Addiction has remained a vague concept in spite of efforts to define it with physiological and psychological precision.
The word’s Latin root refers to a legal judgment whereby a person is given over to the control of another. In recent centuries the meaning has ranged from a simple inclination toward an activity or interest to an uncontrollable desire to take opium, which historically was viewed as the most addictive of drugs.
Opiate addiction is characterized chiefly by the repeated use of the drug to prevent withdrawal symptoms, which include muscle and joint pains, sweating, and nausea. The extreme discomfort of withdrawal passes away after one to three days, although a yearning for the drug may last for a very long time. Some attempts to define addiction in medical terms (e.g., restricting it to opiate withdrawal phenomena) have led to confusion among members of the public because cocaine, according to that restricted definition, would be considered nonad- dictive and, by implication, safer than the opiates.For the sake of brevity, this essay considers chiefly opium and coca and their constituents and derivatives. The chemicals that could be discussed range from the barbiturates to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), but the models of control and therapy commonly applied to these other substances evolved in the past two centuries from experience with the coca bush, opium poppies, and their powerful alkaloids.
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