Addiction, neuroscience and ethics

Abstract

Neuroscience models have much to offer the field of addiction, but they will be self-defeating if they lead to severe restrictions on the type of neuroscience research that can conducted in future. A major challenge for the addiction field is to integrate the insights that neuroscience research has provided on drug use and addiction with those provided about drug use and addiction by clinical, epidemiological, sociological and economic research. The challenge is (1) to develop theories of addiction that take seriously the neurobiological bases for drug effects and addictive phenomena; (2) without depicting addicts as automatons whose behaviour is under the control of the drugs acting on the receptors sites in their brains; and (3) while recognizing the opportunities for individual decision, interpersonal influence and social policy to affect the drug use and the behaviour of drug-dependent people.