The stranglehold of addiction is when it is no longer the issue of how good the drug feels, but how bad its absence feels. It’s about the motivation to avoid the punishment of not having the drug. George Koob of the Scripps Research Institute has shown that when rats are deprived of a drug they are addicted to, there is a tenfold increase in levels of CRH in the brain, particularly in pathways mediating fear and anxiety, such as in the amygdala. No wonder you feel so awful. Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates
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