the leaders of NIDA came up with the second model of addiction. It sees addiction as a disease of a broken brain. The idea is that addictive substances “hijack” our brains. NIDA argued that addicts are helpless passengers of this hijacked and runaway freight train that is their brain. Even if an addict chooses to stop, said NIDA’s director, Nora Volkow, she won’t be able to. There is no choice. This is because, as Volkow wrote in the scientific journal the Lancet Psychiatry, “specific molecular and functional neuroplastic changes at the synaptic and circuitry level…are triggered by repeated
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