicts may go through withdrawal
symptoms ('cold turkey') in order to lessen their tolerance and reintroduce drug use
at a lower dose, which is less expensive to acquire.

The inability to notice cocaine's addictive characteristics was due to a focus on

physical withdrawal effects at the cost of other psychological aspects. Although
cocaine does not cause physical dependence (tolerance and withdrawal symptoms),
it is more addictive than heroin. It's also worth noting that the absence of
withdrawal symptoms does not explain why people use drugs in the first place. In
certain cases, negative reinforcement may be to blame for the initial drug use.
Someone who is experiencing unpleasant emotions, for example, may see a
decrease in these sentiments (i.e. negative reinforcement) after taking a medicine.

The most common cause for drug use, however, is positive reinforcement.

Positive Reinforcement Model

Drugs that are addictive are positive reinforcers (Carlson, 2001). Positive
reinforcement, as you may know, can lead to the learning of a new response as
well as the preservation of old behaviours. As a result, the likelihood of engaging
in addictive drug-related behaviours (such as injecting or smoking it) will rise.
Examining the reinforcing qualities of medications in animals is one technique to
test this notion. We already know that traditional reinforcers encourage animals to
push the bar, thus a medicine that maintains a reaction like bar-pressing in an
animal is a reinforcing stimulus.

At one time it was believed that animals could not be made addicted to drugs, but
that view is now rejected because technical developments have shown that animals
will learn new behaviours that cause injection of drugs into their body.

Biological factors
One field of study has focused on the biological factors that underpin drug
addiction. These may be divided into two types of explanations: one that looks at
individual differences in drug dependency risk owing to hereditary traits, and
another that looks at drug dependence in terms of brain alterations caused by
chronic drug administration.

One theory about drug addiction is that certain people are born with a higher risk
of being addicted to drugs (vulnerability). Numerous family studies, adoption
studies, and twin studies have been conducted to determine whether or not such
susceptibility exists. In a recent research, more than one-third (36%) of relatives of
people with an alcohol use disorder (abuse or dependence) were also diagnosed
with an alcohol use disorder (abuse or dependence), compared to 15% of relatives
of people who did not have an alcohol use problem (Merikangaset al., 1998). This
link was shown to be greater in a research that looked at the rate of alcoholism
among siblings. While these research imply that drug use problems cluster in
families, family studies do not allow us to distinguish between the impact of
hereditary and environmental factors. Rather than any underlying genetic
explanation, the clustering might be due to the siblings sharing the same
environment. Adoption studies look at the frequencies of disorder among adoptees
based on the disorder status of their biological and adoptive parents. According to
research involving twins, there is a considerable genetic component (heritability)
that raises the chance of drug abuse.

Neuroadaptation

The notion of neuroadaptation underpins one explanation of drug addiction (Koob

& LeMoal, 1997). After repeated drug administration, neuroadaptation refers to
changes in the brain that occur to counteract a medication's immediate effects.
There are two sorts of adaptations: within-system adaptations, which occur at the
drug's site of action, and between-system adaptations, which occur in distinct
processes prompted by the drug's action. When medications are given frequently,
the chemistry of the brain changes to counteract the drug's effects. When the
medicine is stopped, the adaptations no longer fight each other, and the brain's
equilibrium is broken.This concept basically states that tolerance to a drug's effects
and withdrawal when the medication is stopped are both the outcome of
neuroadaption.

While conventional definitions of substance addiction emphasised physical

withdrawal symptoms, more recent formulations have evolved to emphasise the
existence of more motivational symptoms including dysphoria, despair, irritability,
and anxiety.

Rational choice theories

One set of hypotheses investigates why people choose to participate in self-

destructive behaviour (Elster&Skog, 1999). One of the most important
characteristics of drug addiction is that the person has lost control over their drug
usage.

This can take the form of ongoing usage despite a desire to lessen or stop using the
medication, the use of higher doses of the drug than prescribed, or the use of the
drug for longer periods of time than prescribed.

This issue may be exacerbated in specific situations, such as when an alcoholic

hasn't taken a drink in a long time and walks past a bar.

Some believe that this is a sort of "willpower deficiency," that addiction is an

example of acting "against one's own better judgement." For such theorists, drug-
dependent persons have a choice of two options, both of which may be evaluated
in terms of their future consequences.

Personality theories

Some theories suggest that certain people have a "addictive personality," which
makes them more prone to addiction. This has been described by Hans Eysenck in
terms of a psychological resource model, in which the habit of drug usage develops
because the substance taken serves a certain function connected to the individual's
personality profile (Eysenck, 1997). For such persons, drug-taking behaviour - or,
more particularly, "addiction" - has advantages, even if there are long-term
negative effects.

There are three primary factors, according to Eysenck. According to Eysenck, there
are three major and independent personality dimensions: P (psychoticism), N
(neuroticism), and E (extraversion) (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985). The psychotics
component describes an underlying proclivity for functional psychosis that ranges
from "altruistic" to "schizophrenic" (Eysenck, 1997). Aggression, coldness,
egocentricity, impersonality, and impulsivity are some of the characteristics of this
dimension. The association between drug addiction and certain personality traits
has been studied extensively. The results of studies looking at the link between E
and drug addiction have been mixed.

Other research, conducted with longitudinal studies of children, has examined

personality attributes that predict ‘substance use at a later stage and has found that,
in general, adolescents who are more rebellious and have less conventional
attitudes are more likely to drink, smoke, and use illicit drugs (Institute of
Medicine, 1996).