Drug addiction is likely to affect all of our lives, with any luck not through our own actions but probably because of one or more of our family and friends. Now firmly entrenched as a brain disease (Leshner, 1999; Wise, 2000), drug addiction is among the most costly such diseases in modern society. Drug addiction is most often defined as a chronically relapsing disorder in which the addict exp...

Drug addiction is a chronic relapsing disorder for which research has been dedicated to understand the various factors that contribute to development, loss of control, and persistence of compulsive addictive behaviors. In this review, we provide a broad overview of various theories of addiction, drugs of abuse, and the neurobiology involved across the addiction cycle. Specific focus is devoted ...

Impulsivity is the tendency to act prematurely without foresight. Behavioral and neurobiological analysis of this construct, with evidence from both animal and human studies, defines several dissociable forms depending on distinct cortico-striatal substrates. One form of impulsivity depends on the temporal discounting of reward, another on motor or response disinhibition. Impulsivity is commonl...

Heroin addiction is devastating to both the person addicted and to society. Attempts to treat heroin addiction have proved difficult due to the extreme addictive qualities of the drug. Medication-assisted recovery or pharmacotherapy, such as methadone and buprenorphine, are controversial in that it is providing a medication that has similar qualities of heroin itself. Behavioral treatments alon...

The idea that specific kind of foods may have an addiction potential and that some forms of overeating may represent an addicted behavior has been discussed for decades. In recent years, the interest in food addiction is growing and research on this topic lead to more precise definitions and assessment methods. For example, the Yale Food Addiction Scale has been developed for the measurement of...

Pathological gambling is a behavioral addiction characterized by a chronic failure to resist the urge to gamble. It shares many similarities with drug addiction. Glucocorticoid hormones including cortisol are thought to play a key role in the vulnerability to addictive behaviors, by acting on the mesolimbic reward pathway. Based on our previous report of an imbalanced sensitivity to monetary ve...

This issue of Alcohol Research & Health examines addiction to multiple substances--that is, combined dependence on alcohol and other drugs (AODs), including marijuana, cocaine, and opioids. It seems fitting, then, to begin the issue with a look at what constitutes "addiction." The Oxford English Dictionary (pp. 24-25) traces the term addiction to Roman law, under which addiction was a "formal g...

Abstract Personality traits have been extensively studied to understand different behavioral addictions. However, less is known about the relationship of employees’ dark personality and work addiction. The purpose present study was examine associations between Big Five (i.e., extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness) narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism...

The abuse liability of nicotine is comparable to or greater than that of a variety of addictive substances. However, the reinforcing and/or rewarding properties of addictive substances other than nicotine far outweigh the reinforcing and/or rewarding effects associated with nicotine use. These data suggest that, in addition to the intrinsic reinforcing effects of nicotine, other factors may con...