What is Opiate Addiction?
The core feature of true addiction is a powerful, lingering and unexplainable compulsion to use an opiate drug that will change your mental state and sense of feeling.

Addiction seems mostly fueled by the use of substances taken for a desirable personal effect. Drugs that can induce rapid onset of euphoria hold particular risk of addiction.

The compulsion to use drugs seems associated with a tendency to run, to avoid and to escape. The way of opiate addiction is to avoid the pain of day to day life and to achieve a detached state of peace and serenity.

Although transient, opiate drug use provides a fast and easy path from many of life’s day to day strains. Periodic use may rapidly become a habit for some.

“Whatever the problem, my solution was to get out of it.

To use, to avoid and to escape - It didn’t matter if the problem was a person, a place or a feeling. My first reaction was always to run.”

Risk of addiction is also affected by genetic, biological and family factors. These may explain why some persons seem resistant to the occurrence of addiction - while others will rapidly become addicted to different drugs at different times in their life.

Some may use a drug out of free or casual choice. This is not the same as drug addiction. Even those who may have a problem with their drug use - those who abuse drugs - are not necessarily addicted. Many of these persons can and will stop using drugs.

Those deep in addiction report a compulsion to use that has no rational sense and has little relation to any reason why they began to use drugs in the first place.

Most who suffer with true addiction have already suffered consequences to their use. Those with serious addiction often say that they would like to stop using, or know that they should stop. Otherwise, they may describe a resignation or despair of not being able to stop using.
 
Continuing to use when you do not really wish to do so - or relapsing after all best intentions to not use - are hallmarks of addiction. It is this lingering and unexplainable compulsion to use that is so greatly misunderstood and underestimated.

It is also this compulsion that is so difficult for others to appreciate - either its lingering persistence - or its potential for devastating force over the addicted person. Many still search for meaning in a compulsion that has lost connection to meaning or psychological motivation.

Compulsion - without rationale or reason - is the root and the key to understanding true addiction.