What Are The Social Effects Of Addiction?

What Are The Social Effects of Addiction?

Addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease. Brain imaging shows that addiction severely alters brain areas critical to decision-making, learning and memory, and behavior control, which may help to explain the compulsive and destructive behaviors of addiction. In order to fully understand addiction, we must first understand why or how one could become addicted. Peer pressure, curiosity, attraction, release of inhibitions and relaxation are some of the reason of addiction. When I use the word addiction it does not necessarily have to mean substance abuse but in does majority of the time because studies show that, substance abuse has the most effects on society because there are many different ways it can go. Addiction can be many other things as well. Without intervention and treatment, the disease runs a course marked by progressive crippling of mental, physical, and spiritual functioning with a devastating impact on all sectors of life- social, family, financial, vocational, educational, moral/spiritual, and legal.

Many addicts lose their job due to an inability to perform their roles and or duties. They may have stolen from the employer, have let their appearance and personal hygiene go down, have allot of absenteeism, start developing poor time management, and be generally unsafe to carry out their tasks. So with saying all of that brings the fact that they generally don’t have an income coming in the home any more. Therefore all services needed to be provided for this person and, or their family is depending on the government, or in other words (our) the tax payer’s money. This brings financial issues in which is a big concern in society because it has an effect on the entire country’s finances. The costs of policing, healthcare, court costs, benefits to anyone affected by the consequences of addicts, the loss of tax and national insurance generated from lack of employment and the costs of running help lines and support groups are absolutely enormous and a huge drain of the country’s accounts. Not to mention the facts that while this person is unemployed they will receive other types of public aid. I don’t think many people look at the big picture until it is broken down like so.

One of the biggest consequences of drug related addiction is the increase in crime levels. This is because a tolerance and dependency is expensive to fund, often running into hundreds of dollars a day. This money is found by stealing, mugging and fraud. Along with the financial implications on society to fund the police, health service and courts, there is also the increase in security costs needed in many areas. I don’t think addicts look at things this way. When they are chasing that high they won’t let anything stand in the way. This brings me to how families, children, relationships and marriages are affected by this. This leaves many families in single parent homes, who struggle to pay their bills and usually have to lower their standard of living because of this. Substance abuse often causes the introduction of violence into the home and statistics have shown a rise in drug related domestic violence. Along with this comes the costs of ambulances, police visits, family liaison officer interaction and supporting court costs, this all comes out of the governments money that could be spent elsewhere. Not only that but levels of trust between members of the family often lost and the addict is excluded from the family as a way of the family protecting itself from the