Define what is meant by drug abuse and alcoholism. Include in your answer a discusion of the notions of dependence and tolerance?No

The phrase drug abuse relates to a person’s use of
prescribed medication and/or illicit substances in a manner which is deemed to affect
both their physical and psychological health. This definition applies to both alcohol
and other drugs. The phrase alcoholism is an antiquated phrase utilised to describe a
person who has an alcohol dependency, and can trace its roots back to the prohibition
movements popular in the early 20th century, and indicates that the person suffering
from the alcohol dependency has no control over their misuse. Modern therapeutic
concepts put the onus on the dependant person looking to change, so the concept of the
dependency being a disease is not very useful as it allows the person to opt out of
taking responsibility for their actions and by default their
behaviours.

Dependence:

Dependence
as a term refers to the normalisation of a behaviour in which the person who is using
substances becomes normalised to the process of using
drugs.

An easy way to think of this is to think about how
we use coffee, usually first thing in the morning to “wake us up”, this is how a
dependant substance user will view their drug of choice whether it is alcohol or heroin,
they always need to shoot up, have a drink to “square themselves” before they start
their day. The substance has become almost normal in the way they consume
it.

Tolerance:
Tolerance is a word used to
describe how used to a substance someone has become.
Tolerance is basically
when someone needs to take more of a substance to continue to feel the same way. This
can be seen if we look at how people utilise heroin.

The
majority of people first dabble in heroin through smoking or “chasing the dragon”, the
next hit they take is never as good as the first, and in some cases won’t last as long,
so to compensate, they increase the amount of heroin they smoke, eventually in some
cases they start to inject, as it is a better hit and this cycle continues.
 

In his book “living with Drugs”  Michael Gossop uses the
example of  200mg of heroin being fatal to a non tolerant user where as a tolerant user
may survive overdoses of 350mg. The average medical dose is around 10
mg.