Friends may drop out of school, lose jobs, or develop legal problems. From the abuse stage to the fourth and final phase - dependency. All of these factors revolve around other complex social, emotional, and cultural factors. One important question is the drug itself. Drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine are so incredibly powerful that their effects on the chemistry of the brain are devastating.
Addiction is a disease.
Modern medical research confirms this. The brain - neurology, is, in many ways the last frontier of modern medicine. As we learn more about the complexity of the brain, medical science will confirm that addiction, is in fact, a disease.