Stress and Drug Addiction

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I have located an article that addresses your topic fairly comprehensively, making the link between stress and drug addiction. Please see the attached article, for better formatting, although it is also presented below. The bibliography lists four other sources you might consider as other sources to draw on for your assignment.

I hope this is helpful.

Article:

Studies Link Stress and Drug Addiction
By Steven Stocker, NIDA NOTES Contributing Writer

Drug-addicted patients who are trying to remain off drugs can often resist the cravings brought on by seeing reminders of their former drug life, NIDA-funded researcher Dr. Mary Jeanne Kreek of Rockefeller University in New York City has noted. "For 6 months or so, they can walk past the street corner where they used to buy drugs and not succumb to their urges. But then all of a sudden they relapse," she says. "When we ask them why they relapse, almost always they tell us something like, 'Well, things weren't going well at my job,' or 'My wife left me.' Sometimes, the problem is as small as 'My public assistance check was delayed,' or 'The traffic was too heavy.'"

Anecdotes such as these are common in the drug abuse treatment community. These anecdotes plus animal studies on this subject point toward an important role for stress in drug abuse relapse. In addition, the fact that addicts often relapse apparently in response to what most people would consider mild stressors suggests that addicts may be more sensitive than nonaddicts to stress. This hypersensitivity may exist before drug abusers start taking drugs and may contribute to their initial drug use, or it could result from the effects of chronic drug abuse on the brain, or its existence could be due to a combination of both, Dr. Kreek has proposed. She has demonstrated that the nervous system of an addict is hypersensitive to chemically induced stress, which suggests that the nervous system also may be hypersensitive to emotional stress. How the Body

Copes With Stress The body reacts to stress by secreting two types of chemical messengers - hormones in the blood and neurotransmitters in the brain. Scientists think that some of the neurotransmitters may be the same or similar chemicals as the hormones but acting in a different capacity. Some of the hormones travel throughout the body, altering the metabolism of food so that the brain and muscles have sufficient stores of metabolic fuel for activities, such as fighting or fleeing, that help the person cope with the source of the stress. In the brain, the neurotransmitters trigger emotions, such as aggression or anxiety, that prompt the person to undertake those activities. Normally, stress hormones are released in small ...