If you are healthy and you take a drug, have fun, then sober up, you can go on with your life and have fun in other ways, maybe do the drug again if you want. That's not addiction, it is recreation.
If you are hurting and you take a drug, have fun and the hurt is gone, then sober up and the hurt is back, and you had forgotten about that pain because you lived with it so long, but now you notice it because it was absent for a little while, and it is terrible and you want it gone, so you find the drug again to dull the pain. This is generally subconscious. You tell yourself you just REALLY want that fun again, and soon. Who wouldn't? Fun is fun, right? But you are obsessed with it more than others around you, and you are not sure why they don't like fun as much as you, but it is really that they are not in as much pain as you. That's addiction, it is self-medication for invisible pain, psychological and emotional.
I think our society tells a false narrative that drugs are so fun you get hooked on that fun, so they are inherently addictive. That masks the truth that our society is hurting people in large numbers, psychologically and emotionally. It is a largely inhumane system. I am not suggesting there are not some drugs that might somehow create an actual addiction. Perhaps that exists. Perhaps crack is such a drug. I do not know. I have not done crack, or heroin. I have not smoked crystal meth. I decided long ago that those were the "big three" threats to avoid. But these days I suspect all drug addiction, even to crack, is really just self-medication.
They did a psychological study with mice (or rats?) long ago, put a couple in a cage, put a bottle of pure water and a bottle of water with opiates (or maybe cocaine?). The mice used the drug-laced water till they died. This led people to declare that these drugs were addictive. More recently, a psychological study was done where, instead of putting mice in an isolated, unnatural, stressful and unpleasant cage, they instead put them in an idyllic mouse community full of friend mice. And they gave them pure water and, I think, opiate water (something like that, look it up if you want details perfect). Guess what? They did not use the drug water to death. Some were seen to use it when they had an injury or issue, but they generally preferred the pure water. The conclusion is that if a mouse, animal, person is in a good environment with good social interactions (friends, family, mate) they do not get addicted. The drug is not causing addiction. The societal problems wound the people who live in them and those wounds cause pain and that pain and that is where addiction comes from.
Or at least that is what I think is the most logical takeaway from the current science is. But that won't stop the Drug War, right?
Now I'm pissed and I'm wanting drugs.... um, for the pain, yeah, that's it...my back hurts.
~psychoblast~
