2) Write a note on Addiction with refrence to :
b) Intoxicating drugs c) Smoking
Answers
Intoxicating Drugs
Since prehistory, humans have experimented with naturally occurring substances for their psychoactive effects. Some anthropologists go so far as to claim that psychoactive substances shaped civilizations!. Take for example Stone Age art. There has been speculation about the use of hallucinogenic plants and opium by Stone Age cavemen while painting the cave walls and ceilings, mainly of wild animals and hunting scenes.
Intoxicants or psychoactive substances have been used in religious ceremonies; for medicinal purposes and for recreation.
What are these intoxicating substances? There are four groups: hallucinogens (substances causing visual, auditory, and other hallucinations); inebriants (substances like alcohol, chloroform, ether, benzene, and other solvents and volatile chemicals); hypnotics (substances causing states of sleep, stupor or calm, such as the mandrake, kava, tranquilizers and narcotics, including opium and its derivatives); stimulants (substances causing an increase in mental and/or physical stimulation not usually impairing the user's performance of daily tasks: tea, coffee, cocoa, cola, betel, tobacco, cocaine and amphetamines.
Smoking
It is now generally accepted that cigarette smoking is addictive. A central dispute is whether regular smoking brings about a change in the person that impels him or her to continue smoking, in effect depriving the person of voluntary control over his or her behavior (at least in connection with smoking). Volkow (2015) has even defined addiction as a disease of free will. The opposing position is that smoking remains voluntary behavior that the person chooses to continue or not (e.g., Lewis, 2016). The difference between these positions has extensive implications for psychological and philosophical theory, for motivation, for drug treatment and intervention policies, for legal assignment of responsibility, and for government policy.