What are the main causes of drug addiction?

The problem of drug addiction has become the headache or fashion of the higher societies along with daily earners, labourers, rag pickers, truck drivers, medical workers mostly in urban areas where these chemical substances easily and amply available.

Following are some of the causes of drug addiction:

1. Personality Traits of the Addict

The addict before addiction must be having the feeling of insecurity or immaturity. It depends on person to person.

2. Frustration Tolerance

Sometimes the person does not have capacity or have poor capacity to tolerate and face the frustration. They also avoid the hard reality of life by a flight into what is called the “drug produced fantasy” which cause them to drug addiction.

3. Drugs Fit Like Keys Into Nerve Cells

The specific neurotic cells are more prone to the substance of drug. Therefore, once the person start taking drugs his brain cells demands it regularly and thus they fit like keys into nerve cells. This happens particularly in case of drugs like brown sugar and Heroin.

4. Curiosity

Some people, mostly youngsters and teenagers, they have strong desire to experience the dose of the drug at least once. This eagerness may be for:

1. getting an experience of the thrills of living.
2. getting new insight
3. enhancing their creative ability
4. enjoying fully their mental experiences Such people become ‘drug dependents’.

5. Peer Pressure

The group psychology is more dominant to any kind of habit, good or bad. The group should get accept the person as a member for which all the activities of the group are shared by everybody. For the members of the group it has become the fashion to adopt new habits of intoxication. The members of the group and friend circle lay pressure to abuse the drug and become an addict. Therefore, “The peer group first take chemicals, and then chemicals take them.”

6. Relief from Pain and Frustration

Today, the people (including men, women & children) are more busy with day to day activities. Hence, there are frequent mental tensions, dissatisfaction, frustration in life. It is a hasty and loaded life. The people faces problems like family, in colleges, schools, universities, work places, business houses. Due to wrong notion that drug gives relief from frustration and pain and person can get freedom from mental tension only by consuming drug. This lead the person to the fatal habit of drug addiction.

7. Parental Behaviour

As like the peer pressure, the behaviour and influence of the parents (mother, father, elder brother or any family member) is also responsible for the youngster to become an addict to drugs. The children (teenagers) irritates if father, mother or any member of the family smoke cigarettes and tobacco, drink alcohol or takes drug.

8. Loneliness, Anxiety and Boredom

It is said that ‘an empty mind is devils workshop’. Therefore the youngster may consume drug if he develops the feeling of loneliness and he is really alone at home or any lonely place. The person caught by anxiety and got bored by doing or nothing having to do may consume drug and become an addict of it.

9. Alienation and Introvert Nature

The youngsters who can not share freely their problems and inspirations with their parents or siblings or even with the close friends which they can hardly have and they are introvert by nature may easily embrace the habit of drug addiction.

10. Socio-Cultural Background

In some societies intake of drugs like charas, ganja, bhang, opium etc. consumed regularly is considered normal like pan-chewing. It is regarded under the pretext of the cultural and traditional and some times divine and these drugs are consumed.