Substance Addiction

Substance addiction is a patterned use of a drug in which the user consumes the substances in amounts that are harmful to themselves or possibly others. It’s important to learn about substance addiction due to the harmful health hazards it produces as well as the medical, criminal, and economical costs that comes along with it. For starters, the abuse of tobacco, and illicit drugs total up more than $740 billion dollars related to lost work, medical care, and crimes annually in our Nation. Along with the exceeding medical, economic, and criminal costs, substance addiction provides terrible health hazards such as cancer, disease, and HIV/AIDS. Substance addiction also causes psychological effects on the body, such as depression, anxiety, violence, hallucinations, confusion, and a psychological tolerance to the drug's effects creating a desire to do increasing amounts of the drug. On the other hand, substance addiction also causes physiological effects on the human body which include unexplained weight loss, memory loss, abnormal sleeping patterns, jerking or twitching movements, red, bloodshot eyes and the inability to remain awake when not moving. Nicotine is a toxic colorless or yellowish oily liquid that is located in tobacco. Over 20% of deaths in the …show more content…
However, these effects eventually wear off, resulting for an urge to smoke again in order to get those same feelings. This results with a cycle and your brain may adapt by increasing its own number of nicotinic receptors, thus you will gradually need more nicotine to satisfy yourself. Nicotine also causes a physical addiction to tobacco because it's a mild stimulant that manages to increase activity in the brain (somewhat like caffeine and