Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

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> The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved.

"addiction" is not equivalent to "dependence", nor does one imply the other. pain management patients are typically dependent on opioids; they would have severe withdrawal if they abruptly stopped their regimen. but they don't necessarily have the compulsive/obsessive behavior of addicts. there are also drugs people get addicted to that don't have much or any associated withdrawal symptoms. people don't get withdrawal from gambling, but they can surely be as addicted as opioid users.

I've seen several comments like this recently. addiction seems an odd thing to gatekeep. the only "requirements" for addiction are impairment of control related to particular behaviors/substances, preoccupation with said behavior/substance, and continued use/behavior despite consequences.

Opiate addiction results in a higher concentration of opiate receptors on many cell surfaces. Possible down-regulation of endogenous endorphin production may also occur, as I recall. The result of removing the exogenous opiates is thus a very painful experience as the endorphin/receptor ratio is destabilized. This also seems to play a role in alcohol addiction as alcohol use has opiate-like co-effects[1]

[1] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh313/185-195.htm

Calling this 'dependency' instead of 'addiction' seems like a semantics game. A lot of other behaviors seem to involve dopamine rewards, but in those case withdrawal does seem to be much less of a physical phenomenon. However I'd definitely argue that addiction is a biochemical phenomenon. Whether or not it is 'compulsive' - well, people have free will and some people just want that little boost, even if it means they get led around by the nose by advertisers and opinion influencers and so on. A bit of self-awareness is a good antidote.

Some author - William Burroughs? said something like, "Heroin is the ultimate capitalist product - the consumer will crawl through a sewer of broken glass just for the opportunity to buy". That's why consumer culture promotes addiction in all spheres of life.

While it does seem like a matter of semantics, in the end, whether something is classified as an addiction or a dependance doesn't seem to be as binary as "has a biological response to removal of said substance".

I'd argue that since we do have dopamine/seretonin driven reward systems, anything that modifies a physiological expression of the neuro-chemical lifecycle from pre-exposure to post-exposure (whether that be density of receptors, abundance of neurotransmitter, some yet unknown neurochemical expression), then that substance can cause addiction.

Video games could do this, just not as dramatically as heroin, but given that modern day life is basically just a hamster wheel of our neurochemical systems, anything has the potential to be addictive as defined above, it all depends on where on the spectrum of addiction said substance lies.

it's not semantics. there's a useful distinction between addiction and dependence. dependence is the tolerance/withdrawal cycle. it doesn't necessarily coincide with the cravings that are characteristic of addiction. someone on pain meds for a broken leg may never think of them again once the treatment ends. it doesn't make sense to consider/treat them as an addict. conversely, a gambling addict is more similar to a heroin addict than a typical PM patient.

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